I came back to work before I felt ready.
Most people do. There isn’t usually a moment where recovery is complete and a clear signal arrives that now is the time to return. You make a judgement call about readiness with incomplete information, and then you deal with what you encounter.
The version of me that returned was different from the one that had left. This sounds like the hopeful narrative version of the experience — burnout humbled me, I came back with clarity, everything is better now. That’s not quite what I mean.
What I mean is that I had spent a period of time outside the structure that I had organised my sense of myself around, and returning to it, I couldn’t fully go back to treating it the same way. The work was the same. I was different.
Some of what was different was useful. I had less patience for things that weren’t important. The urgency I used to feel about things that, in the scale of the recovery period, clearly hadn’t been urgent — that urgency had quieted. I had more ability to work within a day rather than around a day, to be present in what I was doing rather than always running slightly ahead of it.
Some of what was different was hard. Rebuilding confidence in the things I knew I could do was slower than I expected. Trusting my own judgement again, particularly in situations where I’d been uncertain before burnout, required effort. There were moments in meetings early on where I held back things I would have said before, not because I didn’t have something to contribute, but because I didn’t quite trust it yet.
That’s the part that doesn’t get talked about. Not the burnout itself — there’s more conversation about that now than there used to be — but the re-entry. The version of you that exists on the other side of it, and the work of understanding who that person is and what she can carry now.
I’m still doing that work.
What changed in you after a period of difficulty that you’re still trying to understand?