Anatomy of burnout | Diabetogenic

There are different types of burnout. Diabetes burnout, advocacy burnout, and just plain life burnout. 

Diabetes burnout rears its ugly head for many of us living with the condition – sometimes starting as diabetes distress before building and building. 

Advocacy burnout seems inevitable the more I discuss it with advocate friends. The living with, working in, supporting others with, diabetes becomes a lot. Too much. So much. 

And life burnout seems to be inevitable in the fast-paced, never-pause-for-a-breath, always-switched-on lives we live. 

When the three collide it’s a triple threat burnout. Welcome to mine. 

The white noise hum of diabetes burnout – always there – slowly, but surely had become amplified. It was little things – I was regularly forgetting to bolus when I ate. Not immediately replacing CGM sensors when one fell off. Ignoring making the follow up diabetes appointments I needed to make, the pathology visit I needed to schedule, the supplies stocktake I needed to do to make sure I didn’t run out of anything. 

I’ve been hovering on the edges of advocacy burnout for some time and found myself plunged into it earlier in the year dealing with the complexities that played out as I offered my help and support in some volunteer grassroots advocacy here in Australia. 

And life burnout suddenly appeared in the form of exhaustion, but an inability to sleep soundly, and a brain fog that I explained away as a perimenopause symptom. Except it was more than that. It was getting to four in the afternoon before realising I’d not eaten a thing all day. And not remembering if I’d showered, or how many days had passed since I last washed my hair. It was a lethargy that gnawed at me all day long.

I focused on plans for a conference in the US, followed by a few days at work headquarters, knowing that it would be a busy and wonderful time, with a lot of interesting work. I could do it. And I did. The conference was excellent. The diabetes advocates there shone so brightly. And every meeting was a huge success. 

Smile. Breath. Smile. Breathe.

Until I couldn’t. That moment hit like a tonne of bricks last week. 

I’d spent a day in the office at the job I adore, speaking with incredible people doing so much work. I’m inspired daily by the people I work with and learn so much. There were plans set in motion for exciting things to come and I sat in the meeting room I had set myself up in for the day, feeling satisfied and pleased. The workday done, I packed up and stepped out into the street.

And then, a flash, an instant. Suddenly, the pressure bearing down and around on me was so intense and I felt my chest constrict. I struggled to breathe, and my vision blurred. The sounds on the New York streets suddenly seemed to be coming from under layers of concrete, muffled and hushed and yet piercing at the same time. The bright sunlight seared around me, causing me to shield my eyes from the glare. 

‘Breathe. Breathe.’ I felt the rising fright of what I know to be a panic attack, and knew I needed to safely just ride it out. ‘Focus. Focus.’ I looked for something I could hold on to. There it was, a small dog, sitting still, staring dotingly at its human seated at an outdoor café, drinking an iced tea. I stood there, slightly hunched over, my arms wrapped around myself, watching this little dog sitting still. I started to count back from 50, getting to 34 before the dog moved, jumping onto its hindlegs, and resting its front paws on its person’s knee. 

It was though the crush from the last few months had all converged. I’d tried in small ways to stem it. I limited my time online, muting more terms and accounts that sought to do nothing but argue and inflame. I welcomed the calmness that descended when my Twitter feed was devoid of people yelling about food choices, and when my Instagram feed only showed me the images of my nearest and dearest. I focused my outside of work advocacy efforts to AID access, specifically on the helpers. I threw myself into my job because it allowed me to focus and celebrate the work of others. I amplified the #dedoc° voices and other advocacy to keep my own away from the spotlight. I thought these things worked. 

But at that moment, on the streets of lower Manhattan, those attempts didn’t matter or help. ‘But you seemed fine last week,’ said a friend I’d spent time with at ADA a few days earlier. I had been. I was. I thought about how I appear to others. ‘Sometimes, it’s too much. Right now, it’s too much. Forever… it’s too much.’

I felt the uptick in my heartrate. And realised that had been happening constantly. It had happened after the first difficulty with the grassroots advocacy work, and any time I had to face the source of that stress. Sometimes ‘facing’ meant a comment on a LinkedIn post. Sometimes, it meant a somewhat nasty direct message or, even worse, comments that came to me via others. I realised it had happened every time there was some nastiness or other on Twitter. It happened if there was a confrontation of any time around me, even when I wasn’t involved. Anywhere I saw conflict was enough to kickstart an anxiety response. 

‘But you seemed fine last week’, said I friend I’d spent time with at the ADA conference. ‘I’m okay’, I said. And then, ‘It feels too much.’ I felt myself and my mind and the space around me shatter into a million sharp, craggy pieces. And felt my skin being cut against each and every one of those shards. 

This is burnout. This is what it feels like. And with it is anxiety and stress and feeling overwhelmed. We all get it to some degree. Diabetes makes it harder. Diabetes advocacy compounds the whole thing even more. Jet lag doesn’t help. Plus there’s a sprinkling of perimenopause over it all. The culmination is a fragility that scares me a bit and leaves me feeling vulnerable. ‘But you seemed fine…’ my friend had said. And I was. Until the burnout took over. And then I wasn’t anymore.