Burnout
To meaningfully discuss the feeling of being burned out, it is necessary for us to acknowledge that often, our lives aren’t as lovely and under control as we often like to pretend. Burnout happens when we can no longer maintain the façade of life as it’s supposed to be, and the image we project for others to see falters.
In natural ecosystems, wildfires burn through a landscape, destroying much of what has grown up there, but in doing so, leave behind the nutrients and open space required for new, fresh growth to begin. The occasional disaster here and there enables the presence of an ecologically diversity, rather than the simplicity of a well-established ecology that is uniform as a result of its stability. Just so, feeling burned out can be a precursor to change, although it comes before the beauty of fresh green new growth.
This episode features reflections on burnout from Eric Christiansen, Eleni Poulous, and Miriam Bekkouche.
Full Transcript:
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast that explores the diversity of emotional experience.
Last week’s episode focused on the shades of sadness, which often manifests along with the sense that things have changed, and not for the better. Before that, the podcast heard from guests describing the feeling of having arrived. In this week’s episode, we’ll consider the challenging feeling that comes, not because of our failure to have arrived at our intended destination, but because after that arrival, we remain at that destination for too long. We’ll be hearing from guests about their experience of burnout.
Burnout is one of those emotions that I would put into a category of things we are ashamed to feel. These are the emotions you’re not supposed to display on Instagram, or on LinkedIn, or on one of those other highly filtered social media platforms where people show the easy, breezy, proud, and pretty parts of their lives, even as they are falling apart behind the scenes.
Podcasts are often the same way. A lot of people get very picky about the sound quality in their podcast production, and to a certain extent, I understand that. It’s important, in a medium all about what people say, for the audience to be able to actually understand what people are saying.
A lot of people don’t know that I have a hearing deficit, and have had since I was a young child. No one knows why I have it, while my identical twin brother doesn’t. I’m not deaf, but one of my ears doesn’t pick up most of the sounds out there in the world, and that makes my overall sense of hearing confused, especially when I’m in a location with lots of background noise. I tend to avoid those places, so I understand the impulse for podcast producers to achieve a clean sound in which background noises all have eliminated.
Sometimes, the pursuit of this sound goes beyond mere respect for the listener’s needs, however. For a podcast to have a highly polished sound quality is a kind of status symbol, suggesting that the podcast has been professionally produced in a precisely engineered sound studio, the kind with fluffy-headed microphones and sound-absorbent foam-covered walls. There are many motivations for people to put together a podcast, but one of most common reasons is that a person wants to feel heard.
The problem with wanting to feel heard is that listening is scarce. True listening requires work and attention, and people often worry that they aren’t worth paying attention to. So, some podcasters will carefully cultivate a clean sound as a sign of other forms of success. Why, after all, would anyone want to listen to somebody who hasn’t been successful in life?
My purpose in putting together this podcast leads me in a different direction. Celebration of success is a part of life, but in the full scope of life, emotions of triumph are just one small portion of the feelings we experience. What I’m trying to do with Stories of Emotional Granularity is to show the diversity of human emotion. That means going beyond the comfortable feelings we’re proud to have. Life is full of uncertainty, betrayal, and failure. It isn’t clean.
Some of the guests you’ll hear on this podcast are professionally successful, but their success isn’t the reason they’re on this podcasts. They are guests on this podcast because they’re willing to talk about their emotional experiences, even when their emotions are difficult. They’re intelligent, reflective people, and I’m thankful to them for sharing their thoughts and feelings, but they’re not perfect. Nobody is.
To meaningfully discuss the feeling of being burned out, it is necessary for us to acknowledge that often, our lives aren’t as lovely and under control as we often like to pretend. Burnout happens when we can no longer maintain the façade of life as it’s supposed to be, and the image we project for others to see falters.
For documentary filmmaker Eric Christiansen, his moment of burnout came in the wake of a literal fire.
