All of us miss warning signs from our bodies especially the ones we can get away with.
If we have been eating unhealthy for a while, and have started to feel tired, we usually wait until our weight starts to shoot up. Only then do we decide to pick up our running shoes.
When you are going through a health crisis that doesn’t have any visible signs, you don’t know what to do. Or whom to go to. Or even realize that something is wrong.
In case of burnout, it is not like your face will turn red with steam coming out of your ears.
For me, the first faint signs showed up in the summer of 2020. The strict lockdown took a toll on my health. Even though I had lost a lot of weight I looked fine and felt almost fine.
That was when I needed to press breaks but instead, I ignored it all and gutted the accelerator. I chose to focus all of my energy on the only thing that made sense — my job.
You see, there was nothing “visibly” wrong with me.
I liked my job and have always enjoyed being a workaholic. So it didn’t feel completely unnatural to put in a bit more. It also wasn’t unusual at the time to work around the clock. In fact, it seemed everyone I knew was in the same boat as me!
I kept saying to myself “Let’s just get through this and then..”. The problem was I was running on an empty tank. By Jan’22 I resigned.
Maybe, if I had the courage and self-belief to take a short break in 2020, I wouldn’t have resigned.
Who knows?
But if I had, I would not have forced myself to question everything I have known. Audit my inner circle. Rebuild healthier habits. Confront myself. Remove all toxic energy.
I wouldn’t have realized that if adversity can stir an abundance of compassion in some people, it can also invite apathy from others.
I may have gotten my health back temporarily and been “back on track” but it would have still been a band-aid. Because what happened in 2021, was nothing but a visible sign of bottled-up pain and ignored health over the past few years.
This sabbatical forced me to rip off the bandaid and allowed me to heal from within.
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