My burnout story.
I was in my mid-40s. Mom to two young kids. We lived in a beautiful home in a beautiful place, with a growing community of loving friends and family. I'd built a decades-long career in law. We were financially stable, able to travel and make memories together. On paper: so many blessings.
Underneath it: seven moves, one of them cross-country. Infertility and pregnancy loss. The loss of people I loved. The Great Recession. Four major job transitions, several sparked by toxic work environments. Parenting and building a house through a global pandemic. Aging family members with cognitive decline. The collapse, and eventual rebirth, of my marriage.
And through all of it: work, and more work. 60+ hour weeks, on average. Working vacations. Working weekends. From the earliest days of my career, my worth was measured in tenths of an hour. Even after I moved in-house, success meant hitting OKRs and KPIs, and adapting fast to whatever mood leadership was in that week. I'd been trained well: output minus pushback equals reward.
Then one November, my husband and I sat down to do our annual budgeting, talking through our goals for the future. Mid-conversation, I blurted out:
"This is a great plan, but I'm going to be dead in five years, so it doesn't really matter."
I don't know where it came from. But as soon as I said it, I knew it was true. A kidding-not-kidding slip that named what I'd been feeling and ignoring for months, maybe years: the slow, undeniable decline of my health under chronic, severe stress.
My body had been carrying warning signs for a long time. Carpal tunnel. Digestive issues. Anxiety. Insomnia. Allergies. Each one treated separately, for years, and each one had quietly become "my normal." In the last couple of years, it had gotten worse. An enlarged thyroid. Daily headaches. Heart palpitations. Shortness of breath. Brain fog. Chronic fatigue. Even shingles, of all things.
My body had started screaming, and I couldn't ignore it anymore.
I told my husband: "I feel like I'm being buried alive. If this plan means staying on the path I've been on, I'm going to be dead in five years. I can feel it. I'm burned out, and I can't keep going like this."
Buried alive. That was exactly it. And that was the moment everything changed. No amount of planning would matter if we weren't actually able to live the life we were building, or around to live it at all.
My burnout didn't come from one cause. It built slowly, over years, through boundaries I didn't set, workouts I skipped, time I didn't take for myself, and a mindset I kept buying into: keep pushing, keep hustling, keep billing. Underneath it was the quiet belief that something must be wrong with me, that I just wasn't tough enough, that I was failing at something.
We live in a culture that treats burnout as a badge of honor. And as a woman in law, I was trained to ignore my basic needs, to prioritize and excel in a system that wasn’t built for me, all while being told that is the way. I don't buy that story anymore.
So I made the choice to start listening to my body and start healing. I told my employer I was burned out. I took a real vacation, fully unplugged, for the first time in my life. When that wasn't enough, I took medical leave on my doctor's advice. I worked with a health coach to rebuild my body's foundation. I did the harder work in therapy. I got clear on my actual values, and started making decisions based on them instead of on guilt and systemic pressures. And I studied and learned everything I could to understand what had happened, why it had happened, and how to prevent it from happening again.
Full recovery from burnout takes years, and I'm not pretending I've arrived. But my life feels different now. My body is healthier than it’s been in years. I'm no longer people-pleasing my way through every decision. My thinking feels clearer. I have energy I haven't felt in a long time. And I'm doing meaningful work – this work – that scares me a little and matters to me a lot.
A Few More Things About Me
I spent several years in BigLaw, then moved in-house, working across financial services and tech. I've been practicing law for almost 20 years, and in the legal industry for almost 25.
In undergrad I double-majored in Folklore & Mythology and East Asian Studies. My thesis looked at women, sex, and enlightenment in Chinese Buddhist literature. So thinking about burnout in women through the lens of mythology and archetype, the Heroine's Journey especially, isn't a stretch for me. It's kind of exactly my thing.
Outside of work: I'm a boy mom, a dog lover, and a world traveler. I’m an aspiring amateur folk guitarist (meaning I’m not very good). I was a varsity track athlete in high school. I'm severely allergic to most things that grow outdoors, but somehow never to a beach resort. And I still kind of want to be Indiana Jones when I grow up.
Why I Coach the Way I Do
I don't think you need to be fixed. I think you need proof that what you're feeling is real, that it's shared, and that it's survivable, and then real support that actually honors what you’re going through and helps you through it.
That's why I do this work.