MY Supernova Moment (My Burnout Story)

In this episode, I’m sharing MY Supernova Moment - my burnout story, in all its raw and messy glory. When I Burned Out, reading and listening to Burnout Recovery Stories helped me to appreciate that what I was going through wasn't going to last forever, that there was light at the end of the tunnel and life after Burnout. And hearing my own experiences in others' stories helped me to feel a little less alone, and a little less crazy! I hope this episode can help and inspire you in that same way.

Burning Out and need help right now? You can book in for a free 30 minute call with me whenever I have availability, with no obligation to sign up for any of my coaching offerings. Head to my website and book a free consultation call slot today.

Visit my website: https://maggiesupernova.com
Follow me on Instagram: @maggiesupernovacoach
Find me on Facebook: @maggiesupernova
Join my FREE Facebook Community: https://facebook.com/groups/stressedout2supernova

Visit my website & join my mailing list: https://maggiesupernova.com
Follow me on Instagram: @maggiesupernovacoach
Find me on Facebook: @maggiesupernova
Join my FREE Facebook Community: Stressed Out to Supernova

Transcript

I’m nervous about this one guys. This is my Burnout Story.

Oh man, where to even start.

The thing is, I’ve told the story before - a couple of times. I’ve told it on podcasts, most recently by way of introduction as part of my interview on Cait Donovan’s Fried The Burnout Podcast.

The most visited page on my website by miles is ‘My Burnout Story’, and I am not shy about talking about my experiences in content, blog posts, rambling Instagram stories and the like.

So why does it suddenly feel completely impossible to tell this story on my OWN podcast?

I think there’s a lot of fear involved still - even 2 years on and very nicely chugging along the recovery road. Just the very nature of the state I was in when I did hit burnout, I was such a wreck and second guessing everything I did, everything I said, and everything anyone did or said to me. I didn’t trust anyone around me and I didn’t trust myself - and these weren’t completely unfounded concerns. I’d been through a really horrible time. And as with all Burnout Stories, there were internal and external factors at play - it wasn’t all my environments fault, and it wasn’t all my fault. It was a whole big complicated mess of factors.

SO what actually happened? A bit of background. I worked in the live entertainment industry, in marketing, and I’d done so for about twelve years. I was the kid from the middle of nowhere, who dreamed of being a big west end actress - who followed her dreams to the big city, got there, and realised it’s a big city full of kids from the middle of nowhere who dreamed of a life on the stage and wound up working in marketing and PR.

Still, I’d made it. I was there. I spent my whole childhood determined that I was going to have this amazing, successful, completely different to where I’d come from - life. And I didn’t have a bad life - I didn’t have a bad childhood AT ALL. I grew up in a nice house, with nice parents, no major traumas, and then moved to a nicer house with lots of outdoor space, fields, a nature park nearby. It was absolutely idyllic - and when I was a kid it was SO SO BORING. It sounds like I was a precocious little twerp and probably, I was. But, and I suspect this is the actual reality for many precocious little twerps - I was absolutely terrified. Of everything. I definitely had undiagnosed, quite severe anxiety from a very young age - and that had a massive impact on everything I did. When I was a kid, I did not understand how the whole world wasn’t panicking about literally everything. I was so scared of all of it. I was scared of murderers. I was scared of ghosts. I was scared of melting polar ice caps, black holes and escaped big cats on the moors. I was scared of growing up, of not having enough money, of not being smart enough, not being good enough, not being pretty enough, not being thin enough, not being ENOUGH - full stop. This was perfectly balanced with a fear of failing, and so I would only do things that I knew I wasn’t going to fail at. The moment I started struggling with something, I’d drop it and move onto something else. I did the stuff that people told me I was good at, that came naturally to me. And somehow, somewhere along the line, I ended up at drama school.

I was pretty good at singing. I wasn’t great at dancing but I could move - just about. I was an alright actress. I was absolutely not good enough at any of these things to make a career out of it, but by the time I’d managed to get myself to London and into drama school, I was sort of stuck. I knew I wasn’t good enough, but I also didn’t know how to do anything else. Except - well, I did know how to do one thing very well. I knew how to be BUSY. And I knew how people reacted to me when they saw how busy I was.

