Reflective Memory of Burnout in 2023 - Part 1

Even though I already celebrated my 34th birthday in February, something hit me differently today.

Why don’t I feel 34 at all? Why don’t I sense an age in me? This is just a moving body with a personality living inside.

Sitting here now, alone, having no job, some barely maintained relationships and a mother in the other room. All of my external identities have been stripped away. I am so naked now in the sense of being myself.

Who am I?

This question arrived a few years ago, but it looks like I haven’t yet figured it out.

I often look back on my 20s, when life was full of energy, purpose and glamour. I deeply wonder what has changed.

Is this maturity? To live every day so tediously, to be stuck in a room and eventually accept that this is my life?

Why have the last 16 years of my life brought me from one country to another and brought me through all the wonderful adventures, but now they seem like smoke and mirrors and feel like someone else’s life entirely?

I cannot figure out an answer.

Some time ago, I learned about what Saturn return indicates in Astrology. Clearly, it is a transition period in everyone’s life in their late 20s, where all areas in life get tested to see if they can hold. The parts that cannot hold will break apart.

I think the timing was about right.

In my late twenties, I was in a full-blown state of exerting 100% of my energy to manage a job, a home and a relationship. Everything felt volatile. The job was high pressure, and the relationship was unstable. Even the external environment was testing my capacity to see if I could survive the extreme circumstances.

There were Covid 19 confinements, recruitment freeze when I lost my job, home country’s border closure and also another globally shocking geopolitical event (unfortunately I cannot mention its name here) happening almost at the same time.

I suppose during those moments, the gate of pleasure and joy closed up on me. I was exiled to my darkest nightmares to find a way out to a new possibility of living. Some call it “dark night of the soul”. In psychology, it is called depression.

In order to escape the accumulated yet unsolvable problems, I threw myself into the new job. I distanced myself from my partner. I fell into addiction. Finally and inevitably, I was awakened by a huge physical and emotional burnout that I didn’t know I was falling into.

My life fell apart. I lost everything almost overnight, a job I resigned from, a man I pushed out of the door by myself and the cats I gave up on having. Everything I called home, I lost.

I was left alone and I had to confront myself in the most brutal ways.

I had days that I couldn’t get out of bed at all. I had weeks when I couldn’t go downstairs to get groceries. I had nights waking up with terror and sometimes heartaches. One important realisation came to me: that I had been refusing all the help around me. I learned how merciless I had been towards myself in my long journey of achieving success on the surface, but consuming my very essence of life force underneath.

Life turned in a completely different direction at that moment. Everything was out of control. The ways I used to navigate life has completely fallen. I was set on a journey of not knowing what was ahead of me.

It was just like a computer restart with almost all memories erased and all software outdated.

I was frightened.