September 3, 2026
The Night My Daughter Saved Me
I've hit burnout hard three times in fifteen years, hard enough that I remember exactly what it felt like in my body. One small hug from my daughter, on one of the worst nights, is the specific thing I remember pulling me back.
I was nine months unemployed at one point, and I still remember exactly what that particular kind of low felt like in my body, not just my head. My brain stopped being able to attach a thought to anything. There was lead in my boots. I couldn't pick myself up. Depressed doesn't come close to describing it. It's worse than that word does justice to.
I've hit burnout hard three times in fifteen years, and I don't want to get anywhere near it again because I know exactly what it costs. Not in the abstract. In the specific, physical sense of a body that stops functioning the way it's supposed to.
One night during that stretch I was at my absolute lowest. I came downstairs. My wife was making dinner. My daughter was in her high chair, about two and a half at the time. I walked up to her and got close to her face and asked how she was doing. She's not usually one to do this, but she leaned in and hugged me around my neck. That probably saved me, that little moment right there.
It's strange what a small amount of love can do for a person in that state. I think about that hug more than I think about most of the actual decisions I made that year.
What changed after that wasn't dramatic. It was slower and smaller than that, and it took longer than I want to admit. Somewhere in there I started noticing the difference between what I actually had capacity for on a given day and what I was agreeing to out of habit or guilt.
A friend and I had a Zoom call scheduled not long ago, right after a morning networking event I'd gone straight into without any time to myself first. I didn't have thirty minutes between the two. I wanted to help her, genuinely, but I wasn't looking forward to getting on that call in the state I was in. So I texted her and asked if we could push it back a few hours. She had a clear day too. I went to the pool instead, stretched, read, did nothing productive for ninety minutes, and came back in wanting to get on the call instead of dreading it.
Nobody teaches you that the version of help you give from a depleted place is worse than the help you give after ninety minutes at a pool. I had to hit bottom a few times before I believed it. I still catch myself forgetting it on a regular Tuesday, reaching for the old math where more hours always means more output, before I remember what actually happened that one night in the kitchen with my daughter.