When A Conversation About Burnout Turns Into A Confrontation of Shame, And Other Thoughts

If you haven’t read Anne Helen Petersen’s affecting piece, “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” please stop what you’re doing and read it.

This, my friends, is this week’s literary version of Netflix’s sensation, Bird Box.

… yes, right now. And, yes, get cozy while you’re at it because it’s super long.

Done? Okay, let’s get started.

I started off this post by literally copying and pasting in my favorite quotes. The one that describes millennials’ reputations as

“spoiled, entitled, lazy, and failures at what’s come to be known as ‘adulting,’ a word invented by millennials as a catchall for the tasks of self-sufficient existence. Expressions of ‘adulting’ do often come off as privileged astonishment at the realities of, well, life: that you have to pay bills and go to work; that you have to buy food and cook it if you want to eat it; that actions have consequences.”

Followed by the one that highlighted something the author had come to call “errand paralysis.”

I’d put something on my weekly to-do list, and it’d roll over, one week to the next, haunting me for months.

And the one that provided examples about how there are all of these seemingly normal tasks that literally take five minutes stack up, haphazardly and undone, in your apartment, or even more pernicious, in your mind.

Then I realized that, if I pushed ahead with this method, I’d basically quote 80% of what Anne wrote.

Not my most original moment, ha.

I also realized is that, when I envisioned turning this article into a post, I thought the questions I was going to be about wrestling through were What is God’s answer to burnout? How does a Christian avoid this?

However, as I began filling in commentary around her words I realized that what was tugging at my emotional heartstrings was less forward looking and more retrospective.

You see, I am the girl that knows how to gets things done - I moved myself to Luxembourg, learned how to drive manual, started a blog, got promoted at work, etc. - but I am also the girl that hasn’t submitted an insurance reimbursement from last January (will I ever? has repayment expired?, I wonder.) and has collected glass bottles and cardboard in a closet in my apartment because the bins to dispose of it are four flights of stairs and two blocks away.

These items and the many others persisting on my mental, never-ending to-do list make me feel like a failure.

Subconsciously, my mind inevitably nets the #winning list with the to-do list and I am always in the red.

To compound this problem, my very unreasonable response is to think I need to do more things to remedy the situation.

Y’all, is this a soul-sucking cycle of nastiness or what?

But that is what shame is and that is what shame does.

Especially the part where I assume that I am the only person that struggles with these kinds of problems and that if I acknowledged this to anyone they would roll their eyes at me and give me a Saaarahhh (laced with a heavy “you should know better” tone) that would leave me feeling even more ashamed than before.

The magnitude of this article for me is that it created a much-need Brené Brown effect of shining light into a place where I, and a lot of other people, have darkness.

The best part of unveiling shame is that the reality is never nearly as big as the shame shadow leads you to believe.

I think there was a lot of profundity contained within Anne’s words, but I think the importance of the dialogue is less about whether the definition of millennials as burnouts is valid and more about the collective sigh felt by thousands of twenty and thirty-somethings that finally felt like someone truly understood a previously overlooked and misunderstood part of their circumstance.

Nothing feels better than the feeling of you get me. It’s the epitome of belonging and it is very much needed in our society nowadays.

So where do we go from here? Is this a problem we can even solve?

For me, the journey has been long and this is not my first bout with shame or feeling like a failure, but my story is permeated with ever-increasing grace.

Even a year a half ago, I don’t think I would have been able to pinpoint the need to share this story. I wouldn’t have been able to take an article with one idea in mind and let myself go down this rabbit-hole to even get here.

That, my friends, is growth and healing. Praise, Jesus!

Back then, I went from being a girl thinking she was doing all the right things and could be successful in the world and in God’s Kingdom to realizing that she couldn’t do it all and felt God was asking her to leave it behind.

God knew before I did, and before I could put a label on it, that I needed to get out. He knew that the life I had so meticulously build for myself was actually a house of cards that would eventually topple over with very negative consequences.

