I Did Everything Right and Still Burned Out

A highly sensitive person leaves academia and the beaten path

The Navigation Dream

I had just arrived at a tourist information center in a wild, otherworldly landscape. To the right, there was a narrow body of turquoise-hued water; mountains covered with glaciers and thick caps of snow towered over the other shore. To the left, there were dunes, tropical-looking patches of green, the idea of a beach somewhere beyond; bright light everywhere reflected by snow, sand, water. Without knowing how, I saw my distant destination: a quiet wooden lodge overlooking it all. I felt intensely compelled to explore the territory and find my way to the lodge, a place that seemed more beautiful than anything I had ever seen on earth.

A woman in the tourist center was showing me a paper map on the wall, explaining that the road ahead was rough. The map was only approximate, she said, and there would be stretches that might be tricky. There was a longish, meandering blue line that represented the jeep road, and a shorter red line to indicate the last stretch that I would have to travel on foot. The woman was upbeat yet matter-of-fact in her description of the difficulties ahead, and I felt confident that, despite all the difficulties, I had the right vehicle for this journey, a 4x4.

The OCD adventurer

There was a period of my life that might have been categorized as a bout of obsessive compulsive disorder had I been interested in labels back then. I could not leave my home without having a plan detailing the minutiae of where I was going, what I was going to do in what order, and when I would return. Although the anxiety wasn’t constant, it was a perplexing state of affairs to me, inconsistent with the life of a person who had traveled alone from the age of 9, left home at 16, moved across the Atlantic at 20, and learned the language and customs of a new country by 21.

That young person had not been fearless, but she did have a fierceness about her.

She was fierce because she knew what she wanted—adventure—and she could find no reason not to pursue it.

Then the drama of life intervened, as it does.

In her late 20s, she sought refuge from the increasing pain of being an adult human.

Around this time came the Internet 2.0, then Google Maps on phones, then apps full of ratings and reviews. The promise of prediction, security, knowing.

Surely that was the answer to avoiding pain and anxiety: to be able to foresee misfortune and step out of its hurricane path. So tempting in an era that had begun to quantify everything from accommodations to works of art.

Oh, if only that young woman had continued to read Greek tragedy after college!

Instead, she became a digital devotee, not just to the services now available but to the whole worldview that went along with it.

During the OCD bout, an era that lacked a clear direction, she reached for the career ladder that was propped up very conveniently on her training grounds. She had very little self-esteem at that point and couldn’t imagine anyone appointing her to a professorship, but she gave it a chance anyway, not knowing where else to turn. Lo and behold, it worked on the second try.

When the Safe Path Became the Wrong Path: the Anti-Adventure

In which the fierce yet fearful adventurer becomes the tenured, comfortable professor.

It seemed like the perfect container for me at first: a way to do what I do best and get a regular salary for it, a fortress against the capitalistic world that ate artists alive. I thought it would be the place where I could try out all my creative musical and educational ideas without having to obey the tyranny of popular taste. I naively believed that the university walls were impenetrable by the more punishing principles of capitalism. In fact, those walls filtered out only the language of capitalism and not its competitive essence, translating terms like revenue and profit into prestige and excellence.

Those terms had always been meaningless to me in the context of the arts, but they were the currency of the culture.

My early efforts at educational innovation were popular among students but lost traction because they weren’t anchored in the curriculum. In order to anchor them in the curriculum, I would have had to engineer a whole new curriculum plan (a hieroglyphic document legible only by the most proficient of German bureaucrats) and go on a crusade from one academic committee to another over the course of months or years, where it would be discussed in endless meetings in which even consensus presented an opportunity to make yet another lengthy speech. I used to leave those meetings feeling physically ill without knowing why.

I admired my colleagues who seemed to have an inborn knowledge of the system and how to make it work for them; I lacked that inner sense of direction. To my dismay, I could not find the motivation to go plodding along the old path while waiting for a change that might never be approved.

Instead, I kept my projects small, outside of the curriculum, but in so doing, I was forced to sideline the principles of my approach that I considered central to my work. Rather than making up the body of my work, they became an extra that I contributed on top of my regular teaching hours, adding to a growing deficit of sleep and well-being. I did all I could within my means to make life feel lighter, but even the luxuries of a gym membership, nice vacations, and expensive matcha lattes started to feel like ballast, each perk just one more thing to organize, to make time for.

