Hi friends,
A few years ago, I was working as a venture capital portfolio manager. I had positioned myself intentionally as the portfolio’s go-to person with a specific focus on mental health; entrepreneurs have a reputation for not asking for help, but it was amazing how willingly they reached out when support was made available, and without barriers.
There was one question I heard over and over again, to the degree it was clear there was a real problem no one was acknowledging. The question was: “How do I know if I’m burning out?”
You know what they say: If you gotta ask…
A lot of the work we did was about damage control: developing awareness, building healthier practices, and setting boundaries to stay ahead of the thing, rather than actually confronting it. It was always like this; one early-stage founder whose hours and practices were so unsustainable that burnout was certain said to me, “I just have to work like this until [the next milestone], and then I can take a break.” I told him that, on the contrary, the way he was working now was setting a precedent for how he would work in the future; changing his settings, once established, would take even greater work. Shortly afterward, he became seriously physically ill; if our minds don’t stop us, our bodies find a way. He made the minimum viable changes he required to continue working.
For entrepreneurs, crashing is not an option; there’s too much at stake, so to speak, and they have too many people depending on them. Entrepreneurs are also under enormous pressure to live up to an image of “having it all together”—“crushing it” and “hustle” are particularly odious catchphrases of the entrepreneurial lexicon.
What I wanted all of them to know, when they came to me with haunted eyes, hunched shoulders, and hushed voices saying, “Is it supposed to be this hard?” was, “It’s not just you!” If only they would begin talking to each other instead of just to me, they might have been relieved of their delusions to the tune of a) nobody knew what the fuck they were doing, and b) everybody was fucking it up in the process of getting it right.
That was then, when I worked mostly with entrepreneurs. These days, my focus is more agnostic, and I’ve learned that these pressures can apply to almost everyone. For starters, replace “entrepreneurs” with “moms”—particularly “working moms”—and everything I just said is equally true. For another, the past few years have seen the onset of enormous pressures all of us have had to contend with; namely, pandemic fatigue and, for those of us who have been so unlucky, long COVID.
The pandemic has revealed the caretakers among us—those of us who have more dependents than others—and those of us who need to be taken care of. It’s tested our limitations, and our resilience, like never before; and for many of us, it’s been a reckoning in what we care about and what we cannot suffer even a moment longer.
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