74 The Exhaustion No Holiday Can Fix

[upbeat music] I'm gonna just take you back to a version of me that I was not always proud of, and I want you to hear it because towards the end of my corporate career, on paper I was completely fine.

Okay, maybe not completely, but [laughs] I was, you know, smart, capable, high-functioning.

I think everybody around me thought I really had it together.

Inside, I was bone tired.

Like, I'm not talking about the tiredness that a holiday can solve or a weekend of being alone needs.

I'm talking about the heaviness that was in my soul.

I had even stopped exercising the way that I loved.

I wasn't speaking up in meetings anymore.

I just wasn't this woman here that is sitting here today who's always got something to say.

And I was sitting under these, like, fake fluorescent lights, feeling like a battery hen.

I know I've talked about this before in podcast episodes, but...

And how me and my friend Steph used to, like, joke about putting all our stuff back in the locker like we were these battery hens, and that's how it felt.

Like driving to work on autopilot.

You know when you get to work and you generally think, "I don't even remember that drive in," 'cause you're just literally on that autopilot.

I had outgrown where I needed to be.

I was telling myself so many times that I needed to be grateful.

I shouldn't really be so dramatic.

I had a...

Now I, you know, I had a son.

I needed to be responsible.

But there are just some signs that you just cannot ignore, and I think for me, that when I got so poorly, the p- it was painful to even get up to go and pick up my son from school.

And this didn't all happen at once.

It wasn't just, like, a tough week.

It was that my life had been so forced to fit into a box that I didn't really fit in anymore, and there was literally nothing left of what really mattered most to me anymore.

And that was when I knew this was not a holiday problem, this was actually a life problem.