The Week I Stopped Being Tired and Started Being Something Else

The thing about burnout is that everyone thinks they know what it looks like. You’re tired. You’re overworked. You need a holiday. Maybe some yoga. Have you tried yoga?

I had tried yoga. I’d tried it in a studio with bamboo flooring and a woman named Cerys who kept telling me to “release my jaw.” I’d tried it on YouTube at midnight, pausing every forty seconds to check whether I was doing it wrong or whether the instructor was just weirdly bendy. I’d tried the kind where you lie on the floor and do nothing, which should have been my specialty, except my brain used the silence to compile a comprehensive list of every mildly embarrassing thing I’d said since 2007.

So: yoga, tried. Still burnt out. Or whatever this was.

It started on a Wednesday. I was in a team meeting, camera on, nodding at the right moments, and I realised I couldn’t feel my hands. Not in a medical way. In a “my body has quietly disconnected from the rest of me and I am now a floating head making agreeable faces” way.

Ray was talking about the Q3 pipeline. He talks about it the way other people talk about their children - with pride, anxiety, and the unshakeable belief that everyone finds it as fascinating as he does. I like Ray. But on this particular Wednesday, his voice had become a texture rather than a sound. Smooth. Beige. Like being gently smothered by a very polite cushion.

I typed “am I dying or just bored” into the search bar, then deleted it. Closed my laptop. Went to the kitchen. Stood in front of the fridge for four minutes without opening it.

Thursday. Wendy from HR messaged: “Just checking in! You seemed a bit quiet yesterday ”

I typed back: “All good! Just a bit tired ”

The emoji. The exclamation mark. The word “tired.” The holy trinity of lying while neurodivergent.

Because I wasn’t tired. I was overstimulated, under-expressed, running sixteen simultaneous emotional processes while pretending to run one. But tired is a word neurotypical people understand. Tired has solutions. What I actually was doesn’t fit in a Teams message.

Austin noticed, because Austin always notices. He didn’t message me. He just sent a link to a twenty-minute video about how capybaras are friends with every other animal. No context. I watched the whole thing. Twice.

The next morning, he appeared at my desk - we’re hybrid, so this was a deliberate act of physical presence - and put down a coffee. From the place on the corner that does oat milk without you having to ask.

“You’ve got the face,” he said.

“What face?”

“The one where you’ve been translating yourself for so long you’ve forgot what the original language was.”

I laughed, which was a mistake, because it came out wet and shaky and suddenly I was crying at my desk at 9:47 on a Thursday, and Austin just stood there, not touching me, not saying anything wise, just existing in the same square metre of carpet while I fell apart.

Sidney found me in the kitchen an hour later. I was holding a mug of tea I’d already forgot to drink, staring at the middle distance like a Victorian ghost.

“I used to think I was lazy,” they said, leaning against the counter. “Turns out I was just exhausted from performing a person all day.”

“Which person?”

“The one who makes eye contact and doesn’t info-dump about trains.”

We looked at each other. Two people who had spent years building elabourate scaffolding so the world wouldn’t see the actual structure underneath, and for a second, the scaffolding wasn’t necessary.

“I like it when you talk about trains,” I said.

“I know,” they said. “That’s why I’m telling you.”

Friday. Wendy had organised a “team wellbeing afternoon,” which - and I mean this with genuine affection - involved a PowerPoint about hydration and a breathing exercise that made Ray look like he was trying to inflate an invisible balloon. He caught my eye across the room and mouthed “help me,” and I laughed. Actually laughed. The kind that starts in your stomach and catches you off guard, like your body remembers how to do something your brain had filed under “unnecessary.”

During the Q&A, Sidney raised their hand.

“You mentioned ‘bringing your whole self to work,’” they said. “Do you mean that literally? Because my whole self has a thirty-minute presentation on the signalling infrastructure of the West Coast Main Line, and I want to manage expectations.”