As I said, this isn’t my first rodeo with this kind of stuff and yet until this very moment I did not even realize how loving and good God was to prompt me to set in motion what would eventually pull me out of harm’s way.

In the summer of 2016, I felt led to start the steps to move to Europe. I secured the support I needed and locked in where I was going by December 2016 and February 2017, respectively.

Little did I know that the perfect storm was brewing and had God’s timing not been perfect, I do not think I’d be typing this from my couch in my cute little apartment in Luxembourg today.

That’s because by Spring 2017, I was emotionally running on empty. I tried to explain myself in Radical Obedience Begets a Big Life Announcement, but I didn’t have the perspective or the wisdom to fully get what was really going on. All I knew was that I needed to leave now despite how much I loved my apartment, the city, and my New York friends like family.

I felt overwhelmed by working, maintaining a social life, staying on top of my many commitments… just everything. The things that used to give me joy weighed me down like a millstone around my neck.

At one point I actually thought I’d slipped into a mild, workspace-specific depression (is this a thing?) because I felt so hopeless about the situation.

I thought my boss was the problem. Or, maybe, my job. Or, New York. Or, how I saw God? How I saw myself? Like I said, I couldn’t put my finger on the root of the issue, just the sensation that change needed to happen.

When I left, I took five weeks off from work between leaving the US and starting my job in Europe, thinking all I needed to do was recharge my batteries and I’d be good as new.

I traveled to Boston, Buenos Aires, Naples (FL), and soaked up days my finals days with family and friends in the city, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Upon my arrival in Europe, I spent a week road tripping with a friend through Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands.

And then when I started my job again, I felt stressed out and as easily overwhelmed as I’d felt before I left.

How did I travel all around the world, with no work, for weeks, and then go to a completely new country and end up feeling exactly how I felt in New York? As if nothing had changed?

I felt discouraged. I was frustrated. I figured this meant I just need to quit my job and never work again, ha.

By Christmastime of 2017, I was done. I knew I would do whatever it would take to break the cycle. There had to be another way.

And then I saw a friend recommend, Braving the Wilderness, by Brené Brown - who's getting lots of airtime this post, lol - and I had a good feeling it help the cause.

My word for 2018 was “belonging” in the context of “belonging to myself (and God) more than anyone else” and it enabled a shift in mindset that allowed me to let go of the expectations of others and my fear of man and rest in the beauty and reality of being enough for God, which needed to be enough for me.

Truth be told, I needed 365 days of soaking up belonging to myself. I only recently realized that the weight I felt in New York and upon arriving in Luxembourg has begun to lift.

Don’t get me wrong, the striving, fatigue, and desire to want to win at everything is very real and enticing.

This is a war we cannot stop trying to defeat once and for all.

In some ways, we can wake up one day and decide enough is enough and then bam! God breaks a unhealthy habit or restores an ungodly truth.

But there are also times where it’s painstakingly slow. To the extent that glacial doesn’t come close to describing it.

It’s growth that’s so gradual that only in a retroactive, self-imposed timelapse do you actually see a sliver of change.

But, praise the Lord, change is still change. Doesn’t matter how long it takes.

Who knows how I’ll feel this time next year or even tomorrow (it’s after midnight afterall, lol).

All I do know is this: whatever brings shame to light in order to be obliterated is worth the read, conversation, or effort. Each of us are worth whatever it takes to bring freedom.

I don’t care who you are, where you’re from, or what you’ve experienced. There is light at the end of the tunnel and there is peace in the arms of Jesus.

We’re all in this journey together and I am so incredibly thankful for moments like there where I am able to sit back and realize that while the valleys are low and can feel endless, God is in those moments and knows exactly where we’re headed.

Thanks for being in this with me.

P.S. Would love to hear in the comments how you’re overcoming shame, embracing God’s grace, or anything else this stirred up!