Burn Out

When Bob first came to me, he wasn't sleeping. Panic kept him up most of the night. He was taking sedatives to get down and amphetamines to stay sharp through the day, and the cocktail his doctor gave him had stopped working. He was on a mission, money and doing right by the planet both, and he worked like the mission couldn't spare him. He was burning out and moving too fast to see it.

We treat the body like a thing. Most of us live a few inches behind the eyes and experience the body as an appendage hanging below, a slab of meat and bone that carries the head around. And we'd rather it didn't speak. When it does, when something hurts or drags, we reach for the fix: the pill, the drink, the screen, whatever dulls it. I haven't got time for the pain.

The body will carry that for a while. It wants a little rest to repair itself, and because we've trained ourselves past its signals, we override them, and it gives way anyway. First, it's fatigue. You cover the fatigue with coffee, then more coffee, then the coffee makes sleep hard so there's a pill for that, and the pill doesn't rest you, so the morning cup becomes a double. At some point, the body stops negotiating. That's the part we call burnout, and then we're puzzled that we can't work the way we used to.

What Bob found, when he stopped and dropped his attention into what he was feeling, was that the feeling wasn't new. It had been with him since he was a teenager. He was seventeen, his team had won the state championship, and he brought it to his father. His father said, "That's child's play." From then on, Bob had a searing drive to be worthy of the man, and the drive ran straight through his body's limits. The panic at night was the old ache, still asking to be enough.

You can't always translate what the body is saying, and you can't always fix what aches. You can listen. It has been talking the whole time.