Pause. Then Austin started laughing. Then me. Then Ray let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sigh of profound relief, and suddenly the whole room had this energy - not professional, not polished, just human - and Wendy, to her eternal credit, said, “You know what, Sidney, I think we could make time for that.”

Sidney blinked. “I - really?”

“Maybe not thirty minutes. But yes.”

And Sidney smiled. Not the careful, calibrated one designed to signal “I am a normal person having a normal reaction.” A real one. Crooked and surprised, like a door they’d been leaning against had suddenly opened and they’d stumbled into a room with better lighting.

That evening, the four of us ended up at the pub on the corner - sticky tables, inexplicable taxidermy - and something shifted. Not dramatically. But in the way a knot loosens when you stop pulling at it.

Austin was telling a story about accidentally joining a competitive Morris dancing troupe because he was too polite to correct a misunderstanding, doing the hand movements, nearly taking out a pint glass. Ray was asking detailed follow-up questions about the ranking system. Sidney was explaining that Morris dancing has a surprisingly well-documented history and did we know there’s a theory it has Moorish origins, though that’s contested - And I wasn’t translating. I wasn’t running the subtitles. I wasn’t monitoring my face or timing my laughs or rehearsing my next sentence while someone else was still finishing theirs. I was just there, in the noise and the mess of it, and the noise didn’t hurt.

“You’ve got a different face,” Austin said, pointing at me with a chip.

“Don’t tell me what face I’ve got.”

“The face where you’ve stopped buffering.”

“I don’t buffer.”

“You buffer. You do a little loading circle behind your eyes. Sidney, back me up.”

“He does buffer,” Sidney confirmed, not looking up from the Wikipedia article about Morris dancing they were now fully committed to on their phone. “It’s very endearing. Like watching a very intelligent computer decide whether to crash.”

“I hate both of you.”

“You don’t, though,” Austin said.

I didn’t, though.

Monday. Ray’s one-to-one. He asked how I was doing and I said: “I’m running out of energy for pretending to be a simpler version of myself.”

He looked confused, which was fair. But then he said, “Okay. What would help?”

I didn’t know. I said that. He said that was fine.

Then: “For what it’s worth, the complicated version of you is the one that’s actually useful in meetings. The simple version just nods a lot.”

“The simple version is very agreeable.”

“The simple version is wallpaper. I need the person who tells me my Q3 projections are based on flawed assumptions and then explains why in a way that makes me feel stupid and grateful at the same time.”

“That was one time.”

“Most productive meeting we’ve ever had.”

I didn’t know what to do with that, so I just sat there, holding it like a warm, confusing stone. Sometimes that’s enough. Someone tells you the unedited version of you is the one they actually wanted, and you can’t metabolise it yet, so you let it sit.

It’s late now. I’m on the sofa under a blanket that’s slightly too warm but I refuse to adjust because I’ve achieved the perfect position and to change anything would betray the entire arrangement. My phone buzzes: Sidney has sent their train signalling presentation. Built in their own time. With animations. The message says “rough draft, don’t judge the font choices yet, I’m still workshopping.”

It is forty-seven slides long. The fonts are, objectively, unhinged. There is a slide that is just a photograph of a signal box in Crewe with the caption “this one is my favourite, I don’t have a reason, I just think it looks nice.”

Austin texts: “have you seen Sidney’s train thing. it’s magnificent. I’m on slide 12 and I’ve already learned more than in my entire degree.”

Ray texts the group chat: “Is there going to be a quiz? I want to prepare.”

Sidney texts: “There was always going to be a quiz, Ray. Respect the process.”

I scroll through every single slide. Something in my chest does the thing that is the opposite of tightening. Not a revelation. Not a fix. Just the quiet, startling warmth of being somewhere you don’t have to translate yourself to be understood - and realising, with a joy so tentative it almost feels like a question, that maybe you’ve been there for a while and only just noticed.

I screenshot the signal box in Crewe and set it as my phone wallpaper. I don’t have a reason. I just think it looks nice.