Reflections on burning myself at both ends
About two-thirds of the way through Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés is a chapter on creativity and guarding the “soul-Self”. The book – a marvellous and transformative read, which influenced me greatly – studies female archetypes in myths and fairy tales. One of the stories that Estés works with in this particular chapter is The Little Match Girl.
A poor girl, desperate to eke out a living on the frozen streets in winter, tries to sell matches for a penny apiece. They are a metaphor: selling these “little lights on sticks” for next to nothing represents the cheapened reduction of her own “light”. After her failed efforts to sell them, she sits down in the snow and decides to burn the matches, one by one, for a brief respite from the bitter cold. As she lights each one they bring up a different fantasy of a warm, comforting, better place – a cosy hearth with a stove; a snug dining room where a feast is being served. But each vision dies almost instantly as the flame burns bright but briefly, and eventually she freezes to death after lighting the fourth match, whose final fantasy is a “cold” comfort: a vision of her grandmother wrapping her up in her apron and taking her away.
The fairy tale is familiar (and typically disheartening, in its best-known Andersenian version) to many, but the interpretation is powerful, and this quote by Estés stopped me in my tracks:
“…This kind of fantasy is brief but intensely destructive. It has nothing to burn but our energy.”
It made me think of what we call burnout.
Burning matches versus burning out
As we learn throughout Women Who Run With the Wolves, everything in the great narratives is symbolic. The interpretation in the book is that The Little Match Girl is a warning not to be distracted by fantasies, not to go for comfort over self-nurturing, but to return to the genuine creative light of one’s soul.
“Nothing to burn but our energy” for me is especially personal. It conveys the sense of self-defeat when we give too much. The girl in the story destroys her source of income, her potential survival, her livelihood.
Is burnout not similar? We wouldn’t always think of it so dramatically, but consider the ultimate costs paid by those who work themselves literally to death. For now, though, I’m not just talking about overwork. I’m talking about how and why burnout can feel like burning yourself: in short, almost like self-sacrifice, if not total sabotage.
Playing with a metaphor
“Burning matches” does seem like a good alternative metaphor to “burning out”. I Googled this to see if there were any associations and came up with nothing. In the corporate world, where extended (and exquisitely mangled) metaphors run rampant, I did at some point start to hear executives talking about “burning fuel”, which seemed to be an analogy simply for wasting a lot of energy on a (futile) project. The match metaphor works because there’s an intense amount of energy that gets released, but it doesn’t last: nothing good results, except a few inches of charcoal (assuming you didn’t light anything else with it).
I wondered at the possible associations between burnout and “burning the candle at both ends”, which usually just means working like hell. If burning a candle at both ends implies that you’re metaphorically running out of wick (i.e. energy) twice as fast, burnout would mean that you entirely run out of candle and have to take several weeks or months to find a new one.
To me, there’s something missing in these idioms – potentially, or otherwise it’s just implied – namely, that the one doing the burning, the one who lit both wicks in the first place, is oneself.
It’s perhaps difficult to take personal responsibility for burnout when our culture of glorified individualism and over-achievement has a lot to answer for, and when work-life boundaries get increasingly dissolved by technology, but we have to own anything we wish to change.
Who’s the firestarter?
You do it to yourself, you do
Radiohead
And that’s what really hurts
Is that you do it to yourself, just you
You and no one else.
In one of my (clearly remembered, at least) experiences of burnout, I was the one doing the burning. I was a training programme designer with a boss who was hands-off in the most positive and empowering sense, meaning that she gave me full discretion over each of the programmes I was creating and running. There were two at the time, and I maxed out on both in terms of design and delivery.
Practically what happened was that I decided to put a lot of effort into several workshops at once. I cooked up a Time Management workshop (the supreme irony of that topic did not elude me, even as I poured countless weekend hours into it) which I somehow felt compelled to turn into a sort of magnum opus. I wanted it to be everything: a practical session to organise every aspect of one’s life, including stacks of templates; a treatise on the real meaning of work-life balance; an introduction to the art of creative work, featuring a video of John Cleese (whom possibly not many of the audience could relate to); and a treasure trove of time management theories and tricks, from the Jar metaphor to Eat the Frog to the Pomodoro technique. I killed it. I think I almost killed my trainees too.