When I was at drama school, I had like five jobs. I was there ONE year, by the way. It was a full time course and alongside that I had five jobs. In theatres, in bars - I would get up and get myself to school, then have to leave immediately when class finished to cycle over the bridge to the west end and work until 10, 11 or even at some jobs until well after midnight. I’d go home, crash, get up, and do it again. When I wasn’t working, I was at shows, or having drinks after shows trying desperately to have the kinds of cool, stagey friends I thought I needed to be relevant by association. And I’m telling you this part of my story because I absolutely know that one of my first Burnout experiences was in that year of Drama School. I couldn’t be the most talented one, so I made myself the most busy one, the one who knew everyone - who’d seen everything. And that became my identity. And by the end of that year, I was so done with it. I had zero passion left for this dream I’d followed. I was definitely burned out.

After drama school, I didn’t even try auditioning because I knew I wasn’t good enough to get proper work. I bounced around doing different things for a few months, and then wound up temping in the sales department for a big producer. I attached myself to the head of that department and, of course, got myself into events and parties - and there I met other people, one of whom happened to be very senior at a marketing agency. Being the good networker I was at the time, I of course followed up on that meeting by email the next day and was promptly invited to interview for a junior role in the agency.

Anyway, this is my Burnout Story, not my life story. But suffice to say, that was the beginning of my career in entertainment marketing. I went all in, because of course I did. Was there any other way to be? I went to every show, worked on every project, went to ALL the drinks. I had a salary for the first time in my life - a pitiful one, but a salary all the same - I had weekends, and that was a novel thing for me because I’d been working 6, sometimes even 7 days up until that point. As it turned out, I was really good at the job. It came naturally to me, I’m quick and capable - I pick things up easily and I had a bit of a gift for marketing. So it didn’t take me long to start working my way up the ladder.

Let’s fast forward through these seven years of busy busy busy. I burned out a couple of times in those seven years, I pushed myself too hard. I didn’t know what burnout was back then. I had some awesome experiences, and some very bad experiences. I had a lot of stress, much of it I made for myself. There was some messed up stuff that went on too, the entertainment industry is not a nice place a lot of the time, and this was before the Me Too movement brought an awareness of SOME kinds of unacceptable behaviour to the surface, and I took this kind of stuff particularly hard because, well, looking back in hindsight I’m a super sensitive person with anxiety, but I didn’t know it then. Life was work, and parties and networking, and striving to be better, get promoted, work on bigger, more exciting projects, travel to more exciting places, look as successful and impressive as possible to the people back home - despite the fact that I was already falling apart behind the scenes.

And then came the big job. The one that if you’d gone back in time to childhood me and told her that she would one day be doing THIS, with these people and in these places, knowing all this STUFF and being some small part of making it all happen - she’d never have believed you. She didn’t even know enough about the world to dream that this was a thing a person could do.

But I got the big job. I gave EVERYTHING to the big job. Around about this time, I’d actually finished writing a book - because of course, alongside all of that busy stuff I also was trying to be a writer too - and I pitched it to some agents and they liked it, and asked me to make some tweaks and resubmit and I didn’t. I never did. Because I got sucked into the big job. I left my writers networks and when they asked why I said it was because I had to give this thing a real shot. I didn’t want any distractions. I wanted to give this my absolute all.

And boy did I.

Here’s the thing. I lost myself, but I lost myself willingly. I saw the people around me being the people around me and I decided to try to be them too. This was everything. Nothing else mattered. I became what I decided the big job needed me to be: The perfectionist, the over-achiever, the type-A, all or nothing, 110% GIVER of all that I was, to the job. I barely saw my friends - unless I invited them to an event, which of course I did a lot because I loved that feeling, of being the one with the golden ticket. I volunteered for every trip overseas, took on every responsibility, I got involved in every project, I made it my business to be the one who knew every answer to every question. 

I was in an environment that was expanding, and quickly. My role got bigger overnight, every night. Responsibilities grew, the amount of time zones I had to operate in grew, but the support system around me did not - not when it needed to. I only recruited help when I was desperate for it - which was partly my fault and partly not. I was always determined I could do it all, and for a long time, people were perfectly happy to let me. 

