Early Signs of Burnout: The Whisper Before the Crash

I slipped my key into the office door and froze. A sudden thought hit me: Fuck. I don’t want to be here. Permission To, Chapter 3

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Next thing I knew, tears welled up in my eyes. Something drained out of me all at once as if I had lost something without knowing when it had slipped away. My body grew heavy and unfamiliar.

I walked into the office and moved through my usual routine: turning on the lights, slipping into my work shoes, firing up my computer while waiting for the tea kettle to whistle. Everything looked the same from the outside. I don’t remember much of what happened after that. What I do remember is the hollow feeling that followed me for weeks. A deep unprecedented sadness that settled in so completely it was hard to imagine it ever lifting.

When you’re faced with something that doesn’t belong to your internal rulebook, something you’ve never had to deal with before, it’s easy to dismiss it. To tell yourself that it doesn’t mean what it feels like it means. That it simply means you’re tired.

It’s striking how little space I gave that thought. I didn’t treat it like a warning or a truth, even though it shook me to my core. I knew it wasn’t just a bad day thought. It was different. Bigger.

Since I didn’t know what to make of it, and didn’t want to take the time to examine what it might be asking of me, I did the next best thing. I ignored it. I kept quiet and kept doing what I had been doing for years: Overperforming. Overdoing. Overgiving. Slowly overspending myself.

Even boxed up and pushed to the far back of my mind, the words Fuck. I don’t want to be here. didn’t disappear. They lingered, asking to be understood. Still, I kept overriding them, day after day, never sharing them with anyone until a medical emergency forced me to face what my body already knew.

I hadn’t listened to the whisper, so my body screamed.

The excerpt above now lives inside my book. It’s one of the many moments that eventually led me to write PermissionTo, to write this very first blog post, and to create Project Permission.

Project Permission exists so stories like mine don’t have to stay private, and so the people who recognize themselves in them know they’re not alone. It’s a place to slow down, to reflect together, and to start putting words to experiences that often stay unspoken.

If a part of you has been whispering that things aren’t quite right, you’re not imagining it. You don’t have to know what it means yet. But you can get curious about it.

I created a gentle self-reflection tool to help you explore your own early signals of burnout. It’s not meant to give answers or conclusions. It’s simply a pause. A way to listen a little more closely.

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is stop long enough to notice what’s already trying to speak.

So I invite you to stop. To listen. To move through the affirmations in the tool, and then, if you feel like it, to come back and share. A word. A sentence. A feeling. An inkling that surfaced while you reflected.

Your voice belongs here. This space is for listening, together.