You don’t know how burned out you are until you leave

SF reminded me just how far I’ve come

I was in San Francisco this week, and like most visits out west, it came with catch-ups. Some planned, some spontaneous. Some with people I still talk to regularly, some I hadn’t spoken to since the day I left Spot.

As I sat there, catching up over coffee or a cocktail, I realized something strange—I felt calm. Not performative-calm, not “I’m fine” calm. Actual, grounded calm. I hadn’t felt that in a work setting in years. That’s when it hit me just how much had changed.

And it hit me.

You don’t realize how burned out you are until you’ve been out long enough to feel like yourself again.

Leaving a job doesn’t instantly fix burnout. I know that firsthand. I left Spot months ago and still needed time—real time—to unlearn urgency, rebuild trust in my own pace, and stop defining my worth by how many fires I could put out.

But there’s a reason recovery didn’t start until I walked away.

When you’re deep in it, you normalize everything. The Sunday Scaries. The Slack anxiety. The request for an innocuous conversation when you’ve made it up in your mind that you’ve done something wrong. The calendar that gaslights you into thinking you should have time. The way your brain flatlines the second you open your laptop in the morning.

And the worst part? You think it’s you.

You think you’re the problem for not being able to handle it better. You think if you could just get a little more efficient, a little more focused, a little tougher, you could survive it.

But you weren’t meant to survive it.

I can confidently say this now: you were meant to get out.

That doesn’t mean you quit tomorrow. But it does mean you need distance. Whether that’s a real vacation (not the “I'll check Slack once a day” kind) or just time spent talking to people who’ve made it to the other side.

Burnout doesn’t just come from doing too much. It comes from staying in the wrong thing too long.

And you won’t always know it until you leave.

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Would you want a deeper dive on how to know when it’s time to go, or what early recovery actually looks like? I’m thinking about writing more on this—let me know.