As National Work Life Week is fast approaching us, I thought i’d share my story of burnout.
I had been a Lawyer specialising in several areas of law, mainly travel and consumer law since 1998. Up until that point I had dabbled in a little employment law, but only low-value claims.
In 2012 a new Line Manager came into the Team. Literally overnight we were told we were only going to be taking on employment law cases and dealing with all complexity and all value. For anyone who has ever dealt with employment law, this is a vast difference from dealing with claims up to £5k.
We were given training over one day by another Law Firm and expected to crack on. Some of the Team embraced it, but I didn’t particularly enjoy employment law – it reminded me of a maths lesson at school, which I really didn’t look forward to, and would often get wrong.
My first case was a complex whistleblowing case and I was expected to work out how to draft the proceedings from the one day of training, which I don’t recall being covered.
I only worked part time hours, because I had a young daughter at home and wasn’t always around to attend vital meetings at work.
I went from being a very competent Lawyer, with lots of responsibilities, to being told constantly that I was getting the law wrong, not interpreting it correctly, not drafting the proceedings correctly. I was not given any guidance on how to put things right, just to re-do it. I became scared of my Line Manager, because he would stand behind me and watch me re-do it and as I would be doing it, he would shout ‘no, that’s not right – why are you not getting it?’ He made me feel useless, stupid, like I was a failure. He soon took all my auditing and supervision responsibilities off me, because he felt that if I was unable to understand this new area of law, I would be unable to perform the rest of my job, which I had performed at the highest standard for many years.
It got to the point where I was falling behind with my work, I was still expected to take on more work and I was working 12 hour days most days, so what should have been a 28 hour week, turned into a 70-80 hour week most weeks.
On most days, I would return home from work crying, exhausted and distant from my partner. I wasn’t spending any time with my young daughter. My partner would cook me dinner, but by the time I was getting home, it was so late I didn’t want eat, and I wouldn’t have had any lunch either, because if i’d dared to have taken a lunch break I would have had the death stare from my Line Manager.
There were even times when I hadn’t washed my hair for a whole week and relied on dry shampoo, because there just wasn’t time.
I stopped exercising, which was a huge love of mine, but apart from climbing the stairs at work, when was there time to fit this in?
I even lost a lot of my friends, because I would cancel plans with them and stop replying to messages. I mean there’s only so many times you can fake having a headache, when actually the real reason was i’d had another panic attack and was scared of having one in the pub.
It got to a point when I would be sick every morning before going to work, and this was a job that I had once loved. I was so exhausted from being awake all night worrying about the day ahead that I would open a document and read the same line 50 times, but not take anything in.
Things came to a head when I made, in the company’s eyes, a big mistake and I sent an email to the wrong client. Luckily the email didn’t contain any confidential information. The contents had just asked him to call me to discuss a matter, because my client wouldn’t answer calls from withheld numbers, so I would always have to email him.
Unfortunately, I missed a digit out of his email address and the wrong person that i’d emailed replied saying that ‘if I was blonde, 25 and sexy as f*ck,’ to email him back. At first I thought this was quite funny, but then realised I had breached data protection, so I told my Line Manager. He told me not to worry.
The next day a Senior Manager came to my desk with a letter and told me to read it and not touch anything on my desk or talk to anyone. It was a letter suspending me for suspected gross misconduct and I was frog marched out of the building like a criminal. My Line Manager had provided a statement to say that due to the contents of the email from the wrong person, it was his view that I was having a relationship with him. This was extremely upsetting, as I was engaged at the time and it undermined the trust and confidence between me and my Line Manager.
They arranged for someone external to come in to investigate my alleged gross misconduct and contact the wrong person that I had emailed to ask him if he knew me and if I had ever sent him any documents before, and they also had to tell my client that I had been working with for 9 months that I had jeopardised his case and that I would no longer be working on it.
I knew there would be nothing for them to find. However, in the meantime I received a letter from my Professional Body to say that my employers had informed them of my disciplinary and they may also take action against me.
This is when my panic attacks started. At first I didn’t know what was happening to me. I thought I was having a heart attack and felt so ridiculous. I couldn’t tell anyone about them. They would also drain all the energy out of me.
At the disciplinary hearing, there was no evidence that I had ever contacted the wrong person before, but I was given a final written warning for breaching data protection. My response was that the company should have offered us password protection for emails considering the type of work that we did. My Line Manager’s response was that ‘One thing we need to remember in this job is that we’re not human, we’re robots!’.
From that day on my panic attacks became more frequent and I became so stressed. I was terrified of making another mistake. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like my career was over and had no idea what else I could do.
To top that, because I had fallen behind in my work I was threatened with a performance improvement plan if I didn’t reach my targets by the end of the year, so this meant I had to put in even more hours. Finally, I collapsed and was rushed to hospital in an ambulance. I couldn’t move the whole of my left side, I couldn’t walk and for 3 weeks I couldn’t even climb the stairs without having to lie down for over an hour. It was clear i’d had a breakdown and that was the end of my 14 year career at that company.
There is a happy ending…
I spent 3 years unable to go back into the centre of Bristol without having some form of anxiety attack. I got a job closer to where I lived, took a huge pay cut, but do you know what? It didn’t matter.
As part of my recovery I qualified as a Spin Instructor, which helped rebuild my confidence, I discovered mindfulness, which taught me how to let go and to focus on the present and not dwell on the past and worry about things that haven’t happened yet.
I completely changed my mindset. It didn’t happen over night, but I started to realise that if I put myself first sometimes and did things for me instead of running around like a headless chicken for everyone else i’d be happier, healthier and a far better person.
I got my love for fitness back, looked better, started to eat properly and even studied nutrition. I got a new circle of friends through my Spin group. Best of all I started to talk and I realised that talking is the best therapy.
I have now completely changed my career, which you don’t have to do if you’re experiencing burnout by the way, but the important thing that i’ve learned is spending time on me everyday, even if it’s just 15 minutes on my own.
Earlier this year I was invited back to the company where all this happened to give a talk on mental health awareness, which I did. My former Line Manager still works at the company, but he chose not to attend the talk. This gave me the closure I needed. I also applaud that company for making positive changes in the last 6 years since i’ve left, because they have now embraced mental health awareness in the workplace, and hopefully they have learned from my experience and possibly others like me.
The important message to take from this is there is always something you can change and there is always something you can do.
As a Wellbeing Coach, I have been through burnout myself, but learned how to self-care, which is crucial. This is something I now help others with.