I should point out that this was just one mildly amusing thing I did in that 3- to 6-month period.
I got sick eventually. But I didn’t just feel sick, I felt burned out.
Burnout is subjective (unfortunately)
“Burnout” is hard to take on as a label for what you’re experiencing because, like so many things, it’s a question of degrees. I still don’t know if what I was experiencing was the same as what others go through, or if I even met the definition.
Here’s an online dictionary definition of burnout in the physical sense:
“The reduction of a fuel or substance to nothing through use or combustion”.
And the “professional” one:
“Physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.”
Even though it’s literal, I am more intrigued by the first definition because of the “reduction to nothing” bit. As a serious though rather perverse thought experiment, how would you be able to tell objectively if someone has nothing left, unless they keeled over?
From my understanding, if you’re textbook burned out, you’ve physically run dry. Or mentally, which is harder to classify. You not only can’t give any more, you also physically cannot give a shit any more. Your whole battery needs to be replaced.
(I’m not sure if everyone agrees with the “cannot give a shit” part, though. “Not caring”, in some people’s minds, can be a more or less deliberate strategy that prevents you from approaching burnout in the first place. Or maybe burnout looks and feels different to them.)
Back to my fuzziness about whether I was legitimately “burned out” –
The second definition suggests it should feel like all-round exhaustion. A further interpretation is that it’s exhaustion beyond stress: a burnout of our actual sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight response that we somehow manage to sustain for days, weeks, months, lifetimes. Adrenal Fatigue (or AF, which I get a kick out of because it makes me think of being “tired AF”) is a contentious condition from a medical perspective – studies have claimed that there’s no conclusive evidence for its existence.
In my case, that time around it didn’t quite feel like that. Exhaustion, yes – I remember having to lie down on the back seat of the car when I physically couldn’t get out to walk a short distance into a shopping mall on a weekend – but the stress continued. The “burning” continued. Maybe the lie-down incident was a brief pause, but the thing is I didn’t stop caring/worrying. Maybe that’s a perverse sign that we always have reserve “fuel” left to burn; or maybe I was so terrified of there being no fuel left that I was burning…what, the fumes of my own anxiety?
What are we throwing on the fire? (And whose fire is it anyway?)
What does “fuel” even mean? If we limit ourselves to the working context and get analytical for a second, let’s say “fuel” is basically what we can work with at work. In other words, fuel equals the resources (i.e. time, energy and “brain space”) one is reasonably being paid for to do a job.
So then, what am I burning if it feels like I’m burning myself out? Simply put: extra energy. More specifically for me: extra effort and ideas that 1) are awesome but I kind of know aren’t necessary; 2) I somehow feel “compelled” to add nonetheless; 3) generate a sense of “debt”. As in: “The company owes me because I tried harder.” Or, simply, time I should probably spend recreating instead.
The question to ask about about all of this is, of course, “Why?”. The more fuel you add to a fire, the bigger it gets – so why did I keep feeding it?
The P-Word and other factors F-ing with the definition of “enough”
Perfectionism. Gotta love it. Of course, those who get labelled as such don’t find much comfort in the reassurance that perfection doesn’t exist. That’s the exact problem, don’t you see? We’re not going for perfection; we’re going for “enough”. Which is equally as elusive.
The problem with the idea that I and others may put more into a job than necessary is how you define “necessary” and how you define “done”. Where do you draw the line between required and extra effort? It may be obvious for certain defined tasks, and for certain types of people. In my case, I am a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string person in a similar field of work. I’m a so-called knowledge worker, which also means work doesn’t stop so easily, because it takes place in my head, not in a plant somewhere or even just on a computer. In the truest sense, work is never “done”.
Being a knowledge worker might also help explain why extra effort feels like an extension of myself – because one’s mind feels very close to one’s being, thoughts and ideas can begin to feel “personal”.
But if my extra ideas and effort felt like a resentment-generating over-extension of “me” because they weren’t called for, why didn’t I just define my own “done”? Have fun flexing my creative muscles and then draw a line in the sand? Why did I still feel like I “had” to overinvest if it wasn’t imposed on me?
Was I just bored out of my damned mind?
Maybe I was hoping that someone would notice and give me kudos. Or it could have been about me not wanting to risk any chance of not doing my absolute best. Would that be “my best” based on my own estimation, or others’ judgments – real or imagined?