Eric Christiansen:
My name is Eric Christiansen, and I'm a filmmaker. I really don't like the word filmmaker. I'm more of a messenger and, I guess, a conveyor of emotions maybe. With my work, which started over thirty years ago, this particular niche, I guess you're saying I man about filmmaking, about telling the story after trauma and telling the story of hope and recovery and all the myriad emotions that these survivors go through. Thirty years ago, I lost my home in the Painted Cave fire disaster in Santa Barbara, California, and I was a filmmaker then, but I was doing a very, very different kind of filmmaking. I was doing commercials, music videos, but after losing my home in that fire and the ensuing, kind of hitting my bottom, I kind of erased the slate that went before and started a new, got clean and sober, and I made my first film, called Faces in the Fire that was about surviving that fire and the recovery afterwards.
Jonathan Cook:
The Painted Cave Fire took place on an unusually hot and dry day in June of 1990, burning over 5,000 acres and consuming 500 buildings. The fire was so intense that it leaped over the six lanes of traffic of Highway 101. Eric’s home was one of those that was destroyed, but the damage to Eric’s life wasn’t confined to what literally went up in flames.
Eric Christiansen:
The funny thing of this whole thing is that the fire itself, yeah, it was definitely a disaster in my life, but I was the one that really caused my own trauma by my drinking and drugging, by my reaction to that disaster. So, I understand trauma and I understand the recovery afterwards.
The clinicians and the therapists and the people that work with people that have went through trauma, particularly disasters, they talk about the second disaster. It's like, what is the second disaster? Well, the second disaster usually comes approximately three months after the initial disaster, and it's when all the media is gone. It's when, you know, your friends and family are kind of burned out on the whole thing, and they're like, okay, great, you should be over this, and then you're still sitting there going, Oh, gosh, that was kind of actually kind of exciting, and I had a lot of adrenaline and a lot of attention for it on me. But now all that's gone and it really sinks in. It's like, oh, wow, that that really did happen. My home is gone. I'm going to have to start over. You know, I need to go buy a new can opener and little things like that. It's just like, okay, I'm putting things back together, and that's the second disaster. That's not what's really seen in the news. The news is very sensationalized. We want to see the event. We want to see the floods and the tornado, but you know, after and after all the camera crews and stuff are gone, it's that time where you have to reconcile yourself with the fact of what happened.
Jonathan Cook:
The Painted Cave Fire was extinguished in just a few days, but the feeling of burnout continued to spread for Eric, as he tried to dampen the pain of his loss with drugs and alcohol. Eric kept on flaming out long after the literal flames were gone.
Fire is the central metaphor of the emotion of burnout. Fire can have many meanings when it comes to emotion, of course. We can speak of a burning passion, for example. Fire gives us warmth, and lovingly prepared meals. Fire also fuels our metaphorical engines, giving us the power we need to accomplish work and achieve our goals. However, the character of fire when we feel burned out has become destructive to the point where it has eliminated its own fuel. It’s not just that we feel burned, but that we feel burned out, like a wildfire that has nowhere left to go.
So it was for Eric’s friends and family. After providing him with an initial generosity, supporting him through the tough times, they felt depleted. As Eric’s pain continued to smolder, he became too hot to handle.
Oxidation is the energy of life for all animals, and for humans especially. It’s the fire that burns in each cell of our bodies, as we breathe in oxygen to fuel the mitochondrial engines of our warm-blooded lives. In a uniquely human trick, we learned to harness the power of oxidation outside our bodies, controlling the power of fire and its ability to heat and transform the world around us. Without it, our civilization would soon crumble.
Oxygen alone isn’t enough to power the reaction, however. We also depend upon carbon in the food that we eat and the fuel that we throw upon the flames of our increasingly overheated lives. For a few generations, we found a way to cheat, overcoming the limited carbon aboveground by digging up and burning the bodies of the long dead, condensed into what we call fossil fuels.
