Burning Out Bridges — My journey towards healing and re-connection
Recently, I had one of those strange experiences of confluence which, when they occur, are almost enough to make me believe that the universe is trying to tell me something. In this case, a series of related events have sparked new realisations about the way I live, thrive and survive and how our society has the potential to both enable and hinder our individual wellbeing.
The first of these experiences occurred at last month’s Animal Activists Forum where I happened to find myself attending a session on burnout presented by Ashlee Louise. Funnily enough, I had not originally intended to attend that session as I felt that my knowledge of burnout was fairly comprehensive, having attended activist focused workshops on the topic in the past as well as having organised sessions on burnout and self-care for activist youth through Young Voices for Animals. So it was with some reticence that I decided to go along, reasoning that it was a topic worth showing support for, even if I myself wasn’t particularly interested. Typically, the very session that I was sure I wouldn’t learn anything new from ended up being the most informative session I went to across the whole conference and the one that remains in my thoughts weeks down the track. While the whole presentation was presented with such incredible insight and vulnerability, what particularly resonated with me was a single statement which could have easily have been lost amidst the flow of information.
The comment came when Ashlee was discussing the difference between stress and burnout, stating that it lies in the way that stress is feeling too much pressure while burnout presents as the opposite, often manifesting as a feeling of emptiness, ineffectiveness or constant need to seek out more and more work. In that way, burnout is a self-perpetuating cycle as the deeper you get into it, the more burnt out you become as the conditions that caused the burnout in the first place replicate and escalate. Hearing this I was hit by what felt almost like a physical blow as thousands of thoughts, feelings and behaviours reordered themselves in my mind, and a sense of clarity arose out of the chaos my emotions had been for so long. For the first time, my constant anxiety over having free time, my inability to find peace when I was doing tasks I deemed non-productive and the stress and pressure I felt to excel made sense. I realised something that probably should have been obvious to me but that I had missed for a long time, misdirected as I was by my already existing mental health complications. I was burnt out. Badly. But, I also realised that I was already starting to figure out how to heal.
This second realisation also came from the same strange confluence; in this case the book I happened to be reading at the time off the conference, plucked off the shelf of my library at random a week earlier because I recognised the author. The book was Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak and it detailed the lives of five brothers, their parents and those that they loved and lost. As the name suggests, a recurring theme throughout the novel was that of bridges, with the act of building a physical bridge working as a metaphor for healing and reconnecting after trauma. Again, I was initially sceptical of this novel but decided to stick with it and, slowly, as I progressed through the sprawling, multi-generational diegesis I became overwhelmed with the book’s themes and characters in a way that tore at my heart. Having recognised my own burnout and struggling to come to terms with grief, loss and trauma I saw myself in the beautifully written characters and begun to learn from their, often tortured, path towards peace. The metaphor of a bridge spoke to me, particularly, drawing out observations and thoughts that I had already begun to have about community and connection and how social isolation can be both a cause and symptom of burnout and trauma.
On the flipside, I began understanding how social connectedness and community building can not only work to generate healing in people but can also be a side-effect of healing, as depression, burnout and other trauma related responses so often lead to social isolation and the disintegration of meaningful relationships. Partly because of this novels influence I gained the courage to begin reaching out to friends again and to take the first steps to heal relationships that I had singed while emotionally unstable, by lashing out or becoming emotionally distant or unavailable. Through doing this I quickly began to realise how crucial the right community is for healing and growth and how, if I focused on developing and maintaining relationships with people I felt good around then each person added to my life, fitting together like a jigsaw piece until the picture of who I was became clearer, positioned as it was as part of a community, not as a solitary piece of the puzzle. We are so often taught that strength comes from being alone but what I’ve learnt recently is that strength flows through many different channels and it is by embracing a diversity of experiences and connections that we can find our strongest self.
This brings me to my final experience, happening once again within weeks of the other two. Earlier this month I attended the Black Palestinian Solidarity Conference a collaboration between Indigenous Australian and Palestinian academic and activists which sought to explore the similarities between the two resistant movements and how each can support the other in their journey towards liberation. This conference was undeniably exceptional and I came away from the three days bursting with new knowledge and, above all, an even greater respect and admiration for the incredible people who are fighting for liberation on their own land. Significantly there was, yet again, a now familiar common theme that was impossible to ignore. Community.
Speaker after speaker talked of the connection they felt to their land and their people and how creating space for community was key not only to resistance but to hope. Hearing of the intergenerational, ongoing trauma that these people confronted on an everyday basis, hope seemed something that couldn’t possibly be common and yet time and time again the same message was repeated. Liberation is possible. We will win. The future will be better. Hearing these incredible, brave people speak of hope and possibility was the last piece of the puzzle for me and I suddenly felt all of these individual situations click together. Burnout, trauma, pain. They are all symptoms of a broken society. A society that puts greed above love, productivity above healing and ambition above justice. A society that forces us to be alone knowing that when we are connected we are strong and when we are strong we resist misery. A society that sees friendships as a distraction from work, that views family as a burden and love as a status symbol. A society that divorces us from our emotions and enforces false desires that reinforce its own spiral of destruction.
We live in a world that is broken but we have at our fingertips the tools to fix it. Connection, compassion, justice. They are things almost all of us value and yet we distance ourselves from them in order to fit into a system that was never meant to accommodate living, breathing, thinking animals. Our system is built on the hope that we would all lose our emotions and become machines. It arose out of the industrial revolution where efficiency became key and automation the answer to the question we never should have asked. All around me I see people who have so much to give beyond their productivity and I see these people struggling to breath in a world that was not meant to be sustainable. Butn I have hope that this system will not last forever. We have the power to change it and change it we will. One bridge at a time.
