Burnout to Breakthrough: My Mental Health Odyssey That Led Me to Choose Me
[Estimated reading time: 4 minutes]
This is the 2nd of 4 posts related to burnout this month. The 1st post, which occurred early in my career, can be found here.
I’ve written about my 9/11 experience before. As someone who saw the 2nd plane hit from a conference room window across the street and watched the 2nd tower come down in person, it never really leaves you. What’s different about this post is more about the immense toll the whole experience took on my mental health and the subsequent burnout.
Where I was on 9/11
For context, I was working at one of the top 3 investment banks at the time in Product Management for Global Research. I had recently relocated back to NYC after a brief stint in the Bay Area. I was definitely in the “burning the candle at both ends” phase of my life. Working hard. Playing hard. At this point, I had already been diagnosed with one autoimmune disease and just took the meds while neglecting my health. Who cares! I was having fun and traveling the world.
When you’re going through something as catastrophic as 9/11 and the aftermath, you’ve lost all sense of perspective. In most cases of burnout, you don’t realize that you’re in the thick of it until it’s too late. And then you’re incredibly vulnerable. That was certainly me.
After we evacuated the World Financial Center, which was across the street from the World Trade Center, a bunch of us eventually made it to my apartment. It was about a mile away so it was walkable but also far enough away from the chaos. It took a couple of days before I was tracked down by my company to help “bring things back up”. Given that I was incessantly watching the news and I wasn’t sleeping, it seemed like a good idea to do something constructive.
Diving back into the ground after catastrophe seemed like a good idea
We had a temporary location set-up where the product and tech teams were based out of. We were trying to get personal email addresses since the bank’s email servers were down. It was an absolute mess. Keep in mind this was in the era of AOL and Hotmail. People weren’t texting then. And obviously we had no social media at this point. Tracking down people was challenging and call trees were not easily accessible. We breathed sighs of relief when we tracked down someone who was more challenging to find.
It was one of the few times in my career where there was absolutely zero politics in play. Imagine how sad and pathetic that is over the course of 30+ years. The team was focused on getting in touch with everyone within the division, which had hundreds of people in the NYC area. But we were all in for the long haul. We worked long hours. We divided and conquered critical tasks. We collaborated at the right times.
The days stretched into weeks, and then we were moved to a more traditional office set-up that was right near the attack site. Needless to say this was not good for either our physical health or our mental health. Subsequent events of first responders working down there proved that point. But we were so engrossed in coming back stronger than we were! I mean, that was the fighting spirit, right?
Holding grief in
As a woman in Wall Street in the 90s and early aughts, you knew not to cry. Whatever emotion you had was not available for you to display to anyone. All of us were processing some serious grief over loved ones lost and/or injured. We were all processing the trauma of seeing firsthand what transpired. Then you had colleagues who happened to not be at the office that morning for a random reason and had guilt about that. It was a fucking mess.
Eventually we moved back to our original office. That brought more trauma. But again, no talking about it.
Therapy? I have no time for that. I’m working.
Friends? Sure. I could have talked to them but we were all dealing with our own shit. They don’t need to hear my stuff when they’re dealing with their own turmoil. Don’t be selfish.
Family? OK, sure? But why needlessly worry them? I don’t need the constant check-ins to ensure I’m OK (in retrospect, I did - DUH-UH!).
Boyfriend? Yeah, OK. The person at the time wasn’t that kind of guy and, as you can read above, my maturity wasn’t exactly there.
Also happening at this time was still the aftermath of the dot-com crash. Hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in tech and on Wall Street. The long hours continued and now we are now months after 9/11. The esprit de corps feeling had been long gone and now it was a slog. Executive leadership was regularly saying threatening things such as “if you don’t like your job, I have 10,000 people who would kill to have it.” I wish I was making this up. This was in addition to the normal sexism on Wall Street.
Ignoring what was happening and neglecting my health
Just when I thought I was seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, the investment bank I was working for got sued by Elliot Spitzer when he was the NYS Attorney General. As “luck would have it,” I was on point for coordinating the response across the different functional areas back to our lawyers. More long hours. More travel. More neglecting my own health. But I’m OK. Really. I’m OK. I’m getting shit done and making things happen! And I’m getting executive exposure. Yeah, baby!
Spoiler alert: I was not OK. My physical health continued to decline and it was obvious to anyone outside of my chaotic world that I was suffering emotionally as well. This was one of those times where I didn’t have someone pull me aside and say, “hey, are you okay?” Looking back on that now, it was by design. I didn’t want to confront what was happening.
Forcing myself to take a break
I finally took a vacation on a sailboat in Greece about 10 months after 9/11 and met the hubs on the trip, who was living in Seattle. At that point, cell phones didn’t work everywhere so it was really nice to have the break. It was on that trip that I started to take stock of what was going on.
I wouldn’t say it was that I lost myself as in other burnout situations. It was more about “what kind of life do I want to live”? If I learned nothing from 9/11, it was that life can be taken away in a moment. What do I want that to look like for me? I’d be lying if I said I knew the answer to that question but I knew I didn’t want it to continue on the trajectory my life was on. I was a slave to my job. That was the cold, hard truth.
Resetting my scenery to recalibrate my brain helped. And, yes, meeting the hubs was a catalyst. But really it was about re-thinking about what was possible. What if I could…
Look at those kids on Patmos in 2002.
Admitting I couldn’t take it anymore
A few months after that trip, I knew I was done. Another round of layoffs were coming and I raised my hand. It all felt very uncomfortable and scary because the plan was then to move back to the West Coast without a job. I was moving across the country for a guy I met on a sailboat in Greece. What could go wrong?
You’re probably wondering how I missed the signs of burnout in this instance after having such a visceral experience a few years prior. Well, 9/11 was a big factor. I had never experienced anything like that and hope to never again. It was an “all in” situation and in those ensuing weeks after the attack, I needed to be part of something bigger. Then that situation morphed into something completely unexpected with the lawsuit against my employer at the time. And by the time I realized I was in over my head from a mental health perspective, I was screwed.
Moving to Seattle ended up being a major foundational shift that would release me from many of the preconceived notions I had about what I wanted my life to look like. The 90-hour work weeks would become a thing of the past. As I got more settled in the Pacific Northwest, what seemed impossible started to become possible. It hasn’t been a straight linear progression though. It would take another episode of burnout to truly shake me awake and force me to reckon with the fact I needed to make more significant changes in my life.
We’ll get to that in next week’s post.
Remember. Hope is not a strategy. Let’s get some time on the calendar and chat about how Go Long can help you.