Still, I did not give up. I wanted to be the quiet revolutionary within the institution who offered the students a kinder path towards artistic expression, an alternative to the oppressive notion of ‘excellence’ that loomed large.

Besides, the stability of the job was supreme: a colleague joked that I would have had to set the building on fire to lose my tenure.

After two years, I developed gastrointestinal and sleep issues, which would have been a clear red flag for me had they been caused by a personal relationship, and yet I stayed for another nine, hypnotized by the promise of stability.

How Stability Killed My Creativity

While stability was wonderful in many respects, it had an unexpected effect on my inner artist. Since I could not create what I wanted to in the confines of my job, my inner artist responded by boycotting any kind of creation. The initial excitement of designing a new approach to music education was slowly eroded by the realization that my ideas could not take root in this environment, let alone be brought to fruition.

And so I watched helplessly as the fierceness, creativity, and passion drained out of me in a slow, steady drip.

I spent the entirety of my semester breaks recovering while my more adapted colleagues gave masterclasses and performed at festivals for extra cash.

It took me years, eleven to be exact, to admit what was happening. Rather than acknowledging that this job was the wrong fit for me, I had been accusing myself of not trying hard enough to make this perfect-on-paper situation work. I told myself how much privilege I had, scolded myself for not being appreciative enough, for expecting everything to be handed to me on a silver platter.

Only after landing in the abyss of burnout did I wake up to this fact:

I had followed the directions that promised to bring me to the land of status, security, and stability, and in the process I had lost my joy and creativity. Those directions had been for someone else.

Oh, if only I had heeded the advice I doled out in nearly every lesson!

Because this is what I would have said to the part of me seeking certainty and predictability during that lost period:

This is a vulnerable moment for you. You know there is a long way to go. You know where you want to be, yet it manifests as an impossible landscape, tropical and alpine all at once; you cannot imagine it as a real place, which is why your mind has conjured it as a fantasy land.

You cannot see the steps that will bring you from here to there.

You will receive guidance, but most of the time you will be alone with your own progress, wondering whether these are the right steps to take, whether this is the right direction at all, waiting impatiently for the new landscape to appear.

You look around at your peers and marvel at their sure-footedness. You gaze at them in amazement and put them on pedestals of accomplishment. You are convinced they are in their promised lands, even as they struggle with feeling lost, far from their paradise.

You will start most days believing you have made no progress at all, because you can only see the tall grasses around you and not the aerial view.

One day you will think you have found a shortcut, but you probably haven’t.

Even if you did find a shortcut, you would be the one shortchanged in the end, because you know what this is about—duh. The dream is screaming it: The journey is the destination.

Part of me lingers back in that information center, clinging to the paper map I can’t bring with me even as the joy of anticipation flutters in my stomach. How will I recognize the road if it’s so rough, without curbs or tire tracks, without the familiar digital depictions of upcoming turns on my screen?

A-paw-llo, my recovery guru and burnout coach. Just because.

Forgiveness

But more importantly, how will I forgive myself for having abandoned my inner adventurer for such a long time, not to mention my inner artist? I don’t blame the system; systems are what they are. I sensed that early on and thought I could bend myself to the system without consequences.

Yesterday, less than an hour after working on this very essay, I saw a former colleague’s story on social media and was instantly sucked back into the vortex of guilt, pummeled by my inner critic:

You didn’t try hard enough.

Your expectations were too high.

What a spoiled brat you are for renouncing such a gift.

And yet, despite still being in recovery from long illness, burnout, and grief, I have experienced an explosion of creativity since I left my university position.

I hadCreativity is my most significant vital sign.

Allowing myself to have this period of possibly pointless creation without the goal of winning institutional approval or societal admiration feels like forgiveness in action.

I am aware of the great privilege of my position, made possible in part by the very institution that drained my energy. I will always be grateful for the opportunity I was given to work with young people from all over the world, to mentor them at a vulnerable time in their lives. I have no doubt that some of them are very upset with me for abandoning them in the middle of their studies. And I will have to be the one to forgive myself for that.

I have no illusions about the difficulty of striking out on my own (see paper map, inaccessible roads, etc.).

But I am no longer directionless, and I am no longer relying on the GPS that led me precisely to where I thought I should go.

My destination came to me in the dream. It is not slathered in awards or merit badges; it doesn’t come with a fancy title or unassailable authority.

It’s just my own quiet, peaceful oasis where I get to be me.

And the way to get there is to bask in every step of the journey, wrong turns and all.