It is Long Covid Awareness Day and my original post was making me mad so I thought something a little lighter was in order: How a debilitating chronic illness cured my corporate burnout. This post was written while properly pacing, which means in 5 minute sprints over the course of over a week, so expect some disjointedness.
The job
For those who aren’t familiar with me as a 9-5 employee, I was a tech worker from 2008 to 2023 working primarily in B2B software. I started out developing websites and, as the tech stacks became more complex and segmented, I was pushed further and further into the front end. Nearer to the end I moved over into the product side of things, eventually settling into a senior product design role. Skills-wise this was a good fit. I like research, numbers, and trying to make things better for the people who are actually using the products I’m working on. I also tend to think longer term and bigger picture, and I felt like over on the product side of things that was something I could do.
Happiness-wise, this turned out to be awful because none of those things I liked or felt were ever prioritized. In broad strokes, quick wins were more important than making sure we weren’t making more tech debt and things that made money now were much more important than making sure the users were able to do their jobs. I also had trouble saying no to things and believed my boss when I was told this workload was only temporary (Lie), so I ended up overworked. When I did finally start saying no it was too late. I had set the expectation and just kept getting more and more work with less and less impact.
Add in office politics, my projects getting randomly canceled after I had put in a ton of work, general work chaos (Layoffs and changing plans every couple months is great for your employees), and the part where the company said they prioritized one thing and did something completely different and burnout was inevitable.
The coping mechanisms
Writing has always been an outlet for me. While I was working, I also wrote, rewrote, edited, and published at least 3 books a year. Looking back on it now, I can recognize that this output was largely a result of needing both a way to relieve the stress of the day job and to have a place where I felt like I did have some feeling of control. I was not creating things for a business or for profit, but because it was personally fulfilling. It also made me very happy, but there was also the escapism and the fact that I could put in the work and see the results.
This did also mean that I never really had any downtime. I considered all of the writing to be my down time because I felt better after I worked on those projects, but it was still work. A lot of work. I have been publishing since 2012 and writing for even longer, so I spent a lot of years never really resting.
Cue Long Covid
I got Covid in May of 2022. By June, I knew something was wrong. It took a very long time for me to get a doctor agree with me enough to check that I met the criteria for Long Covid, and even longer before a different doctor agreed to send me for testing for it to confirm.
I won’t go into the diagnosis process and whatnot at this point. The important part for right now is that it’s a big chronic illness with a wide variety of possible symptoms. For me, this presents primarily as ME/CFS with PEM, as well as POTS. I also get out of breath a lot, and have have a small collection of other miscellaneous other things that come and go or that I haven’t found a proper name for yet. I haven’t quite been able to explain “my blood feels weird” to a doctor yet, but that’s also probably not important for this topic.
It has, however, meant that I am unable to work any longer. Trying to work and maintain my workload was making my condition even worse so I have been off of work for a while now as I try to recover.
But what does that look like?
As much as I’d love all the medical terms to explain it, it’s really confusing to understand what has practically changed about life as a result of it. My world is much smaller now and I am physically very limited in ways I can’t quite describe, but this is as close as I think I’m going to get with my brain how it is now.
| Action | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Number of “functional” hours in a day | 12-14 | 1-2 |
| How many times I need to stop and catch my breath going up the stairs | 0 | 2 |
| How long I can hold a conversation before a headache starts | Multiple hours | 5 minutes |
| How long I can sit in a chair before getting dizzy or start developing a headache | Multiple hours | 5-10 minutes |
| How long I lie in bed resting because I can’t do much else | Did not do this | 6 – 8 hours |
| How long I can write (Or concentrate on any singular thing, really) before my brain goes fuzzy | So many hours | 5 minutes |
| How long I need to lie down and zone out after a 5 minute writing session | Never happened | At least 30 minutes |
| How much I could walk before I start to get out of breath | Could walk for an hour continuously with good shoes | End of the block if I go slowly |
| How long it takes before I can get out of bed and do things after I go get coffee with a friend for an hour | No time at all | 3 days |
How Long Covid cured burnout
Long Covid is a condition that requires rest. It’s not really that new as I understand it–Plenty of other things trigger similar conditions. It’s just not a sexy enough condition that we’ll fund the research, and so self management is really all we have. And self management means rest and to a certain extent it also means removing yourself from society to unlearn all of the things that modern society values because society and western work culture despises rest. You need to focus a lot on getting your body to get into and stay in rest mode so that it can recover from the chronic stressors on your body caused by chronic inflammation and other things that we’re still learning about.