As our power grew, our hunger grew along with it. We always knew that with the power of fire came the risk of being burned, but we stoked our fires hotter and hotter, filling the air with toxins and heating the entire world until it began to burn of its own accord. Still, even as we watch our global civilization accelerating toward planetary burnout, every day we throw more and more kindling onto the fire.
This is the irony of burnout: The more we push ourselves to achieve, the more we deplete the resources we need to achieve. In our youth, we may imagine that we will always continue to grow stronger and more capable. It’s easy to overlook the wear and tear that comes as a result of our achievements, but eventually, the exhaustion catches up to us.
For Eleni Poulous, the exhaustion of burnout came as a result of the growing effort it took to maintain a public persona on behalf of a large organization, drawing upon the limited resources she could summon as an individual.
Eleni Poulous:
When I finished my last role, my last employment role, I had spent 15 years directing the National Justice Policy and Advocacy Unit of the Uniting Church in Australia. The Uniting Church is the third largest Protestant denomination in Australia, a Christian church and for 15 years, I had done media, a lot of media work. I'd done a lot of advocacy and lobbying, meetings with politicians and a lot of public speaking. I was in a leadership role and I was always out there. Every time that I would do a media interview or meet with the politicians, I was representing the church, so it was the church that was being carried through the words that I used. I always felt a deep sense of responsibility for that, and an awareness that I needed to make sure that I wasn't speaking for myself, that every time I engaged with a journalist or a politician, or every time I delivered a speech in a public setting that people could recognize the Uniting Church in that. I did that for fifteen years and I knew I was tired, but what I didn't really expect was the sense of freedom that I felt when I finished and I realized that the weight of the responsibility that I carried around for the church's public presence and how the church was understood in the public space, how much of that I carried on me, and how much it weighed on me.
Maybe part of the sense of release at the end of the fifteen years was related to the fact that the issues that I was working on were not solvable in fifteen years and in many cases, on some issues, I felt that the country was going backwards and the world was going backwards and that I was bashing my head against a brick wall all the time.
Jonathan Cook:
Eleni wasn’t literally bashing her head against a brick wall, of course. The symbolism vividly communicates her feelings in the moment, however, in the combination of enthusiastic movement coming into brutal contact with an immovable external reality. Eleni felt the need to repeat the public message that positive change was achievable even as she observed that progress wasn’t being made.
The emotional battering Eleni went through wasn’t just a matter of becoming tired as a result of sustained effort. It was a consequence of the emotional wounds she sustained from throwing herself with enthusiasm against barriers that showed no sign of giving way.
There’s something in the emotion of burnout that’s self-inflicted, as in Eleni’s language of bashing her head against a brick wall, or Eric’s experience with compounding the physical loss of fire with the second disaster of drug abuse. Burnout isn’t as simple as becoming bored with one’s life. It’s an exhaustion that’s created as a result of one’s enthusiasm. It’s the power of our passion that leads us to deplete ourselves, and it’s because of this self-depletion that burnout cannot be solved simply through the application of more effort.
Eleni Poulous:
What I hadn't realized was how burned out I was. So, I took a week or so, and thought I was just tired, but I was really burned out. Then it took me, I basically took just a couple of months where I just did nothing. I just laid on the sofa and watched bad television for two months until I started to finally feel like I had a bit more energy and was ready to go again. The burned out stuff was really a lot about, I think, the bashing my head against a brick wall and seeing things just get worse.
Jonathan Cook:
It’s popular to suppose that the ability to do work is a simple matter of willpower, or self-discipline, as if people who become disengaged from their work are simply lazy. The metaphor of burnout as like a fire that has depleted the resources it needs to keep going offers a different perspective, one that suggests the need to stop expending effort in a project that simply cannot succeed. When a fire has consumed all the oxygen in a room, after all, there’s no point in trying to rekindle the flame by striking match after match. More fundamental work is required.
