The term burnout makes it sound like the person being described didn’t have what it takes to hang in there. It sounds somehow like a judgement. It’s not a good term to describe what has been happening to people in 2021. Even resilient people can reach their limit. 2021 has been harder than 2020 for many people. When our lives were overtaken by the shadow of Corona in 2020, it was unexpected and stressful and maybe scary at times but it was also something new. There was a novelty to it. That novelty is what makes 2021 different. Not only is it not new anymore, not only is the thrill gone, but there is a sense of disappointment, a let down, that we haven’t learned more and adjusted better after this many months. And there’s this lingering, wondering “is this ever going to end?” voice in our heads.
For all the good moments, for all the things I can be grateful for, for as good as we’ve had it compared to others, I still say this has been a miserable year.
A few days ago I came home from a grinding twelve hour work day. A day in which I had been feeling really tired almost all day long due to getting a Covid booster two days before that. Within minutes of arriving at home, my daughter’s fuse was lit and burning toward explosion. These explosions occur quickly no matter what mood she was in seconds before. I had already been struggling to maintain my composure for days, weeks really, and at the end of this work day, as I was about to walk into my home, I had let down my defenses. I was running on empty.
At first, I didn’t respond well. I was thinking about me. About how I didn’t want another challenge in my day. About how I was tired and that I should have been about to turn off and relax because now I was at home. But I caught myself before I fell too far down that line of thinking (or really not thinking, that’s autopilot). I remembered that the only way this was going to work was if I thought about her, not me. The only way it was going to work was if I could ignore how I felt and what I wanted and find compassion for her.
And once I switched directions, my intervention with her was successful. Later when my wife and I were talking and I was telling her about my day at work and the things I didn’t like about it, I finished by saying something along the lines of how even after that long, tiring day I was still able to keep it together and diffuse the bomb and be supportive to our daughter. (Yeah, I patted myself on the back)
But being there for someone else and being able to help someone else is the biggest thing keeping me going. When I was still in the garage, after arriving home from work, I was crying after reading a text message. The message had pictures, taken a few Thanksgivings ago, of a recently dead friend. I composed myself and went into the house but I was done, zero left. Then seconds later I was facing the countdown to an explosion.
Why am I telling you this? No matter how resilient someone is, we can still be pushed to and past our limits. We can still get to the point where we feel like we have nothing left. An answer to get through and even cure our misery is to put our misery down and focus on helping someone else. That is curative. That is letting go of our ego and its worries and grievances and allowing our pure self to come out.
If you’re still with me then you may be thinking, “but you helped your daughter, someone that you love. Big deal”. And you’d be right. It’s so much harder to give our energy away to someone we don’t care about or to someone we don’t know at all. But only five days before that night, I was unable to find any compassion for my daughter in the same situation. I was so empty and so turned off that I didn’t care that she was suffering. I could only think about and feel my own suffering.
The key to diminishing our suffering is always within our reach. It’s to turn our focus to someone else’s suffering. When we find compassion for someone else, when we give our energy away, the energy that we don’t think we have, then we allow ourselves to be restored. Our physical and situational circumstances will not have changed. We will still need to address our problems and overcome our challenges but we will have traded in some of our own misery for some positive energy. When we see someone else’s pain, we allow ourselves to look past our own pain.
When we come out from under the cloud of our own negative feelings, we put our ego aside. We are releasing ourselves from the illusion that it’s all about ourselves. There’s more happening than our own pain, but if we’re so focused on our own feelings then we have no attention left to see anything else. Turn our gaze outward and we free ourselves from those clouds and can once again see the horizon.
P.S. It also helps to feel like someone other than yourself cares that you’ve been pushed past your limits. That’s getting harder to come by too as we are all having our own Coronamageddon struggles.
P.P.S. Gratitude is good. It’s a real way to see past our own circumstances and to reframe what we are dealing with. But it’s passive. Helping someone else is active and you get a bigger return on your investment.
P.P.P.S. The people who work in healthcare have daily opportunities to help other people and that’s probably what attracted a lot of people to the job to begin with. But during these times, amidst everything we have to deal with, it’s getting harder and harder to see past our own walls and care anymore about the people we’re there to help. True story. Our healthcare workers are being destroyed right now.