Hiding behind the inferno
At worst, this was about me throwing everything I could on the fire in order to generate a flare big enough for somebody to notice what I was doing and stop me.
And say what? What was I waiting for somebody to say? Not just “What you’ve done is good enough” (I wouldn’t necessarily believe it) but “We’re sorry, this is all our fault.”? Or even “You know you really should be doing X instead”. Perhaps I was simply waiting for clearer instructions. Or more significantly, for permission to do what I really dream of. Problem was, I wasn’t sure what that might be. Or I was scared to drop the rest and find out.
Perhaps I can surmise that the true issue was this: There’s creative anxiety in my life – as there is in everyone’s lives – and the uncertainty of what that means is frightening. (“What if I don’t know what I want??”). It’s daunting because it requires taking up responsibility for finding out and, in the process, risking being shit at it. To avoid confronting this anxiety, I instead set fire to myself, metaphorically – possibly even hoping to burn myself out and let myself off the (imaginary) hook.
Maybe when we’re too scared to risk being shit at something new and exciting but uncertain, we’re more likely to max out on the things that are certain, even if we hate doing them. We’d rather avoid a crisis of identity even if it means creating a series of other crises that we at least can control.
All or nothing
The problem with being petrified of being the person who does an “average” job, is that it’s indiscriminate. Nothing is enough.
I was rewarded for my extra efforts – with an increase, an annual recognition award – but somehow, as obscene as it sounds, I still felt like it wasn’t quite worth it. It’s almost as if the reward was a reality check, but not really of much consequence, because underneath it was an assessment that I didn’t fundamentally believe. In short, believing the words “Good job” was too risky.
What this ultimately means is that I get burned anyway, on pretty much everything, just in case.
Is it me?
They say our reaction to stress is a lot to do with how we perceive it. Is the experience of burnout, then, also related to how we perceive it – both the overwork that leads to burnout and the feeling of being burned out itself?
If I was able to see it as simple overwork, as overextending effort rather than overextending myself, would I have felt less burnt? Did I put myself wholeheartedly into my work, or just choose to over-identify with the extra effort I put in?
Can “wholehearted” be subverted into holding oneself ransom? In the sense of me willingly dissolving my own boundaries in the hope of earning some sort of credit (“The organisation owes me, the universe owes me…”) which may never come?
The devil’s advocate position might then be to conclude that it’s foolish to be wholehearted. It’s risky to invest oneself. But then what are we doing? What is meaningful work?
Can we invest ourselves, but not too much? Can we be generous and wholehearted but at the same time not take it personally?
“Stop taking yourself so personally”
I loved this recent advice from a friend so much. It reminded me of the story of a Buddhist master’s words to a man to “stop taking yourself so seriously”, even and perhaps especially in the midst of suffering, words which may seem harsh at face value but are actually profoundly liberating. The word “personally” just adds another nuance that rings true to me.
In my moments of extreme frustration, where I feel like my efforts are futile and unrecognised and utterly pointless, I’ve recently become tempted to grab hold of the lifeline that simply says: “This isn’t me.” This work isn’t me, it’s something put out by my brain based on the limited available data; take it or leave it, it doesn’t ultimately matter. It’s an attempt to finally say “I’ve done my best” and actually believe that (miracle!) and then (miracle of miracles!) be able to move on. Maybe it’s even an easier way of telling myself: “Stop taking yourself so seriously”.
How close is this to: “I don’t bloody well care anyway, go stuff yourselves”, or even simply “That’s not me. I’m not here.”? I don’t know. It’s certainly not about irresponsibility or lack of conscientiousness. Though it does have the sense of disidentifying with my work, disowning everything I’ve ever put out there, once it’s out there. I guess I just have to check myself that it’s not accompanied by self-righteousness or closed-hearted defensiveness.
There’s no way around vulnerability. To live fully, we have to risk getting hurt. Suffering is life. Can we suffer impersonally? I think we can. I think we kind of have to. Or else I don’t know how to cope.
I still get burned all the time. I don’t know if it’s possible to stop it. All I’ve been trying to do is to recover by saying – as gently as I can and as often as I can remember – “It’s not me”.
All & None of the Above 