Burnout: the blame game

We organise against systemic oppression, but when we burnout the responsibility is individual.

Last weekend I dropped out of three organising commitments, dropping things never feels good but this time hit me with a heaviness similar, but bigger, to when I've known it’s time to end a relationship. 

Burnout is not caused by you. 

I’ve been dancing around using the term Burnout for too long, like the baby queer who eventually ‘comes out’ only to discover everyone already knew. So here is me coming out as what you already knew, burnt out. (And queer). 

In my life the term Burnout seems to crop up frequently, especially in organising circles. There’s a few definitions you can reference but I found this one from The Learning Detective helpful - 

“Burnout is a state of emotional, physical and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when an individual feels overwhelmed, emotionally drained and unable to meet constant demands. 

The American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger coined the term ‘burnout’ in the 1970s. He used it to describe the consequences of severe and high ideals in ‘helping’ professions. 

Burnout, however, can affect anyone, from stressed-out careerists and celebrities to overworked employees and homemakers”

- Bitezine Books, Burnout. How to avoid it and look after yourself. 

There’s a popular quote about Burnout that gets overlaid onto various straight from Canva backgrounds, it’s taken from musician Michael Gungor’s book, The Crowd, the Critic and the Muse,

 “Burnout is what happens when you avoid being human for too long.”

- Michael Gungor

Michel’s sentiment is decent even out of its full context, but it’s not quite right for how I feel Burnout so deeply. It’s not about you, it’s about everyone around you and the conditions in which you organise. I’d say: 

Burnout is what happens when you see too many people treated inhumanely for too long or you yourself experience being treated inhumanely for too long. It’s not only that your needs aren’t being met right now, but that everytime you fight for them and sometimes even win, the conditions of the fight are distressing and tiring. Your tiredness becomes exhaustion because like a shitty game of whack-a-mole as you push one rotten landlord or boss or state representative or personal loss down, another one pops up.

Realising my fire is out

Last weekend, sending messages to cancel organising commitments, I knew that I had finally cracked and a week or two of rest would not be enough to put me back together. My steps back are no longer creeping to the edge of the door but a sprint from the building. 

In just one week I've started to see the reality that the ones who have been patient enough to keep loving me, have been asking me to see. That for too many years I've been pushing through. That it’s been years since I managed to maintain eating well and avoiding periods of going hungry, that it’s been years since I have consistently felt the cool air outside on my face without having to negotiate with myself for hours first. That I consistently have flashbacks that send me running from task to task to block them out. That I have a cycle of burning fast, crashing and crying alone and hiding my phone on aeroplane mode until I reemerge. 

With a pinch of working class and a sprinkle of feminised gender I am someone who can only see my value, if I am offering work. If I do not do things of value, I am of no value. 

I do not yet understand how I will feel like I can still survive, snog, and care for people I need to and myself  (or the more philosophical, ‘live laugh love’) whilst grappling with burnout.  I just know that the people who have loved me for so long deserve a rested version of me that can love too. 

Burnout and short skirts

We all know the short skirt rhetoric more well than I wish I did, more than I wish you did. Like too many, I have been harmed in ways that I have had downplayed and been encouraged to believe were somehow my fault. I have no desire to share details here, nor sadly a need given we know the stories well enough to fill in the gaps. 

It feels important for me to reflect on this in my own understanding of burnout but also as a request for reflection from others who are the friends and co-organisers of people experiencing burnout. 

Many times people have said ‘you do too much’, ‘you keep saying yes to things’ ‘you keep offering to help’ adopting a disapproving teacher look, bored by my repeated cycle. 

The short skirt rhetoric definitely is not a perfect metaphor for their responses, as unlike burnout it has no grey area however what I want to draw on is that it feels like the burnout is placed as my responsibility, burnout is seen as a result of my actions alone, and lacks the social context that drove me to move in the ‘no work of value, no value in me’ approach. 

I wish more people would respond with comments like  ‘I’m worried you’re taking on too much, and I want you to be in the movement for a long time. Do you feel you are taking on too much? What do you / don’t you have time for in your life? Can I help? What is happening in this group that means you're taking on these tasks?”

I wish people would see things this way because what pulls us to organising is often our own very real struggles. 

Part of a tenants union and you’ve likely resisted your own eviction or been gaslit when fighting for safe living conditions and have a lifetime of precarious housing ahead of you. Active in your workplace union and even if you’ve not had to fight for a fair bereavement policy or access adjustments you’re still surviving under bosses. Whilst not all organising is directly linked to our personal experience (for instance, as a white person born in the UK my organising no borders work isn’t driven by my own experience of racism or the immigration system) the way we are in the spaces, who we are, is driven by personal experience and how we’ve been socialised. 

This means some of us are more likely to put our hands up, to take on more than we can. Sometimes we’re coming to organising because we desperately need hope in the collective when the problems which feel ‘our own’ feel impossible. 

So whilst I think we should hold up the mirror and tell each other when we see the signs of burnout, I want us to also reflect on who is and who isn’t burnout. 

Some drivers of my burnout are the complex responsibility of self but I suspect we will see a trend of those who are most traumatised, most overworked with the least access to financial resources that unlock therapy, freedom from work or the fears of inheriting debt not a deposit. 

What is the collective doing to address this without turning every direct action group into a reading group. 

The Rise of Burnout 

Thinking about how frequently it pops up in communities I organise with, made me wonder if outside of the bubble people are thinking about Burnout. Over the past five years a quick trends look shows us Google searches for “burnout” have doubled. 

Note: the numbers on the side of the chart don’t represent the number of searches which are much higher than 50-100. The numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.

People searching for a term doesn’t necessarily mean the thing itself is on the rise, as queers know only too well, having a word for something or a word starting to be used more doesn’t mark the start of its existence. 

But, it does give an indicator of social awareness and, I'd hazard a guess, an increased desperation of people living with limited access to seeing an actual doctor turning to Google in a desperate search to understand their declining health. 

It’s almost as though *rolls eyes* that burnout might be related to the UK facing its biggest drop in living standards on record and food prices rising at their fastest rate for 45 years

The conditions we organise in will always be difficult, and actions will be stressful but I don’t think organising has to lead to burnout. 

I want us to organise in ways that do not replicate workplaces, and that we plan actions to move us to ‘Eustress’ the stress that drives us and helps us win rather than distress. I want us to understand each other well enough to know how our responses ‘fight flight freeze fawn’ react to stress and I want us to organise to build things up as we go, think proper creche spaces at meetings, good food, long breaks that help build us up, not just burn us down.