Here’s the thing with Burnout. It’s not your fault. But it’s not solely the fault of the people around you, or the environment you’re in either. It’s a combination of factors. Sure, there are narcissists and opportunists and bullies and just, people who are NOT GOOD PEOPLE. But it’s not always malicious, when you get taken advantage of. The system is messed up. So, I was in an environment where WAY too much was asked of me, way too much responsibility was put on my shoulders, WAY too much personal investment from me and WAY too much advantage was taken, not enough support was given and, honestly the environment I was in was pretty toxic at times. But I also ASKED for it. I so desperately wanted the responsibility, the stress, I wanted to be busy and part of it, and I wanted to be IN THE ROOM. Because the alternative was NOT being, and that was failure. And I couldn’t fail at this. It was too important. 

I was really good at my job. Until I wasn’t. Things got really messy. Roles changed. Restructures happened. SHIT HAPPENED. And I came out the other side of it all absolutely miserable. I’d given everything, for so long, and I had nothing left to give - and in the end it didn’t matter, and I failed anyway. What was it all for?

I quit my job in December of 2019, after almost four years. I was a shell of a person. 2019 was the worst year of my life, by far. My anxiety was so high that I could hardly function. My depression took me so LOW that I just wanted to die my way out of my situation. I’d stopped caring. I’d run out of steam. And yet alongside that I also spent a lot of that year desperately trying to network my way into another job, convincing myself that I just needed to move onto the next big, amazing, impressive thing. That if I just got out of this pot, I’d be fine. Everything around me seemed to be happening behind a kind of haze. I cried like every single day, I didn’t even try to hide it any more. I was just sat at my desk, crying, all the time. People got used to it. I’d pushed myself way beyond Burnout and was deep in that textbook definition: extreme exhaustion, chronic stress, cynicism, loss of passion - the lessened performance. I wasn’t pushing anymore, I couldn’t. After years of 60-70 hour weeks, hundreds of emails a day - I wasn’t working long hours, I was leaving at 7 every day and heading home to drink red wine until I passed out on my couch. It would take me a long time to get out of bed the next morning and I was always late, but I didn’t care.

By this point I’d also experienced a looooong list of physical symptoms of chronic stress and Burnout too. I could barely eat anything, without horrible digestive pain. My periods had stopped almost completely. I was getting migraines and my hair was falling out. I’d gotten stress induced glandular fever early in that year and after that my liver was not looking great for a long time - mostly because I’d not realised I had glandular fever, none of my doctors had realised that was what it was either, and so I’d not known that the excessive drinking I was doing was doing even more damage than it would usually have done. I looked, and felt, like shit.

When I quit, it was like a weight lifted momentarily. I had no idea what I was going to do, just that I was going to take time off. I knew I was broken and I needed to recover. But of course, next came the three month notice period, so I couldn’t recover just yet! I took 2 weeks off over Christmas, and went home. I slept. I went to a spa hotel. I drank a LOT. And then I went to Amsterdam for New Years to see my friends and drank some more.

I remember the last night of my holiday. I sat at my friend’s kitchen table at midnight, drinking my second bottle of white wine, absolutely hammered. I had to get up at 6AM the next morning to get my flight home, but for some reason neither of us seemed bothered by this. She was quizzing me about what I was going to do next. I’d made it so far, I’d worked so hard. I surely wasn’t just going to jack it all in? I’m going freelance, I told her, with all confidence. I’ll make more money that way. And I’m going to write again. I’m going to go back to writing. And I’m going to get my life, and my creativity back.

The next day, I somehow made it home to my little London flat. Just one more sleep left of this 2 week holiday, and then I had to go back, for what had actually ended up being close to a four month notice period for some ridiculous reason or other. I didn’t sleep that night. 

The next day I dragged myself in, mumbling happy new years and stumbling to my desk. It took me an hour to switch my computer on, I just sat drinking coffee until I could manage it.

I lasted until maybe 11.30am that morning, then went home with a migraine.

I didn’t come in the next day.

On the Wednesday, I had a meeting. It was a meeting I was dreading, but I was damned if I was going to miss it. It had been rescheduled so many times. I needed this thing to be done. So I dragged myself off of my bathroom floor, where I’d been sitting for quite some time, and I went in.

