hey. So. I've been trying to write something like this, about the last year or two or five, where I've been. And something about this post hit me, lying in bed at 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon, with tape on my arm from a fresh round of bloodwork and exhausted from the walk to/from. Burnout is impossible...and yet...you do get through.
Don't know if there's much to say about the burndown. A lot of it involves stories of/with people that are more their stories to tell. I was trying to do too much, too often, and the more it started to fall apart (the more I started to fall apart) the more desperate I got to keep all the plates in the air, to keep it all moving. It was impossible. More and more I was physically falling apart, having deep memory black holes, and just not really being present or aware. I still don't remember the events I was told about later, or really much of 2023 at all. Then, in the back half of 2023, about five different things broke one at a time, and by New Years 2024 I had none of those plates left in the air. I learned a lot about how childhood trauma and my adult experiences informed a lot of that. You can't save everybody -- professionally, personally, familially, let alone all of them. Hell, sometimes you can't even save yourself.
Sometime in December 2023 or January 2024, something happened. The only thing all the doctors agree on is that we'll never know what. Some kind of infection, maybe, but they never found it. Combine that with the burnout and the physical decline and, over the next few months...
Through February, March, and April, whatever it was caused an autoimmune reaction, and my entire body waged war with itself. I have never spent so much time in hospitals. I nearly died; half of my body didn't work, and it almost reached my lungs, leading to one point in late April/early May, where my doctors and specialists couldn't decide whether or not to have me committed as in-patient in the hospital. Other than that, I basically slept for the entire months of March and April.
In May, I moved out of the 110-year-old townhouse tower place I'd called home for 13 years, and into more supportive housing in a totally different place. A small little 1-bedroom apartment with no stairs and a shower instead of a tub. Was that house killing me, or were the ghosts in the place?, or who knows. But that was basically the time things started getting better. It would be well into July before I could really move around again, and late August before I could handle a train ride to see my family without having to worry about my body and gut giving out.
It's now the end of October, and the bloodwork I got done today is for an appointment next week in which the specialists are planning, barring any last surprises, to close my file at the hospital and send me back to my family doctor.
As I mentioned, I basically slept for a few months, getting work done in the moments I could in between. I'm grateful to my boss and employer for their understanding and grace through that time. I'm grateful to my friends and family for supporting me and being understanding through all of this. I wouldn't be here without you. Seriously.
There were so many little kindnesses that stand out. One in particular...a friend I've known for a long time was in town with a car sometime in June, maybe? And we had talked about her coming over and us getting pizza or something, idk. And she had a different idea... she showed up with lawn chairs in the car, and drove us to the beach. Now, I live right on the lakeshore, like...when the wind turns from the south, you can smell that salty algae lake smell in the building's halls. But I hadn't seen the lake in five months. I hadn't been anywhere that wasn't a hospital or a grocery store, really. And sitting there on the beach, watching the sunset with her...I'll never forget it. It cost her nothing and it meant the world to me.
I'm still not done healing. Trauma and burnout, whatever you want to call it...maybe I'm never fully healthy again. I refer a lot to "my new body". It is sore and stiff and hurty a lot. It is also 60-70 pounds lighter than when this started, after everything it went through. I joke that I now have the status effects of "strong: heat; vuln: ice". I sit more, I nap more, but I've also been through enough therapy this year to learn to be okay with that, to forgive myself when I can, to try to allow myself to heal.
It is a quieter life, and often a more difficult one, but it is a happy one as well. Having been through all this and out the other side, I am grateful for every day and for everyone in it. And if you find this post and it rings with you at all, I promise you, stick with it, no matter how scary it is at times -- give yourself permission to heal, and look forward to the other side, someday. Someday.