That just happens to also be how you recover from burnout.
I take breaks now
The first thing you learn about managing chronic fatigue is that you have to rest. I thought resting was just not moving and I could do that very well. True rest, though, means letting your mind be quiet, letting your emotions be still, and letting your body stop for a while.
No longer being in a chaotic work environment (Because I am physically unable to work) completely removed my emotional stress. I no longer had anxiety and I was suddenly able to handle all of the other things in my life with ease.
Quieting the brain was a lot harder and took more work. My brain is naturally very busy. When it’s not being filled with stress thoughts about my job, it is thinking about story ideas, plans for ways to change up my house, thinking about new recipes that I could try, or any number of other things that I’ve become spontaneously curious about at any given moment. I love losing myself in a book or long form content of some kind or researching random things, and it turned out that this continues to be the biggest drain on my energy.
Now, though, I physically can’t do that anymore. If I concentrate for more than five minutes on anything, I start having a very hard time focusing on it. If I push to continue to concentrate on it, I will develop a headache. If I push through the headache, no matter how much medication I take, it will turn into a migraine. This means that I cannot think too much about anything. My body has trained me to let my brain go quiet, or at least to maintain my attention on much lighter matters.
I can’t dwell on things
In the same way that I cannot focus on anything positive or fun, I also cannot dwell on any of the negative things either. My old habit of spiraling has been trained almost entirely out of me at this point because, again, my brain goes fuzzy and then reacts with pain. On top of that, negative emotions are very draining on my limited energy, so I’ve had to work to let a lot of things go because these things are now very much not worth spending the energy on.
On the other hand
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that I cannot get too happy about things either. This hasn’t just been being trained out of negative emotions, but out of extreme emotions in both directions. I just had a lot more negative ones as a result of burnout.
I’m much more confident
My confidence had been completely stripped via my day job. I didn’t feel incompetent, to be clear. I knew how to do the job and what I was doing just fine. I struggled instead with trying to understand and keep track of the changes that were happening with the company, which priorities I was supposed to keep in mind while I was making decisions, and told over and over again that what I had been told was never actually told to me. I asked for clear, direct communication and attempted to create a paper trail a few times only to be met with meetings and being told that I should need to be hand held and should be able to figure this out for myself. Do that enough and I felt like I was constantly questioning myself.
With the onset of Long Covid and all the general cognitive issues that comes with it, you’d think this would get worse. Instead, I found that when I turned to trying to navigate the medical sphere in trying to get a diagnosis and treatment I was doing just fine. Yes, I struggled to clearly state what was happening. I tried and failed with doctors to get them to let me communicate in a way that would allow me to be clear. I was told over and over again that I was dealing with anxiety and depression and other psychiatric issues and had to work hard to get someone to agree to let me go in for tests to prove I was physically impaired.
But I eventually got those tests. And time and time again, I was right.
I realized throughout this that I am fine. When put in an environment where there is a clear objective (My health improving) and procedures that can show which way to move forward, I am just fine. I had comparable obstacles in both situations, but in one where I arguably am much less experienced I was able to handle it just fine. I just don’t do well in environments with obscure goals and processes.
