"We've turned burnout into a neat, momentary drama, but it was a slow dismantling"
Talking cognitive dissonance, finding your way back to yourself and building a whole new life after a breakdown, with Kathy Slack
Burnout. It’s a surprisingly divisive word. I know plenty of people who dismiss it with an eye-roll, who swiftly move the conversation on, or at the very least who want to have a debate about who’s entitled to have it. There are others, like me, who shudder at the memory. There are, of course, plenty in between.
Burnout (or recurrent breakdown, as we used to call it before it got a rebrand, but we’ll stick with burnout for the purposes of this conversation) wore a permanent groove in my wellbeing. Like water eroding rock, if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got. How I wish I’d grasped that, ooh, a few decades ago. (I’ve written about it before, as you’ll probably know. That piece went viral so I’m sure it’s one of the reasons many of you are here. If not, you can catch up here.)
Anyway, as a result I’m fascinated by what makes burnout happen, who it happens to and how we, if not recover from it, then learn to live with it. Which is why I was keen to chat with
. Kathy is a food writer, stylist, photographer and kitchen gardener. Or as she calls herself, ‘a grower.’But before she was any of those things, Kathy lived a very different life. She was strategy director (sounds grand, eh?) for a massive global ad agency, a fast track graduate trainee who spent most of her life on trains and planes and measured success in promotions, payrises, praise and ticking off to-do lists.
It won’t surprise you to read that about a decade ago, burnout took Kathy out at the knees, plunging her into crippling depression and forcing her to rethink everything that had previously made her world go around.
Kathy has now written a book, Rough Patch, that re-examines the year that brought her to her knees but also brought her back to the earth, in more ways than one, and ultimately to herself.
Kathy joined me to talk about the move (fall? shift?) from highly paid advertising powerhouse to a part-time summer job picking vegetables at Daylesford Organic, being a grower not a gardener, the cognitive dissonance that we both believe leads to burnout, the cult of busy busy busy and why “it was just what you did” has a lot to answer for.