Eleni Poulous:
When I'm tired, I can still find pockets of energy to be creative or to engage in something, but being burned out, I couldn't. There was nothing left. So, if I'd had an opportunity to be creative, I don't know what I would have, I just couldn't have. I didn't want to be around people. I didn't. I felt like I had given everything and that I just needed time to refill. So, you know, the tank was empty, but not just I'm really tired and I need a weekend to recover, but in a bit of a darker way than that, I think in terms of there’s no capacity to do anything and it's not going to take three days for me to recover. I just need to give in to it, really, and just see how long it takes to get to the other side.
Jonathan Cook:
When we’re feeling burned out, we know that we can’t continue on the same path, but how can we find a way to the other side of our exhaustion? Miriam Bekkouche has a few ideas. Miriam specializes in helping people who are feeling burned out in their work.
Miriam Bekkouche:
My name is Miriam Bekkouche, and I am in Montreal, which is also where I'm from. I work on helping people reconnect with the art of rest, recovery and working with their awareness, really for all purposes, but particularly to help them fulfill their potential in a in a professional context.
For me, it starts with mindfulness. I take a mindfulness approach to everything that that I might do in training and coaching, and it's about really helping folks still their mind, but recognizing that when we still the mind, the mind is actually going to also still be very busy. And so, working with that paradox, using tools that are mindfulness based and then resetting priorities around, what does it mean to when we're in a period of time where we're reaching towards a goal? What does it mean to actually prioritize rest and recovery as part of that, which is something that we might do automatically if we're thinking about a physical goal, like working towards running long distances, but that we've completely forgotten in a world where productivity and, you know, go, go, go, go has taken over.
Jonathan Cook:
As Miriam advises her clients on how to cope with their feelings of burnout, she draws upon her own experience of becoming burned out as a young diplomat whose feelings of depletion came even as she was outwardly achieving her professional goals.
Miriam Bekkouche:
That voice that tells us that we're never we're never done, and we should keep on going and we should try harder, by the way, while we're doing it, that's so, so, so predominant. I hear it in other people, and, you know, I have a lot of compassion for that, having had the experience of really noticing it in myself and seeing that it comes from all kinds of sources, it comes from within us sometimes it comes from the folks that are around us, definitely comes from society at large, just generally.
It’s been ten years since I had an experience of burnout, and now I'm very comfortable using the word. It's very much the reason also that experience of burnout is the reason I do the work that I do today. It's very much because I found myself in a career that I was excelling at, and that seemed perfect on paper. In a lot of ways was perfect on paper that I started to notice that. How is it possible that I'm feeling so empty inside? How am I feeling so overwhelmed? How am I starting to fail at things that otherwise I was excelling at? You know, in this environment that otherwise seems like I should be able to keep on going. In fact, I felt that my identity rode on the fact that I should keep on going towards this grand objective of reaching new heights in my career. So, yeah, I basically ran myself into a wall as I was trying to navigate all of that and experienced a burnout, although I didn't call it that at the time. I always say I say this now to folks that I work with, but I recognize that even at the time that I knew that even in those in that dark moment and that time when nothing really made sense, that there was a gift in there somewhere, there was that I was forced to figure out a new way of being and to transform whatever the ingredients were into something new.
Jonathan Cook:
Miriam uses the same kind of language that Eleni used to describe her burnout. It was as if she had run into a wall, like the brick wall Eleni kept hitting her head against.
Miriam Bekkouche:
I had a great title. I was working at a reputable, I'm working with a government, a reputable organization. I was making money that would be considered very decent and that would set me up for a good life. Beyond that, for me, it seemed perfect because I had made at a certain point in my life, I had made a calculation that I needed a combination of stability and flexibility in the job I did afford, that it was a job where I would be changing roles every handful of years, moving to different locations around the world every handful of years, but still working for the same employer. So again, check on paper. I think at the core, it's really that divide between what appears to be versus how it feels on the inside.
