I will never read your email

A story about the time I burnt out, burned down, and burned back

My email out of office reply subject line read “I will never read your email” for almost four months. Harsh, but true. It was an act of desperation, defeat and at the time felt like an act of survival. If someone were gracious enough to read the body of that automatic reply, they would have hopefully found a little more information and a lot more patience.

“I am taking time off to focus on my health and family. I can’t get what I need knowing there is a mountain of emails growing behind me, so whenever I DO surface, I will archive everything and start fresh. Thanks for your patience.”

No date of return. I wasn’t being coy. I honestly didn’t know.

Burnout is brutal. It is honest. It pushes you past the point of being able to fake it ‘til you make it. You just break it. Break down. Break you.

In hindsight I should have stopped myself much sooner, before I needed to go full nuclear option. I felt the compulsion, the fizzy feeling of exhaustion, the there isn’t-enough-sleep-in-the-world-for-the-kind-of-tired-I-am feeling. When weekends became a desperate attempt to just get back to zero. When all of the energy was gone, and I had pulled the savings out of my adrenals, my cortisol, my joy. The moments when I knew that any burst of energy I had was going to my work, and none of it came home with me. All of those red-hot flags should have warned me. They were like flares on the highway signaling to slow down, accident ahead.

But I didn’t listen, I hit the gas. I mustered, I blustered. I huffed and puffed and in doing so, blew my own house down. A friend and mentor sent me a message that said “I hear you are doing terrible. I am calling you tomorrow.” This was the last thing I wanted, to talk to a person I really admired. I would never let them know the emperor had no clothes. I would really need to dig into some undiscovered bit of juice. When he called, he also called my bluff and said, “Elke, you are a conjurer. When you are in the room everyone looks to you. They don’t understand what it costs you to make magic out of nothing. It isn’t nothing. It comes from you. Conjurers need different kinds of breaks. Weekends don’t cut it.”

He was totally right and yet I ignored this fantastic wisdom for a few more months.

The moment I finally gave in wasn’t epic. There were no big announcements or trumpets, it wasn’t triumph or even a white flag. I just said, “I can’t. I need a break, a real one, and I don’t know how long it will last.”

I didn’t put the company up for sale, or close it. Both options felt like just Too Much Work at that time. I simply wrote the world’s greatest out of office reply and drifted away. “I will never read your email.”

The first month felt akin to a blind date with myself. “What do you want to do?” “I don’t know what do YOU want to do?” all awkward, and like I didn't even know how to be in this life. Then I slept. And slept, and slept. I outslept teenage sons. I slept anytime of the day and still slept all night. My brain didn’t wake me up at 3 am anymore but it also didn’t wake me up at 7 am. It wasn’t rest, it was recovery.

I stared to feel my physical self again, I noticed my feet touching the ground. I fed myself like it was love. (It is.)

And then I stared having ideas again, they snuck in like little weasels. I tried to keep them away, but as I healed, the ideas came back. After a while, I stopped fearing them and started writing them down, just in case. And then I caught myself buying a few domain names for the really good ideas. That was when I knew it was time to resurface.

I hired a total badass college student to kick down the door of my email, archive it all and let me know when it was safe to return. She was the most efficient person I had ever met. She organized, archived and cleaned up the overrun electronic house. I kept her. I marveled at her efficiencies, drive and how many things she could juggle. I worried for her. I wanted to put my hands on her shoulders, brush her black hair behind her ear and say “Be careful. Slow down, before you can’t.” Instead, I paid her. 

I never did look at the archives.

I started to work again. Cautious, like rebounding after a broken heart. I changed my out of office reply to say “I thanks for your patience. In order to focus on goals personal and professional, I don’t check email every day.”

It has been a couple of years now. I still am very slow with email. If I feel the fizzing of my energy, I catch my burn before it gets out of hand. I treat compulsion like an early warning system, a tsunami is coming, and listen.

If you are feeling the burn, be kind. Give yourself some grace and some space. Fires are easy to find. It is ok to step away. Don’t extinguish that fire with your body or with your life.

Stop. Drop. Roll.