For Anyone Experiencing Burnout: Please Don’t Give Up On Yourself

When you are burnt out, you want to detach yourself from everything and everyone. You feel lost and lose your passion for the things you used to love. When you are burnt out, you might feel like you don’t have a purpose or question your self-worth. You do not have the energy or motivation to do anything more than is asked of you, because your body is physically and mentally drained. Maybe you want to disappear until you find yourself again. Or maybe you just want to sleep and wake up when it’s over. This level of exhaustion, I’ve found, is the most detrimental to your mental health. It can be hard to explain unless you’ve felt it, but the only way I can describe it is that you’re just tired. Tired of working hard, tired of hustling, only to feel empty and unfulfilled by the end of the day to the point where you can’t even seem to bring yourself to care. You become a ghost of yourself. A shell of the person you used to be or thought you would be. 

But even in this gloomy fog, you will find the light again. You will find the smallest bit of joy and hope again. And those little moments will become the big moments. And you will wake up one morning and you will feel excited again. You will be excited for all the wonderful things that could happen to you that day. You will be able to come out on the other side of this and say that you genuinely love your life again. You will find joy in the small things and have new dreams and new experiences. You will become stronger and evolve into the person you’ve always wanted to become. I can’t tell you how long this season of your life will last or when you will feel better, but I can tell you that this feeling of burnout will not last forever.

I hope you can try to surround yourself with people that support you and encourage you. I hope you can try to surround yourself with people who uplift you and make you feel good about yourself. I hope you can communicate what you’re going through to those people and let them in. I hope you will make a list of the things that make you happy and remind you of all the good this world has to offer. I hope you will wake up every single day and write down all the things you’re grateful for, because there are so many things to be grateful for. I hope despite it all you can remember who you are and know that you can become that person again or completely recreate yourself at any moment. You are not going to feel lost forever. I promise you will find your way back to yourself, and when you do, I hope you will be able to share your story with others.

So please, whatever you do, don’t give up on yourself. Please know that this is just a season of life, and one day you will look back and be in awe of how you made it through. How you did not let this temporary feeling of burnout take all the light from within you. One day, you will see just how bright your future really was all along.