Jonathan Cook:
Miriam was doing well, on paper. However, emotional experience is anything but paper thin. Miriam had charted a professional path in a formally-structured career in which the parameters of achievement were clearly defined. Miriam had educated herself and had the practical skills required to succeed in her diplomatic role. Yet, she observed herself beginning to fail in the straightforward tasks of her job.
Miriam’s burnout arose out of the difference between her professional identity and the more complex feelings that were developing underneath the surface.
Miriam Bekkouche:
That was the surprising gap because, you know, I think I also chose that particular line of work. I was a diplomat with the Canadian government. I chose that particular line of work because it was it seemed like it was in line with my identity. And in many ways it was I have a multicultural background. Bridging cultures around the world is something that seemed innate. I was innately passionate about and I wanted to contribute to it. It seemed like a as I mentioned, that flexibility combined with stability was really, really important to me. And not to mention I wanted to do important. I wanted to make the world a better place. I wanted to have impact in the world. And it seemed that this was a system and a structure where I could have a chance at doing that in in some significant and definitely recognizable way.
All of these things made me really attached to the role and really attached to the identity I became. In other words, I mean, it's kind of classic to say this in when you start to uncover what is burnout. But for me, I became my job with, you know, I only thought of myself in terms of my professional orientation. This is not to say that I didn't have other things going on. I had a very, I had a full life. I have some I had friends, I had family members that I was staying in connection with. I had hobbies and all kinds of things. But still, the most important part of my identity I had really, it was like completely inseparable from my profession. And that was surprising for me to realize to what extent it had gotten to. In a lot of ways. I didn't see the burnout coming because it didn't make sense.
I really was at a time when, as I said it, the perfect on paper had foundations that were tied to what I wanted as well, or at least what I thought I wanted, which is the next layer here. Realizing that it was not what I wanted, or at least it was no longer what I wanted at this moment in my life or at that moment in my life ten years ago now, was a huge shock and it resulted in a little in a crumbling of the understanding of who I was and a real kind of soul searching around. What did it mean to be okay just being myself without a title, without a professional identity? What was truly generative to me? What felt good? What felt in line with my personality traits? Otherwise, we're feeling boxed in in the career that I was in.
It was showing up in my body. I mean, it was showing up in my behavior, but it was showing up through extreme cynicism that was definitely not in my nature. It was showing up in a kind of volatile, I thought for myself it seemed volatile, kind of behaviors where I really needed to, I would, I needed to go to the extremes in other areas of my life. So, for example, I was running, running. I started running at the time, which is a great hobby, but then it was like, I need to go run a marathon. Running is not enough. If I need to travel as I don't need to, just traveling to travel alone and I need to go travel to a challenging area where it's going to be dangerous for me.
So, these kind of like volatile to me kind of behaviors were a symptom of this unrest inside. Then there was the sense of that I started noticing that I felt like because I was, another thing that happened was I was in a role where I was working with a lot of businesses and entrepreneurs and startups that operate in a very, very, very different way than a government organization. I started to feel a split literally, because I had one foot in that very fast paced business world and another foot in the kind more bureaucratic, steady world, and that split almost kind of like cracked something open for me to say, well, who like, where do I most feel comfortable? I always thought of myself as a person who feels comfortable transitioning between all worlds, but really, what is it that I am desiring now for myself as an experience?
I started realizing that I wanted a space that I could play in that was more, more creative. That was the timelines to making things happen were shorter. You had a more direct connection with the results of your work, something that I was not always feeling in the place that I was at. All of those things were kind of swirling around me. I would say another factor was also that I had I was in New York City, and prior to that I had been in in capital city in Ottawa, where government work was a standard. I was really immersed in a context where everybody recognized my profession and my choices as being ones that fit a particular mold, and in New York, there were just so many more options and so many more perspectives, and I was getting so much different kind of feedback. In terms of what my role represented to other people, that it started to poke holes again in terms of that perfect on paper thing, the perfect on paper thing. I was no longer in a meeting like surrounded in a bubble of folks who agreed that it was perfect on paper. I was in a community of folks who thought, Well, maybe it's great, maybe it's not. Maybe there's a lot of other ways of doing things. That created a bit of a wrestling as well in me where I said, okay, wait a minute, I'm tying myself to what other people think about what I'm doing versus what I think about what I'm doing. So, what do I think about what I'm doing?
