Knowing better

Week 1. I have been in this chair since the morning. Two hours at least. The laptop is closed and I have not opened it. I keep feeling that there is something I am supposed to be doing but there isn't, the not-doing is the work now, and I am failing at that too. There is a voice in my head that will not stop. It is not very kind but it is mine. How could I possibly have ended up here again. What was the point of everything I learned the first time, if this is what I have done with it?

My second burnout was worse than the first and the reason for that had nothing to do with the symptoms I was experiencing.

It was worse because I knew. I'd been here before, eight or so years earlier, and I had come out of it stronger and wiser. Or so I thought. I knew what the warning signs were, I knew what my own limits looked like and I knew, very well, what I was supposed to do and not do. And yet I had watched myself do all of it anyway, month after month, just to arrive at the exact same point I was at years ago.

There is a part of me that cannot forgive that. I was furious with myself and underneath the fury was disappointment, which is considerably worse, and it kept putting the same question in front of me. She gave you everything you needed. What exactly did you do with it?

It was never only the work, and I want to say that plainly rather than let it arrive later as an excuse. My relationship had ended years prior but we were still living in the same house, during a lockdown which had me working remotely, while dividing a life into money and bricks and furniture through mediation between client calls. That was going on underneath everything. I used the work to get away from it, and the work was the most demanding it had ever been, which suited me exactly.

The phone rang and it was my boss. She didn't call to see how I was. She asked of course, but it was the kind of 'How are you?' that doesn't want the honest answer. It is simply a decent sounding bridge to the conversation that follows after. She called to chat and what she wanted to chat about was work. The projects, the problems, the people, what so-and-so had done and what she was going to do about it. She called to put all that down somewhere and I was where she had always put it down. The fact that I was signed off sick didn't appear to have changed that arrangement. I was signed off sick so I wouldn't have to be involved with work. She called about work. I asked her to stop. She called again. And again.

Week 6. Second session with the new therapist. She told me about her dog. The dog bit someone and she is right in the middle of the drama that comes with it. She talked about it for at least 15 minutes. 30 minutes left for me. She asked me how my week has been and I said fine. She seemed satisfied with that, and we moved on to the renovations she was having done on her house.

The therapist the company arranged spent the first fifteen minutes of nearly every session talking about herself. The dog, which was in the room with us, and which had bitten somebody. The fight she was having with her neighbors. The renovations. The holiday plans, and whatever was going on in her street. I sat there and I let her. I am very good at absorbing things. That was, after all, precisely why I was there.

I had no energy. There was a finite and very small quantity of it, and every ounce was supposed to be going into getting back on my feet. Instead I was spending it on boundaries. On working out how to say no to my own boss, and how to say no to my own therapist, and how to do it in a way that could not be used against me later. And then on recovering from having said it. The energy I did not have was going on defending myself from the people who had been provided to care for me. I do not know how to write that sentence in a way that sounds less absurd.

It took me five sessions to say it. I told her I had understood the sessions to be for me, and that I did not think I was there to hear about who her dog had bitten or what was happening to her kitchen. She did not take it well. I told my case manager the same thing, but she got to him before I did, and arranged a version of the story in which I was a resistant client who was not easy to work with. No more than six weeks had passed between the intake and the end of it.

My boss did something similar, though it took her longer. For a long time afterwards she would say, to my face and without blinking, that during that period I had not even wanted to talk to her. She said it with a small wound in her voice, as though something had been withheld from her. It had. It was the first thing I ever withheld from her, and she never understood why. She still doesn't.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to see the two of them as the same but different. The company had put two people in place around my collapse: my boss and a therapist. Both of them had something to put down, and both of them had chosen me to put it down on. Nobody was doing it deliberately and that's what made it so difficult. I was simply a container to both of them. And when I stopped being that, they both did the same thing with the same speed, which was to turn the moment I stopped absorbing into a defect in me.

There were two people who did support me. The company doctor was one, and from what colleagues who went through the same process have told me since, that was not a given. He was direct, unsentimental and he protected me from myself, which was the correct judgement, because left to my own devices I probably would have gone back in no time and done the whole thing again. The case manager was the other. When I told them what had been happening, the therapist and the phone calls, neither treated it as a complication or as a fault of mine. They saw what I had done to end up where I was, and what had contributed to it, and how hard I was working to get out of it, and they put themselves between me and the rest.

After it ended with the therapist, and once my boss was finally holding to what the company doctor had written down, I could put my energy where it needed to go. In a meeting some weeks later he told me he was impressed. By how I had taken charge of it. By how clearly I could see what had put me there. He said, in a slightly surprised way, that he had enjoyed working with me.

What actually got me back on my feet was eight years old. I went back to the first time, and to what recovery had looked like then. I went over the coaching sessions in my head, the exercises, the sequence, the questions and the order I was supposed to ask them in. I ran on the foundation she had built with me, which I had apparently kept in perfect working order for eight years without once using it to prevent any of this. That still makes me angry. The situations at home lifted one by one. I began to breathe again and I did the work she had taught me to do, alone, with no one watching.

A woman I had not seen or spoken to in years, reconstructed entirely from memory, gave me more to work with than the professional sitting right in front of me ever did.

I was back full time in a little over six months. All through those months, more than once, I caught myself thinking that I had failed her too. She was not there. She saw none of it. She does not know that what she built with me was the only thing holding me up. She does not know that I was running her questions through my mind, in her order, like someone saying a prayer they are no longer sure they believe. She would not have been disappointed in me. I am certain of that, in the way you can be certain of something and still not feel it.

Two people were paid to look after me and could not manage it. Two others chose to and did. And the woman who actually got me back on my feet was not there at all, and does not know it to this day.