MamaWritesSpells

Turns out collapse is a teacher. A rude one. But effective.

I didn’t burn out in a dramatic, movie-scene way.
No collapsing in the hallway. No tearful exit emails.
It was quieter than that. Sneakier.

It looked like answering emails from bed.
Like rereading the same sentence five times and still not knowing what it said.
Like being weirdly angry at the grocery store because there were too many choices and my brain just… opted out.

And here’s the thing I didn’t want to admit at the time:
I was the problem and I wasn’t.

I cared. A lot.
I took responsibility seriously. Too seriously, maybe.
I thought leadership meant holding everything — the vision, the pressure, the loose ends, other people’s emotions — and never letting it show.

Turns out that’s not leadership.
That’s martyrdom with a LinkedIn profile.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth no one puts in management books:
You don’t learn leadership while things are going well. You learn it when something breaks — and you have to decide what not to carry anymore.

Burnout stripped me of my favorite illusions.
That being indispensable was a compliment.
That exhaustion was proof of commitment.
That if I just pushed a little harder, things would magically stabilize.

Spoiler: they didn’t.
I just got smaller.

Somewhere between my third canceled plan and my seventh “I’ll get to it tomorrow,” I realized something deeply unsexy but incredibly important:

Leadership isn’t about doing more.
It’s about deciding what doesn’t belong to you.

That realization didn’t come in a flash. It came in fragments.
A missed deadline that didn’t actually ruin anything.
A moment where I said “I can’t take this on” and the world… continued.
A quiet relief that scared me because it felt like letting go.

Good leadership, I learned, has limits.
It has edges.
It includes rest — not as a reward, but as infrastructure.

If you’re building something that requires you to disappear to sustain it, that thing is already unstable. Ask me how I know.

The leaders I trust now?
They’re not the loudest.
They don’t glorify hustle.
They notice when the system is asking for too much — and they change the system instead of blaming the people inside it.

I didn’t learn that from a seminar.
I learned it from burnout tapping me on the shoulder and saying, “Hey. This isn’t working.”

Rude, honestly.
But necessary.

And yeah — I still care. I still show up.
I just don’t confuse self-erasure with strength anymore.

Lesson learned.
Hard way.
Would not recommend.
But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t teach me everything that actually mattered.