Hello, I’m Emily. In June this year I was made redundant. This is not a pity party, that’s just quite a good place to start our story.
Actually, the real story starts a long time before that. Back in my *mystical voice* formative years, but that’s a hell of a lot to wade through in the introduction so we’ll save the backstory for another time.
Before I continue, it feels right that I provide a tl;dr summary of where this is going, so you can decide if you’d like to just leave and not come back if it doesn’t sound like your thing, so here we go…
I got made redundant from my job. Fortunately I am in the very privileged position of not having to rush into something else immediately. The situation I found myself in caused me to take a step back and think about the impact a 40+ hour work week was having and whether that’s what I want to do moving forward or what might be a better fit for me. My upbringing led me to believe for a long time that we are put on this earth to go to school, get good grades, go to uni, then get a full time job until we retire; like that’s the undeniable meaning of life. I followed suit. I still can’t believe how long it took me to challenge that belief, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this.
I’m using this as a place for my musings, an outlet for some cathartic oversharing, an opportunity to get back into writing and a way to hold myself accountable to the promise I have made and broken a few times already in my life: to actually look after myself better. It’s probably going to be a little bit self-indulgent and it’s almost inevitably going to come from a fairly narrow perspective based mostly on my own experiences. I don’t claim to have answers or solutions that will solve anything for anyone else, but hopefully I might be able to offer some relatability, entertainment and at the very least some mildly interesting reading material.
Still with me? Great.
In the immediate aftermath of learning my fate (‘the company plans to make your role redundant’), I experienced what can only be described as a miraculous recovery from a burnout I didn’t realise I was in the throes of.
Within a week people were actively complimenting the health of my skin (this has never happened before). I looked in the mirror and saw what, until then, I thought was just one of those go-to, slightly disingenuous compliments you give to someone you think needs a pick-me-up: I was glowing!
Of an evening, I would catch myself dancing and singing in the kitchen as I made dinner (generally a task my husband would have taken on, minus the theatrics).
At the gym (a CrossFit gym - oh shit, I’ve mentioned it already and we’re only a few hundred words in) my performance was increasing faster than it had ever done before (in defence of having brought up CrossFit so early on, I have never been able to afford to go regularly enough, so seeing progress of any kind is something to be smug about and a fairly tangible example of change).
And, most remarkable of all, my period returned almost immediately having been absent for six months. If you are a person who does not have, or know much about, periods it’s worth me pointing out that the NHS guidelines recommend you go to the GP if yours disappears for longer than three months. Yikes!
I can’t pretend that being made redundant was a wonderful experience because that just wouldn’t be true. I knew that the decision was not personal, but that didn’t mean I was immune to the self-doubt and anxieties that accompany a situation like that. But there was this unignorable sense of the universe having dealt me a solid; a reprieve that my body, brain, even my soul had been crying out for and I had been wilfully ignoring.
It’s not the first time I’ve experienced burnout, not by a long stretch. In fact, on returning to work post-covid after a long period of furlough, I had promised myself that I’d never allow myself to burn out again after a particularly bad period at the beginning of 2020. It was the imposed break of furlough that first caused me to come to terms with the relentless pressure that I am prone to putting myself under.
When you’re in a place of severe burnout, it’s hard to realise how bad things are. Especially when you’ve been raised in a society that glorifies hustle, maximising your productivity and overachieving.
Furlough was really the first time I realised I can’t relax. I can’t function without *stuff to do*. Within the first few weeks of being stood down from work I had deep-cleaned the kitchen, redecorated the spare room, baked enough cakes to feed an army, decanted all of our dry food products into clear containers - à la The Home Edit - run my first 10km and sorted through all of our belongings several times.
I thought perhaps I have a low threshold for boredom or a fear of being alone with my thoughts (this is definitely a contributor, especially as I was coming to terms with a bereavement at the time) but in reality the main factor at play was, and continues to be, an obsession with productivity. The idea of getting to the end of the day without being able to tick things off of both a literal and metaphorical to-do list terrified me, and it still does.
For the first few weeks after my redundancy I felt a totally joyous feeling of freedom, not least because during that time I went to Glastonbury for the first time in 5 years. To think that I had no responsibilities, not just for the weekend but also none to return home to, was, well… whatever the opposite of a burden is? I don’t even have the words.
However, after my return to the real world I found myself staring into a vast abyss. Perhaps (read: definitely) still suffering the lingering effects of the post-festival comedown, I found it hard to find purpose or meaning in my life without a job. Should I start looking for another job? What sort of job should I look for? Should I go back to what I was doing before or do something else? What do I want to do? What should I do? What am I on this earth for if not to ‘do’ and what should I be doing? Since then I have been fighting the productivity demons on a near daily basis.
I can’t look back on my experiences of burnout without seeing how easily I fall into a cycle of willful ignorance for my own wellbeing while working the way I always thought I was supposed to. In moments of clarity I am determined to break this pattern and try to seek something that suits me better, but in moments of doubt I find myself back on LinkedIn scrolling through jobs I know will just cause me to go right back there.
So what’s next? In the short term I’ve taken on a few small freelance clients while I ‘Figure Out What I Want To Do’™. I’m also trying to jot down some initial ideas I have for a novel. I’ve picked back up with an Etsy store I opened during Covid. And I’m still trying to ride the wave of improving performance at the gym whilst trying out trail running for the first time. If all of that is making you think ‘sounds like you’re already doing quite a lot of things there’, you’re not wrong. The productivity devils still have me in a chokehold, but this is just the start of the journey.
Buckle up, because I have no idea where we’re going and in the world of being-in-the-driver’s-seat-of-my-own-life it’s clear I am not very good at steering.