Burnout (and way out).

Doctor, not Miss.
Jul 30, 2017 · 4 min read
This is a fish-eye photo of my office setting of June/July every year.

For the past three years, that is, since I work as an assistant professor in my current university, spring semester has represented a challenging time, mainly because of the overlap between coordinating a course of 300+ students and supervising a number of (BA, MA) theses ranging from 15 to 35. Big numbers, but not uncommon in Dutch academia, nor anything different from what I was hired to do.

Three years ago, I barely had any experience with teaching, as one does when emerging from the blissful years of graduate school in Switzerland. I jumped in the deep waters and I floated, and then I swam. To this day, it doesn’t exactly come naturally, but yes, it does get better. Student evaluations improve and every now and then, as I sip on my water durig class, I find myself answering "yes" to the nagging question inside my head. "Am I really doing this?".

Yes.

Who would have thought? I remain a researcher, at heart, but teaching is no longer my lesser activity. I love my job. Even if/when it tries to kill me.

Truth is: things fall apart, and so do people sometimes. Academia, much like tech, is a field where busyness is a state of being, often the result of limited time and competing expectations. We are either preparing class or analysing data. Either getting documents together for the committee or writing papers. And yet everything needs to be done, everything has a deadline, everything is equally super important. Researchers’ guilt, memi-fied as “I should be writing” by genius Twitter account Shit Academics Say, is not only a very real thing but an industry issue.

I always tell my students, we choose to research what we struggle with, and I spent four years pondering (aka writing a doctoral dissertation) about the limits between private and professional. I should have known better. And yet, once again, theoretical knowledge only goes that far. I am human, people leave, countries change, but the vortex that is my job has stayed the same, right there to absorb joys, pains and everything in between. I’ve been reasonably successful, and my organised, approval-seeking, semi-compulsive attitude has indeed found a satisfying playground. I used to think: if I make it through the semester I’m good. If the course goes well I’m good. If I keep it together at work…

I joined my doctoral school just as my supervisor and mentor Miriam Meckel took some time off to recover from her burnout, and wrote a book (now a movie!) about her experience. I remember mean comments on Amazon calling burnout “the fancy modern term for depression” and — god — they couldn’t have been more wrong. I should know, by now, having gone through both.

I’m not sad, I’m exhausted. I’m not hopeless, I’m exhausted. I’m not demotivated, I’m exhausted. For weeks “tired” has been the only adjective I could think to use as an answer to howareyous. Too tired to sleep, or to eat or do pretty much anything except work, because work needs to be done, because deadlines, because. T-I-R-E-D. Until it reached the point where my body told me to stop, my people told me to stop, and I couldn't do anything but listen.

I have stopped, now. I am moving only very slightly, very slowly. Opportunities pass me by. Projects start without me. Deadlines linger and I force myself to ignore them.

I can’t say that I’m ok. With it, or at all. But I’m learning to be, and I really hope I get there soon. Or eventually.

And also: I’m not sure why I decided to write this. I suspect this story might sound eerily familiar. Having it all, having it all really quite together, and then one Jenga brick slips out of the tower and everything else falls apart.

We can no longer NOT talk about this. The alternative is for declining mental health to be considered a side effect of the academic profession, or some sadistic tool of self-selection. They burned out because they were not meant to do this. Which leads to an academia in which we are only as good as we are effective, as good as we can bend into tiny uncomfortable shapes, while the outside structure stays exactly the same. We have a problem, dear friends.

And I wish we could find a way to talk about it.

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