In 2021, I sat in my doctor's office and couldn't stop crying. I couldn't even explain why — when she asked how I was doing, the question just broke something open.
I thought I had failed. I thought I was weak. I thought this was what breaking down looked like, and that it meant something was fundamentally wrong with me.
I was wrong about all of it. But it took years to understand what the breakdown actually was.
"Burnout is not a personal failure. It is a structural event — the moment a system running on insufficient resource finally reaches its limit."
My second daughter was born late 2018. While still on maternity leave, I was retrenched out of nowhere. I started a freelance marketing business and became the main breadwinner, working long hours to keep everything together.
We lost a significant amount of money to a builder who didn't deliver. Then 2020 arrived, and with it the pandemic. Most of my clients and income disappeared almost overnight. I was managing all of it while parenting two young children, carrying the invisible workload, and trying to be fine.
The tears in that doctor's office in 2021 were not a malfunction. They were information. Everything I had been holding — for years — had finally run out of somewhere to go.
What the breakdown actually was
I spent a long time framing what happened as something that had gone wrong — a failure of resilience, discipline, or mental fortitude. I now understand it differently.
Burnout is not a character flaw. It is what happens when you have been running a high-friction life for long enough, on insufficient rest, with too much accountability and not enough support, in systems that were not built to be sustainable for you.
The breakdown was my system's way of refusing to continue under those conditions. It was, in hindsight, the most honest thing my body had done in years. It just took a long time to appreciate that.
What came out of it
Recovery — real recovery, not "bounce back and push through" — is slow. It involves a therapist, a coach, a great deal of uncomfortable honesty, and a gradual willingness to stop treating your own needs as a problem to be managed around.
It also involves, at some point, a question: what would need to change structurally for this not to happen again?
For me, the answer eventually became clear enough that I acted on it. In 2023, we sold everything and flew from Cape Town to the Philippines. It was the most significant structural change I could make — and it turned out to be exactly the right one. Not because location independence is inherently healing, but because it required dismantling the structure that had been generating so much friction and building something new in its place.
What burnout taught me that I couldn't have learned any other way
Wondering if you're carrying more friction than you realise?
The Low Friction Audit is a free, quiet guide to help you notice where life is asking more of you than it should. No action plan. Just honest noticing.
If you're in it right now
If you're reading this from inside the exhaustion — still pushing, still performing, still telling yourself you just need to get through this phase — I want to say something directly: you are not broken. You are not failing. You are a person running a system that has too much friction in it, and your body is telling you the truth.
The breakdown, if it comes, is not the end of something. It is information — the same information your body has been trying to give you for a long time, finally arriving loudly enough that it cannot be ignored.
What you do with it is up to you. But the most important thing you can do is listen.
