This is so true. Looking back I can clearly identify my first burnout at 21, just a few months into my first job, though I didn’t identify it as that at the time. And really there were micro-burnouts while I was still at school.

Now, as well as knowing my own patterns pretty well and seeing how it sculpted my life, my mission is to help my mid-20s AuDHD daughter identify her own burnouts looming…before they happen…which is work in progress.

But the more we talk about these things the more we normalise them enough to preempt them whereas, while they remain obscured by a culture that simply doesn’t “allow” them to happen, they continue to wield such incredibly destructive power over so many well-intentioned life paths. It still shocks me that my whole life was derailed by burnout by the age of 38.