That’s ripe weather for The Burnout. It’ll catch you in these moments, as you flit from one obligation to the next in attempt to keep pace with yourself. Everything’s just dandy until it isn’t. You’ve got it all under control until you don’t. It’s all manageable until the unraveling starts. Don’t tell me you haven’t lived it.
The Burnout will bring to light all the imperfections you usually are able to overlook. It will remind you of the way you thought it would be, cruelly nudge you with the grand life you have somehow failed at creating. Randy Pausch said, “experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” That’s not always the case. Sometimes you get a very holistic, full life instead of whatever life you wanted. And I’m still trying to figure out whether it’s braver to embrace the underwhelming life, or to turn your nose up at it and fight for that thing you wanted—and in doing so, forego the simple enjoyment each day offers.
The Burnout is real and it will sneak up on you when work is particularly difficult, when deadlines come like hail storm, when the bills are larger than the paychecks, when you’re struck with a loneliness you can’t quite place. When the travel isn’t gratuitous and you can’t run fast enough, and the decisions to be made are the kind that change lives—but you just can’t see that yet.
If you tilt your head a little, though, it’s glorious chaos. That’s exactly what it is. We’re wasting top-notch moments when we try to organize it. Maybe attempting to master life is just a really fantastic way of wasting it. So whatever life you’ve been building—whether it’s the dream or the brave alternative—it’s yours. And that’s something, isn’t it?