The meeting was cancelled as I walked through the door. Rescheduled for what must have been the fifth time.

I put my stuff down, went into the office of my most senior colleague, friend and confidant, sat down and burst into tears. I was done, I could go no further.

This wasn’t the first time this had happened, to be fair. I cried in that office A LOT. But she seemed to realise that this was different. She knew I was done. She had someone call a doctor, collected my stuff up, and I slipped out of the office and into a cab.

And I never went back.

The first few days after I hit the wall of Burnout are kind of a blur. But as I shared in the last episode, Burnout SOS, the first thing I did after hitting that wall and finally being forced to listen to my body was see a doctor. I sat for an hour in a fancy private doctor’s office and offloaded about two years of trauma. By the end of that appointment, I had a list that I could take with me to my GP, and to the therapist that said fancy doctor referred me to. And as I said in that last episode as well, I was REALLY lucky to have the resources and support that I did have when I burned out. I know it’s not like this for everyone - and that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing now. Being the support that isn’t always there.

I went home, I slept. A lot of the time I think I was basically unconscious. I lay on the couch and just let myself lie there. I felt like I’d been hit by a bus, like my body actually was too damaged to move. Everything was kind of numb, my brain was fuzzy, and my eyes and my head just hurt - like I’d been crying for days but really at that point? There wasn’t anything left to come out.

I went to therapy, and found that actually there was plenty more to come out! I got through a box of tissues every session, I think. Sitting and talking everything through was very, very helpful. Especially because I had a VERY frank, and to the point therapist, who wasn’t afraid to call me on my bullshit. This was the time that I learned about my anxiety - and realised HOW LONG that had been a part of my life. There’s always that expectation that therapy will take you back to your childhood and in my case, that was very much a part of the experience. I went back and realised I’d been terrified since day dot, and everything I did, every decision I made, every reaction I had, came from fear. It shed a lot of light on how I’d gotten to the point I was.

A few weeks into my Burnout recovery, a friend who had Burned out a year earlier - which I of course had no idea about because I was so deep in my own shit at that point - gave me a copy of Susan Jeffers book, Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway because it had really helped her. This was before my therapy revelations and I remember being like, oh thanks, but I really don’t think fear is my problem. Cut to a few weeks later and I’m devouring that book like no ones business. I’ve read it multiple times since.

I Burned Out, because I lived thirty plus years of life believing that I wasn’t enough as I am, that I had to be something, someone, bigger, better, more successful, more impressive, more exciting - to be worth anything. I believed that I had to be some else, and I worked my ass off to be someone else. While doing that, I lost who I actually was. And I realised, when I burned out, that I’d become someone that I didn’t actually want to be.

These are the things that shifted for me, in the days and weeks and months after my Burnout. I very quickly accepted that I was broken, and gave myself permission to be broken. I don’t know how I made that change so quickly, so seemingly easily. I think it was honestly that I didn’t have the energy to pretend not to be broken any more. I listened to the professionals who told me I was traumatised, I’d had a full on nervous breakdown and needed to be wrapped up in cotton wool, and so I did that. I took the medicine, I did the breathing, I did the meditation. I slept, and slept, and slept. I had wild, crazy dreams where my mind started processing all of the mess of the last few years and let me tell you, there was a lot to process. I read BOOKS, learned LOADS - and I became my own coach. I read the Burnout Solution by Siobhan Murray, and I read that because people kept saying this word to me. Burnout. I didn’t know that’s what I’d been experiencing but then I read the Burnout Solution and I was like, oh, yep. That’s me. From the Burnout Solution, and on recommendation from my therapist and an awesome coach, I started using a planner and journal and bringing this kind of baby steps routine and structure to my life. I stopped drinking - I hadn’t had a drink since I got back from Amsterdam actually. I switched to fruit tea and hot chocolate. I found Fried: The Burnout Podcast and started listening to story after story of people who had gone through Burnout and built new lives for themselves on the other side.

I told my immediate family what was going on, and they were worried of course - but supportive as they always are. I stayed in London, but I knew I could go home if I needed to. I told some friends what I was experiencing as well, with some surprising results. A couple of people became very present in my recovery life - some less expected than others. I had this really little network of really close friends who I would see every other day. Who got me out of the house, who came with me on walks and to cafes and tea shops. I became a regular at my local Yoga Studio, and for a few weeks my main focus for every day was just that walk down the street to Yoga or Pilates, and back again.