Jonathan Cook:
Miriam’s burnout manifested as a kind of friction between different aspects of her personality that were exposed as she moved from the bureaucratic culture of Canada’s diplomatic corps into the commercially-focused culture of business in New York City. Nonetheless, Miriam remained attached to her diplomatic identity until a dramatic event on the scale of Eric Christiansen’s wildfire finally broke her free. In Miriam’s case, it wasn’t flames that detached her from her previous life, but wind and water in a storm powerful enough to shut down the city that never sleeps.
Miriam Bekkouche:
I now see clearly that burnout is not just one event. I mean, there are there was there was a few like one off events that really pushed me off the edge, you know, was right around the time of Hurricane Sandy, where, again, materially, I didn't really experience any I really, truly didn't experience anything other than living in an apartment with no electricity for a week. But I was on my own and kind of experienced this feeling of it's just one thing more that I have to deal with at a time when there's so much on my plate. I was running a major initiative that was going very, very well, but was very demanding and depleting, and I was constantly running into red tape at every turn. That had taken its toll.
I had always a default of going over and above and not saying no to new initiatives or projects that were being asked of me. So really running myself to the ground with that. Some people call it people or people pleasing, and I just call it, you know, thinking that I can do everything. So those are all the factors that had kind of stacked up that created that burnout event. I didn't see any of those identity pieces that I was talking to you about. It was really in when my body said no more, cannot do it. But I took a step back. I took a month off from medical leave to try to sort out what had happened. My first starting point was just saying, how do I rewire the way that I relate to my productivity? How do I rewire the way that I relate to doing things?
Jonathan Cook:
Miriam’s path forward from her burnout began with a process of self-questioning. The veneer of normalcy in her work was broken by the impact of Hurricane Sandy, and this gave her the space she needed to begin to re-examine her life, learning to listen to herself once again.
Miriam Bekkouche:
I had forgotten how to listen to myself in my body. I had forgotten what brought me joy. So that month of rediscovery was really pivotal. I didn't unwind in that one month all of the different pieces of the equation that were going that required a whole next level of fun life experiences, which involved me going back to the job, probably too soon, very much too soon. I'm falling right back into the same patterns that reminded me of burnout and not being able to function and certainly not feeling well on the inside, deciding to quit that job. Fast forward to actually quitting the job and then kind of freefalling for a moment there of not being sure which way to go. You'll get another job, start a business. Become who? Become what? It was actually in that moment that I would say, in that moment was a year, it was in that moment that I was able to start to unwind the different pieces and really look at them. It wasn't every time that I went to a networking event and somebody asked me, “What do you do?” I had no answer, and sitting with that absolute horrible discomfort, which now I'm not afraid of at all. But at the time it felt every time like I was worthless somehow. It was in those moments and in those reckonings that I was able to start to see really what were the different threads going on for me and start to unwind them.
The most impactful thing that happened actually was I was in a particularly just like really low spot and in fact, and then I was in a relationship that had broken up just on top of it. So I really felt like I was like everything is just like bottom. I don't have the relationship, I don't have the family. I don't have the job. I don't have the this, you know, I don't have all of those status pieces. And I happened to get on the phone with a cousin of mine, and my cousins and I are close, but we don't talk regularly. And this particular cousin just had the wisdom to say, you know, simple thing, which was he says, “I love you and I just love you because you're you.” It even brings tears to my eyes today because it was so simple, and I'm very grateful to that cousin because I'm sure my parents would have said something similar, but it would have not registered in the same way. I'm sure even I would have had a friend who could have offered something similar, but the fact that it came just from this lovely person, you know, who I could feel that deeply and I could trust it deeply.
