Picture someone with me for a second.
She walks into her office at 7:15 in the morning. Nobody else is there yet. She sits down and starts answering emails before she has taken her coat off, maybe before she has had her first coffee.
Watch her for the rest of the morning.
She does not ask twice for anything. If the answer is no, she moves on. She does not push back. She walks into meetings, reads the room, and doesn't open her mouth. And at least once that day, she apologizes for something that was genuinely not her fault.
Imagine you didn’t see the title of this post. Could you guess how old she is?
I am not asking you to guess her age. I am asking based on her behaviour.
Because after more than twenty years of watching brilliant women fall apart quietly in conference rooms, here is what I know. That version of her was not built at the office. That version of her has been running a shift far longer than her job title has existed.
The exhaustion nobody talks about is not the workload
It is not just that she is running a pattern she no longer needs. It is that, on most days, underneath it all, she knows what she is doing. Instead of addressing it, she justifies it.
She feels herself not asking twice. She feels the apology forming before she finishes her sentence. She feels herself shrinking a need down into something smaller and more polite before the words even leave her mouth.
And in that same second, the excuse is already built.
I am just being efficient. I do not want to make this weird. Now is not the time. I do not want to be that person. I already know what they will say about me.
She builds the justification so fast she almost does not notice she needed one.
That is a level of exhaustion nobody talks about, because we are not talking about hours and caseloads. We are talking about the exhaustion of running a program you can half-see yourself running and still cannot stop, because stopping would mean admitting how long you've been in charge.
Three women, three programs, one pattern
I want to show you three shapes this takes. I have seen all three of them up close, and many more besides. Listen for your own justifications in them.
The one who was the responsible one
She was the oldest of four. By ten, she was making the lunches, signing the permission slips her mother was too tired to read, telling her little brother that everything was fine, just go back to sleep.
Nobody handed her a job title. The message was clear anyway. You are the responsible one.
Thirty years later, she is still the one absorbing the extra file nobody wants. And when some part of her starts to think something is wrong with this, she tells herself someone has to take it on, someone has to hold it together.
It is the exact same sentence she said to a frightened sibling at two in the morning, when no parent was coming. Except now she says it in a blazer and calls it work ethic.
The one who stopped needing things
She left home at fifteen. She learned fast that needing things got her nothing but more weight to carry, so she stopped needing things, at least out loud.
Now she is sitting across from a manager who is underpaying her. She can feel the number she wants sitting in her throat. She knows she is worth it. She swallows it and tells herself, I do not want to seem ungrateful. I do not want to rock the boat right now.
Some part of her knows that is not the real reason. She just cannot afford to sit with the real reason.
The one who learned that quiet keeps the peace
She is the first in her family to graduate from university, the first to sit in a corporate boardroom, the first to wear that kind of suit.
Growing up, she was taught, not with words but by watching, that quiet keeps the peace. In family arguments. In being scolded. Quiet always kept the peace.
So now she disagrees in her head while her mouth agrees. And she tells herself, I will raise it privately; that is the smarter move. Most weeks she does not. She knows she will not, even as she tells herself she will.
None of these women are working a job. They are running a program, half consciously, catching themselves mid-loop and stepping back into it anyway. A program written long before any of them owned a blazer, put on the heels, and picked up the briefcase.
The program was not wrong. Nobody told her the assignment ended.
This is the part people miss.
The program worked. It kept her safe. It carried the oldest sibling through a hard childhood. It kept the girl who left home at fifteen from getting hurt worse. It kept the first daughter in a room that was never built for her.
I am not standing here saying the coping mechanisms women developed were stupid or wrong. The opposite. They were smart. They were exactly the right tools for the ten-year-old, for the fifteen-year-old, for the woman who had never seen anyone who looked like her make partner.
The problem is not that the program was wrong then. The problem is that nobody ever told her the assignment was over.
So she keeps catching herself mid-pattern and keeps choosing the excuse over the truth, because the excuse is faster and more comfortable and doesn't require her to grieve, or to feel guilt or shame about the person she had to be to become the woman she is now.
She is forty-one. She is billing 2,200 hours a year. And she is still running on code written by a child.
The burnout loop: catch it, know it, excuse it, keep going
Here is what has actually changed for her. She sees the pattern now. That is the shift. She is no longer blind to it.
But instead of changing it, she maintains it. She justifies to herself why she is doing what she is doing.
And that keeps her in the same survival loop she was running all those years ago. That loop is not just emotional. It changes your biochemistry. It changes your physiology. It puts your body back into a state of exhaustion over and over and over again.
The loop looks like this:
* Catch it. You feel the pattern activate in real time.
* Know it. You recognize what it is.
* Excuse it. You call it efficiency, professionalism, timing, or “it is just who I am.”
* Keep going. Nothing changes, and the body pays.
Calling it “just who I am” is the most expensive line in the whole sequence. It is not who you are. It is a very old survival strategy still running long after the danger left the building.
We let it run because stopping takes us outside our comfort zone. Change is frightening. And some weeks the only energy we have left is the energy it takes to maintain the thing that is draining us.
The one question that starts everything
This is where it starts. Not with a wellness app telling you to breathe. With one honest question.
The woman who shows up at work every day and goes home to her family every night: how old is she really?
Not her age on her birth certificate. Who is she still behaving as? How old was she when those behaviours were built? And what was she actually trying to survive?
You do not need an answer right now. You do not need an audience. You do not need to post it anywhere.
This is something you sit with in the car, on the walk from the train station or the parking garage, wherever you get sixty seconds of silence. Sit with it in the moment you catch yourself running the pattern and brushing it off as nothing.
Because until you take that step, you cannot begin rewriting the story running underneath your behaviour, the one that is driving you into burnout. Most of us have been performing this script so long that we forgot we are allowed to read it, let alone rewrite it. Or we were never told it is safe to try.
This is not about blowing up your life. I am asking you to notice. That is it.
Notice the age. Notice what you are protecting. Then notice whether you are still her.
Your past is your path. It is not your excuse, and it is not your identity.
You do not need the same strategy at thirty, forty, or fifty that you needed at ten.
You are not the eldest of four who has to hold everyone together. You are not the girl who left home at fifteen. You are not only the woman who survived and built something anyway. That is a story. It is not a wound either.
What you became in spite of it, and eventually on purpose, is the real thing.
In the next piece, I am going to talk about what that old program is actually costing your body when it does not get the memo that the job it was hired to do is over. Because being told to relax, take some time off, set some boundaries, and get control of your calendar does not work. Next time I will tell you exactly why.
Until then, just notice her. That is the whole assignment.
You will recover from burnout,
Stacey
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