I told my wife this week that I feel like I’m complaining about something I’m grateful for. Then I went back through everything I did this year to see if I was right.
Between January and April I edited one book and wrote another. Between April and August I wrote half of a third and a stack of business articles. I’ve published a blog post every day. I’ve posted a picture to my Bible account every day. I lift three times a week and walk most of the rest. That’s at home. Work goes without saying.
I’m proud of that list. I’m also exhausted by it. Reading it made me tired in a way that doing it didn’t, and that’s what I want to write about.
Is this burnout?
I don’t know. I’ve been burned out before, so I have something to compare it to.
In 2016, several things landed inside about ninety days. A foster placement that broke us. A personal loss that I won’t discuss. My dad’s quadruple bypass. Then I lost my job. When they let me go, it was a relief. I remember being grateful for the severance because it meant I could stop for a minute. I got a real estate license, mostly because it was something to do that wasn’t the thing I’d been doing.
That was burnout. I was praying to get out.
This year I’m praying to get further in. I’m more motivated than I’ve ever been, and I’ve been motivated before. I want to be good at what I do. I want to be the one who works it out when nobody else can. So this doesn’t match. But I’m more tired than I expected to be, and some days my brain feels like a slog.
I don’t think I’m complaining. I think I’m admitting that the thing I run on has a limit, and I found it.
I pushed through. That’s what I tried first, and I got fried. I had a weight goal for this year and I’ve quietly abandoned it. The workouts and the diet didn’t turn into weight loss, though they turned into feeling good, so I don’t know what to do with that yet. I had a structured daily challenge going and I had to stop tracking it and just honor the habits without the scoreboard. Some of my reading got set down too. My brain fills up faster than it used to, and I’m having to be honest that it only holds so much.
And there’s a thing I’m failing at right now, in real time. I have books I’d love for people to buy for Christmas. I’m having a hard time finding the energy to tell anyone.
The part I’m bad at
I believe in the Sabbath. God set it apart at the beginning (Genesis 2:3). It was one of the fights Jesus kept having with the Pharisees, because they’d turned rest into a rule and he kept treating it as a gift. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).
I’m bad at it. Some weekends I take the day and sleep eight hours and it’s wonderful. Other weekends I don’t. If there’s a place in my life that needs redeeming right now, it’s this one. I’m not going to pretend I’ve got a rhythm I don’t have.
I’m starting to suspect the tiredness came from the aim, not the amount. Getting a lot done doesn’t mean you moved anything. The needle moves when you find a real need and fill it, and I’m still sorting out which parts of this year did that. Some of it did. Some of it was motion.
So what I’m sitting with is this. Who was each of these things for, and did I know before I started?
What I want is what I wanted at seventeen. I want what I do to matter to people. I want to show people how much God loves them, and I want to show them that goals and hard work and accountability lead somewhere. More than that, I want to love my family well. I want to make God smile.