I put myself back together after Burnout by being 100% focussed on my recovery, by coaching myself and holding myself accountable. I didn’t have kids to think about, or work to go back to, and that’s how I did it so quickly at the beginning - I really want to be clear that I KNOW it’s not clear cut like this for everyone. I was lucky to have support from work in those last few months before my official last day - I’d done enough of my handover to get by and even though early on there was a plan - from me, anyway - that I would go back and finish things properly, that didn’t happen and I don’t think anyone else was surprised. Around this time as well, January, February, March of 2020, there was something else going on. This new virus, that we figured was going to be another ‘bird flu’ style thing that I’d panic about but ultimately wouldn’t turn into anything, had started to gain traction. Even my therapist told me i was panicking about nothing - just another irrational fear. I was supposed to leave my job on Friday 20 March, 2020. On Monday 23 March, 2020, the country was ordered into Lockdown. After much deliberation (because I don’;t know if I mentioned this but I’ve had crippling anxiety about literally everything since birth and plagues and global pandemics have been in my top 5 worse case scenarios since my primary school trip to a plague village in Derbyshire when we stayed in a haunted hostel and learned about pustules and plague doctors - so by the time that first lockdown came round I was basically convinced that if I left London I would be taking the plague with me and I’d be killing my whole family, guaranteed), but after much deliberation, my mum and dad drove down to London on the Sunday and took me and a decent sized suitcase home with them to wait out this lockdown thing for a couple of weeks. And we all know how that worked out - LOL

The thing about burning out and losing literally everything that you knew overnight - it kind of forces you to take action. That’s why I call it my supernova moment, i knew, at that time when everything was blowing up, that I had this choice. This opportunity to go home, rest, suck it up and head back into the fire - or to go home, rest, and completely reset. For the first time I was honest with myself and I admitted that not only wasn’t I happy - but I also couldn’t see a way I was ever going to be happy in this life I was living. For years I’d told myself if I just get to THIS point, I’ll be happy. If I just make THIS much money, if I just live in THIS place, if I just get THIS promotion, if I just get to work on THIS project. It was bullshit, because I got to all of those points and still hated my life. I HATED IT. To the outside world it looked amazing but inside I was so miserable. And suddenly I started to think, what if I just changed everything with the only priority being to NOT be miserable all the time.

My initial period of really focussed recovery ran over the course of about 3 months, before the pandemic kicked off and sent me spiralling back into anxiety town. In that time I was in the doctors weekly, at therapy weekly, I was doing coaching and yoga and meditation every day, and slowly but surely re-learning how to human. I was figuring out who I was, away from this life I’d known. What was actually important, what made me feel, what made me happy. The biggest learning I had over that time was to slow down. To just slow everything right down, to take the time to actually stop and look around. And then to start listening to a deeper level of myself, that wasn’t so concerned with what everyone else thought I should be, thought I should do, thought I should act. I kind of regressed a bit - a lot! I let my inner child out and just let her breathe for a bit. I built a simple routine, I watched cartoons in the mornings and wandered parks in the afternoons. I let things be simple for as long as I could. Eventually, when my therapist encouraged me to bring a bit more activity into my daily life, I spontaneously booked a flight to go visit friends who were skiing in the Alps for a couple of days. She was like - I meant go on a slightly more energetic hike or something, geez! But even when it came to Burnout Recovery, I could never do things by halves. That trip, getting up into the mountains, hiking in alpine forests, learning to ski, and spending time with a small group of people who were just doing life RIGHT, was incredibly inspiring and energising. It gave me a lot to think about as I headed home, a couple of weeks before the world was about to shut down.