Jonathan Cook:
Miriam’s ability to heal from her burnout came as the markers of her social status fell away. No longer dependent upon the formal aspects of identity of her job and her personal relationship, Miriam became able to perceive in herself what remained after the burnout had consumed her superficial roles.
Miriam Bekkouche:
The lessons were multiple, and I know that I would have not, or the ways that I came across these learnings of separating myself from a professional identity. Reconnecting truly with who I am, feeling that intrinsic value of myself, that intrinsic motivation as well to take action in the world are things that came as a direct result of the burnout experience. In the burnout experience, what's happening is a transformation. That transformation, even though it doesn't feel like it in that moment, is truly a gift.
For me, it's the crashing and burning part of it I see. Sometimes you see the, what's it called, the match that's like burnt out as the reference, but for me it's much more flamey and just total, you know, crash, burn, explosion and then smoldering ashes afterwards. That's burn out.
Jonathan Cook:
In natural ecosystems, wildfires burn through a landscape, destroying much of the vegetation. Through this destruction, however, the fire opens things up, leaving behind the nutrients and open space required for new, fresh growth to emerge. The occasional disaster here and there enables the dynamic potential of ecological diversity in a patchwork landscape. Without the fire, a well-established ecology, uniform as a result of its stability, would come to dominate, making life predictable but greatly reducing its variety.
Miriam’s period of struggle was something like a wildfire. Only when the stability of her previous identity was burned away could Miriam arise, renewed, a phoenix from the flame.
Miriam Bekkouche:
I don't always relate to this particular image, but it's coming to me now, which is the phoenix rising from the ashes. For me, what I do relate to what does resonate is that there's this cycle that we're all part of, as the birth growth death cycle, just generally speaking. So for me, it's actually really recognizing that there was a part of me that died and I don't and it was more like a for me, it's more like a shell. There's the shell, but that needed to be shed and or and more than that, it needed to be cracked, as they said, cracked burned down, and turned around. In that was something that was then able to be reborn and to grow and to flourish.
Jonathan Cook:
Miriam describes her recovery from her burnout as like a process of death and rebirth. The perfect-on-paper career she had designed for herself had become like a shell that prevented her from living in the larger world around her. She needed to crack through that shell in order to emerge as a new version of herself.
Conventionally, our lives aren’t supposed to work like that. We’re supposed engineer our lives as if we’re machines with precise functional capabilities, performing the jobs that we’ve trained for. We’re not machines, though. We can’t simply get up every day and perform the same functions over and over again day after day, year after year.
What if we could design professional experiences that were purposefully designed to go through cycles of growth, destruction, and recovery? What if there was space in our lives to acknowledge when we are feeling burned out, to allow ourselves to burst into flame every now and then, before beginning again, with new purpose and fresh enthusiasm?
There’s something similar to that cycle that I’m trying to embody in the rhythm of this podcast, in the seasonality of it. In the natural rhythm of the temperate woodland ecosystem that I’m native to, seasons follow each other in a regular cycle of change. The fulfillment of each season is to fall apart into the next season. Now, at the end of August, summer is beginning to feel more like autumn. The nights are a bit more chilly, and the leaves of some of the trees are beginning to change color here and there. This transition isn’t perceived as a failure of summer. It’s what summer is supposed to do. Just as soon as we become accustomed to the feeling of one season, it shifts into the next season.
In the same way, this podcast has reached not just the end of this episode, but the end of its second season. As I’m learning the rhythm of producing this podcast, I’m coming to recognize the value of the kind of period of rest and renewal that Miriam describes. Instead of simply continuing forward, week after week at a relentless pace, I’m going to try to avoid the experience of burnout, allowing for time to find more guests and listen to what they have to say.
A new season of the podcast will come in a new season. Right now, I’m imagining that the third season of Stories of Emotional Granularity will begin some time toward the end of November, as autumn begins to shift into winter. There are many more emotions to explore when the time is right.
Until that time, thank you for listening.