Blog | Tristan Kernan

I've been blocked writing about my experience with burnout for a full year now. I feel so much fear and shame: I'm a failure and I shouldn't talk about it. It's even been hard for me to open up in safe spaces, with close friends - the message inside my head of "here he goes again, talking about his brain fog for the hundredth time, why doesn't he stop feeling so sorry for himself and just push through?" That burnout is dominated by inner symptoms and relatively invisible on the outside means I am limited in receiving external validation, which has kept me locked up inside myself, perpetuating the very conditions that fuel burnout. Blah. It's a vicious cycle.

As I described in my article on anxiety, I think of the anxiety condition as a system of stored stress and fear. Part of the healing journey is in releasing these pent up emotions, and a key method for me is expressing my experiences in writing. It's my intent to share openly and honestly about my experiences, first to help myself relieve the fear and shame, and second to help others who are stuck in these emotions, bewildered as to their condition, its causes and its healing.

One year ago

Last July I caught the flu. It was a terrible case of the flu, I was knocked off my ass for a good week. Symptoms persisted for another week, then another week, and I dragged myself to the doctor to get tested, presuming that I had caught COVID again and could I get on some of those antivirals? I tested negative for COVID, positive for the flu, and going back a couple weeks later once more tested positive for the flu a full month out. My physical prowess recovered, and I was able to move through life, but my brain kept the score: I experienced persistent brain fog. It's taken many aspects over the past year, it swings up and down and back and forth in intensity. Some of the ways I've described my brain fog are mental dullness, lack of sharpness, sluggishness, and like a match that just won't light.

This "long flu" terrified and perplexed me. When will it fade so I can get back to my old self? Why do I have good days and bad days, good weeks and bad weeks? Most frustrating - doesn't my body understand that in order to correct my environment to reduce stress I need my full cognitive capacity? Where's the fairness in a condition that prevents me from addressing it?

In hindsight, now, I can see the progression of the condition. I can see the alarms flashing. Back at the time, though, my world shrunk to getting through each day, hyperfixated on managing my various crises. I can't say what could've been if I had had someone to sit me down, slap me, and thoroughly explain my condition and how to act skillfully. Perhaps I would've dutifully nodded, and immediately returned to crisis management. It's a really hard mental habit to break.

Crisis management

In the month preceding the flu, I ran the stress gauntlet.

I had started applying to new jobs, playing the market to see if any opportunities interested me. I was immensely fortunate, out of a dozen or so applications I found myself in several active interview cycles. This quickly proved to be too much for me. I have intense test anxiety, owing to growing up with perfectionistic expectations around grades. Interviews that take the form of proctored tests trigger this anxiety quite strongly. I noticed that I was overdoing it and withdrew my applications, but that stress had been seeded.

I started dating a new woman. I was instantly obsessed. It's really incredible how my brain picks up on subtle cues that hearken back to childhood and past relationships, how I latch onto someone I don't know rationalizing the overwhelming feelings as "passion." This new relationship had all the hallmarks of unhealthy codependence: intense initial attraction, over-sharing, boundary violations, love-bombing. I recognized these patterns in real time but I struggled to escape; I was hooked. After a fight a month in I gathered my courage and ended the relationship. I was left reeling, deeply vulnerable after this experience.

Most significant, one of my reports at work went through his own breakdown. This tested me on so many levels: as a recovering codependent, I had to maintain strict boundaries with myself to not try to fix or caretake my employee. I also had to set boundaries with my own boss: as a brand new people manager with no training under my belt, I decided to turn over the situation to my boss and HR, and follow their instructions. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my boss has his own undiagnosed abandonment issues. While my employee spent multiple months contributing nothing or next to nothing, my boss purposefully misled, gaslit, and abused me over the situation.