I have been removed from corporate life for the foreseeable future
As a result of getting sick, I am unable to work and have been more or less forcibly removed from the chaos and stress of corporate life. I no longer have to be worried every day about job security and if the things I’ve been so focused on are going to suddenly be completely irrelevant. Not being in that environment day after day and having that be the central focus of my whole life has been probably the key thing I needed to recover from burnout.
Leaving the environment causing the issue tends to resolve the issue. Surprise!
I have to acknowledge that I am in a very privileged position currently. I got sick while employed and so I have been able to rely on my job’s long term medical leave health insurance to cover my bills. My housing costs are lower than other people in my area and I have my mom come by once a week to help me with the household chores and cooking that I am not able to keep up with any longer. I’m only just starting to have to deal with government assistance because I’ve been sick for so long and should I ever have to rely on it 100% I will probably end up dead.
I also have to mention that I am not someone who ever really identified with my job. I was a person who did the job, the job was never part of my identity. It was something I learned to socially introduce myself with, but if anything I have always identified more with my hobbies than my career, which also made this a lot easier for me than it might for other people.
Some other perks
It’s not just developing some skills and new perspective that it’s helped. While I’m still trying to put a positive spin on not being able to leave bed most days, I can come up with some other positives.
I got an ADHD diagnosis
I’ve known since around 2017 that I probably had ADHD, but was told by me doctor that if I didn’t get that diagnosis as a kid, it wasn’t ADHD but anxiety. In the process of trying to convince them that I was dealing with a physical health issue I ended up getting not one but two medical professionals including a specialist to agree that yep, it’s definitely ADHD. I can’t do stimulants as a result of the Long Covid, but it’s been great to have that validation and the ability to understand why certain things are harder for me, as well as figuring out how to change my life around so that it works better for my brain instead of continuing to try and force myself to do things the “normal” way.
Which was, as it turns out, was huge drain on the limited energy reserves. If your brain doesn’t work that way, I’ve become a big fan of finding a way to work with your brain rather than against it.
I’m okay with sounding dumb
One of the final books I managed to write and publish before I got sick was Fredrika, about a woman who speaks with a valley girl accent due to an accident in her childhood. She is sure that people can’t understand her and speaks quickly when she speaks at all, though it’s more that they are caught off guard by the language and she just speaks so quickly that they don’t always follow. She can speak like everyone else, but it takes a lot of concentration and gives her horrible headaches.
As it turns out, this is a very apt metaphor for how I felt when I talked at the start of all of this. The brain fog made it hard to find the right words at the right time and I spoke even faster than I did before because I could feel the thought leaving my head when I started speaking. Concentrating and focusing on what I was saying to try and make it sound right gave me headaches and made all of my other symptoms worse. I was certain that only nonsense was coming out of my mouth and it was incredibly frustrating.
But unlike Red, I learned to accept that I don’t sound the same and don’t care anymore. I am, in fact, a little annoyed that people understand me so well because from my perspective it is just gibberish coming out that has somehow escaped my mouth as a coherent thought that I have quite frequently forgotten by the time my lips stop moving. It is now simply the strange way in which I communicate and if the people around me seem to understand me fine, then I am no longer going to stress about the word choice being the most correct, or even making sense. If I’m not then it’s on them to ask me again.
I’m re-prioritizing life
Because I have a lot more time and my brain doesn’t really let me dwell or spiral on the negatives any longer, I can really focus on figuring out life. Not being able to do most things in life really shows what things I miss the most and what I want to spend my limited energy on. The things that bring me joy and satisfaction are things like telling stories and being creative. The friends who check in have become so much more important. I also still really like figuring things out and telling people all about the things I figured out.
Making super awesome features for B2B SaaS products is pretty low on the priorities list now.
Will these things always be important? Who knows. Some day I will probably have to return to work, health issues or no. I am smart and capable, and that will be a concern for when it comes up. Right now, I’m just focusing on my health and taking it one day at a time for the first time since I started working. The future is unpredictable and, for the first time in a long time, I’m okay with that.
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