Tag burnout

Dead Things

When I was in high school, I read the novel First Blood, which is the novel that the Rambo movies were based on. As is often the case, the movies were very unlike the book. In the novel, John Rambo,…

The Movies I Can’t Watch

The longer I am away from doing work on the streets, the more I realize how traumatic that work actually was, the ways it impacted me and my brain, and the very real ways it continues to show up. Here’s…

Deserved Maintenance

Some years ago, I was talking to the person who was my spiritual director at the time. I was in the midst of unrecognized (by me, anyway) burnout, and she was encouraging me to take some time away. We had…

Making Room

It was September of 2016, and I was fried. It was my 10th year of doing frontline work with virtually no break for very little money. My wife had a heart transplant the year before, changing our lives forever and…

Advice You Will Ignore

Since posting my story of burnout, I have had no less than 5 conversations with people in similar places. All people in the so-called helping professions, all doing good work, all exhausted. I used to teach classes on self-care, but…