Burning out at work

This latter situation was especially distressing because it mirrored what I experienced growing up. When my father and stepmother divorced, my father placed me in the care of my now ex-stepmother, despite full awareness that she was mentally unwell and could not provide a safe environment for a child. As the abuse mounted by my ex stepmother, my father turned the tables and told me that it was my fault, my choice, and that really I was the one abandoning him. At ten years old, I had no power to challenge him, and I internalized this guilt. Over the years, my ex stepmother spiraled down into depression and drug addiction, and at every juncture my father repeated the same lies: that I was responsible for my ex stepmother, that he was the true victim.

When my employee broke down, it took me back to when my ex stepmother broke down. I was at the prestigious governor's school summer program for gifted high schoolers. At a time when I should have been fully engrossed in the experience, making friends, learning, and playing, I was on the phone begging my father to help my ex stepmother whose drug addiction had escalated to the degree of erratic and dangerous behavior. At work last year, I had to beg my boss to help me with my employee, to provide minimal guidance and support. My boss not only refused to help, but actively misled and manipulated me, making me out to be responsible for my employee's breakdown and lack of recovery.

I kept my head down and tried to manage the work situation for several months before I realized that the toll on me was too great, that there was no path to resolution: my boss said that firing is off the table, so short of a spontaneous and miraculous recovery, the status quo would persist endlessly. I withdrew from managing this employee, offering my full support to help with the transition but making it clear that I had to step back for my own sake.

The other half of narcissistic abuse comes after you set a boundary and step back. I had naively hoped that by playing it nice, not naming the abuse, I could placate my boss. Just as when I was a child dealing with narcissistic parents, it didn't matter how small I made myself, how little I spoke up for myself, how much abuse I accepted by turning the other cheek. After stepping back from managing this employee in crisis, my boss began a targeted campaign to force me out. Every week there'd be some new abuse. I thought I was handling it well by continuing to not engage, not react, keeping my profile as small as possible.

When a teammate suddenly departed, I saw how my boss was crushed, actually devastated. He honestly believed he could convince this person to stay, when they had already accepted an offer elsewhere. I had a lot of empathy for my boss at that moment, seeing how his narcissism was sourced from the same abandonment wounds that scarred me. My boss for his part felt shocked and laid off the abuse for a couple weeks - but the narcissistic drive to dominate or exile me quickly returned. The "fix was in" when I got my performance review that made no mention of the months I spent managing my employee in crisis. A week later my boss had a meltdown and threw a temper tantrum alternating between begging me to stay and threatening to fire me.

I had been holding on for months, rationalizing it as accumulating savings for a period of time off to rest and recover. After the gaslighting performance review, the part of me that was holding on let go. After the temper tantrum, I knew it was time to go. I walked away from a cool ten to fifteen grand by quitting before the end of the year.

Warning signs

From June to December, I spent a solid six months in acute and intense stress and anxiety. Looking back I don't know how I managed to make it work for so long. I suppose it's because it felt familiar, that I was trained for this in my childhood. While my mind was reeling from the stress and brain fog, my body was marking the score. Long flu was the first physical ailment, rare and usually responded to with "don't you mean long COVID?" Next was jaw tension - my mouth and jaw were practically locked tight, with night time grinding, leading to aches and pains during the day. When I went to the dentist, they also found a reinfection of a tooth that had previously been treated with a root canal - a root canal that the endodontist said was perfectly done. I was told that reinfection is exceedingly rare. But I wasn't surprised. I knew that months of stress was causing my body to deteriorate, to be prone to infection and reinfection and reducing my body's ability to fight off infection. Finally my gastric system started acting up, with bowel distress daily.

More than the cognitive symptoms, the physical symptoms really spooked me into leaving the job and taking time for recovery. As uncomfortable as an emergency root canal is, it was the wake up call I needed that I had to make a change to right my trajectory. My body was screaming out to me.

It took me a long time to listen, but I'm thankful I did because not everyone can stop the process of self sabotage before their life is in shambles, or worse. I left my job with my head held high and finally started on the long journey of recovery.