The Pause

Learning to Listen

Burnout doesn’t always announce itself loudly—sometimes it accumulates quietly, until the body forces a pause.

The past few years have been a whirlwind of questions, deflection, and realization. I’ve found it’s true what they say about it all catching up to you eventually. It’s just that we don’t even realize we’re dragging it all around until we’re completely smoldering beneath the weight of it. By then, the flames are gone, and we’re left feeling like a pile of burnt ashes.

Forced to pause, I took in my surroundings through the eyes of a scorched, dried-out soul—one whose shell had been aching and screaming to be heard in the only ways it knew how. For far too long, I believed I simply needed to adjust my declining physical and mental state to match my high-energy, high-stress lifestyle. I thought something was wrong with me for “not being able to do it anymore.”

Countless hours of research and rabbit holes followed, trying to make sense of my body’s signals—driving myself further into the ground in the process. I never once stopped (my first mistake in general) to consider that my lifestyle needed adjusting to me.

That first screeching halt wasn’t the first, I realize now, nor would it be the last. However, since then, I’ve come to recognize the signs that I’m pushing too hard before getting to that point. Comparison to my abilities years prior kept me thinking that my ailments meant something within me needed fixing—as if I could locate a broken mechanism to explain my decline.

A lot of us seem to operate this way—under the pretense that because we used to live life a certain way, we should be able to continue on in the same ways. When really, our bodies just hadn’t compounded that overload long enough to result in noticeable symptoms. That’s when we blame our inabilities on aging.

“I just can’t go like I did in my twenties.”

Yeah—because you ran yourself into the ground, as we all did, thinking there were no repercussions because we were young and able to do so.

Of course, while being younger typically allows for better metabolic rates, among many other positive modalities, being older does not equal declining health. Well, it shouldn’t, anyway. The general social norm of praising overworked individuals only amplifies this mentality.

It wasn’t until my last forced pause that I was able to reflect with a depth that revealed something to me: the lifestyle I’d built over the past five years simply no longer aligned. Once that veil dropped, it never went back up.

I had to find and offer myself grace for not recognizing something that feels so obvious now. I had to forgive myself for holding on so tightly to a narrative I’d built so much of myself around that I refused to see how clearly it had run its course—and that that was okay.

I don’t need to operate at the level I did years ago. I’m a different person now than I was then, with a different body and mind—and that’s a beautiful thing. Something to be honored and respected.

With that came a newfound responsibility: to listen.

For me, this did not equate to quitting my job and living a totally new life—not right away. It was, and still is, many little adjustments over time. There are still an enormous number of unanswered questions, not just around my health, but my exit route and transition into alignment. To pursue this not from a place of lack, but of embodiment—a shedding of all that no longer fits the path ahead.

Not having many of these answers would have normally caused even more stress, and at first, it did. But in my last pause, I found direction—not in the search for where to go, but in the steady pulling of my heart.

There’s so much noise all around us. When I turn inward, there tends to be noise there too—and that’s okay. I sit with myself until it quiets down, until I can feel that steady tug on my heartstrings. I deserve that patience. I deserve that space to feel heard.

I have missed a lot of work in honor of these quiet moments, and that has caused some stress of its own. But I can handle the stress much better afterward. I can reach for the tools I now know are available to me to find balance—to know when to pause and when to step away.

My body and mind had been pleading with me to do the bare minimum- listen. In doing so i’ve found it much easier to create balance in my life. This inner guidance has simplified decision making—if the exertion causes depletion, I simply don’t do it anymore.

And that’s that.