I decided to go travelling. I made a budget. I listed my flat on AirBNB and booked flights. And then, COVID happened. So I didn’t. I ended up going home to stay with my parents, in the self-catering apartment that couldn’t open up due to lockdown along with the rest of their B&B business, and we hunkered down for that long, lockdown summer. I know for a lot of people, that first lockdown wasn’t pleasant. For me, it was an unexpected gift, the gift of more TIME. I threw myself into Yoga training, Meditation training, coaching training - and very nearly Burned myself out again. Yep! You heard me right! Burned myself out with my own recovery - because I was still trying to be the BEST at it. I caught it earlier that second time though, I listened to my body and slowed everything right down. I look my time getting my training done. I walked a lot. Baked banana bread. Started looking after my Nan, and hunkered down in our little bubble.

If I’d have gone travelling, I’d have knackered myself out again very quickly. I’d have come back to London when I ran out of money, gone and got another fancy job somewhere else, and probably burned myself out again within a year. It’s funny how things happen sometimes, isn’t it? How sometimes the world forces us to stop. But we don’t always listen when it does. I’m really glad I finally let myself listen.

Now it’s two years later. I’m still in recovery, I think I will be for a really long time. It’s not just recovery from a single Burnout, this is a slow and steady process of starting life over again! It takes time, and that’s okay. I have ups and downs, highs and lows. I still get triggered, the PTSD and anxiety is still there, but not as much as I used to - and when I do, now, I know what to do. I still deal with depression on and off, and I’m navigating other changes that have happened since - from wildly fluctuating hormones, continuing alopecia and hair loss, and just the fact that my energy levels are not the same as they once were and maybe never will be. This road to recovery is long - and I’ve realised, actually, that maybe it’s never ending. Maybe this road is just the rest of my life. But that doesn’t freak me out - it actually makes me feel really good. Because even though it has these ups and downs, these steep climbs and rolling hills, that place in the middle is always getting better.

And one of the best things that’ve come out of all of this is what I’m doing right now. I didn’t set out to be a coach, but when COVID happened and I started writing about my experiences and sharing on social media, people started to reach out to me because they recognised their own experiences in some of the stuff I was sharing. People started to ask me how to find more balance, particularly people from my former industry came to me to talk about how to cope with the fact that their whole lives had changed overnight thanks to COVID shutting everything down - like my Burnout did for me. So I hopped on some Zooms, and found that I could actually help people with this stuff. I found that a lot of them were feeling the way I’d been feeling all that time ago, when I thought it was just me. And I found that a lot of them were heading on that same road, towards a big fiery Burnout. Aaaand, I found that helping them made me feel awesome, it really did give me a purpose I hadn’t felt for a long time, and it helped ME to stay on track with the work I was doing for myself - especially while the world as we knew it was in limbo.

Cut to a few years later, and I’m doing more than just hopping on Zooms. I’m working with people in group coaching and one to one, helping them navigate their own Burnout and Recovery. And I’m good at it guys, check out my reviews! I’m teaching Yin Yoga, which is the Yoga that helped me so much in my recovery. WHOLE episode on Yin Yoga coming up soon. I’m guiding meditations regularly as well, and I’m WRITING and creating content, and everything I’m doing with my work has Burnout Prevention and Recovery at its heart. 

And in my own life, away from my work - because that is a thing, and it’s the most important thing - I’m still working on this self-discovery journey, I’m focussing on my family, and my little dog, my creativity and my energy, and building a life that is balanced, and that works for me. It’s a lot smaller than I expected it to be - or maybe it’s more that I’m more OKAY with it being smaller, than I expected it to be. And maybe it won’t be forever, I don’t know. But it is right now, and I’m happy with that.

And that, so far, is my Burnout Story.

As always, you can reach out to me ANY TIME. You can find me on Instagram most easily, @maggiesupernovacoach, or you can get me on email, maggie@maggiesupernova.com. Head to my website to get on my mailing list and to get some freebies like a free guided meditation and your first Yin yoga class with me for free, and of course you can book in directly there for a free 30 minute chat with me any time I have availability.

Now, I’m off to make myself a coffee – or maybe something stronger after that! Actually let’s be honest, I’m still mostly off the booze and I’ve already had a coffee today, so it’s going to be a peppermint tea, that’s just how rock and roll I am these days.

Thank you for listening, and I hope that sharing my story has helped you in some way. Back to business next week - we’re looking at Burnout Symptoms and how to spot early warning signs of Burnout. Something I could have done with knowing a few years ago!

Have a great week, you’re doing amazing.