From burnout to freedom

This is the first May in years where I don’t feel like a hollowed out husk, incapable of spending any meaningful time with my family, much less pursuing any passions of my own.

Maybe this is why, after a solid year of complete burn-out, I finally have a sense of hope about the future. I’m not saying things are all better! But for far too long, I’d given up on even the possibility of feeling something like hope again. I can’t overstate how terrible it is to be unable to imagine otherwise.

I can’t quite wrap my head around it – after all, I thought I’d landed my dream job! Teaching at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. Job security in my home territory, the institution where I completed three degrees in education, law, and Indigenous studies. The conventional wisdom is to travel widely for your degrees, but my entire support system is here and after living outside my homelands for nearly a decade, all I wanted was to be able to stay here and raise my kids. Securing a job here meant I could do that, and I thought that was my ultimate goal.

It was the culmination of decades of work and sacrifice. Being paid to teach Cree and Indigenous studies? Having health insurance for my family, finally putting something away for retirement? It was like I’d written my own job description. I’d also just successfully applied for a promotion from Assistant Lecturer to Associate, and though I was never going to be tenure-track, it felt like a big achievement for a first generation graduate.

May and June are usually the most draining months for me – for the past few years this has been my Cree language spring intensive semester. A year’s worth of Cree crammed into six weeks. Each day is scheduled to run from 9 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. It always seemed impossible – we’d cover an average of three units a day. The students are amazing and committed and somehow we make it happen, but it’s the only thing we can do for those six weeks. Recovering from this semester would take me basically until it was time to start prepping for Fall semester again. Each time I’d consider quitting, and then tell myself next year would be better, it would get easier.

But it didn’t.

Before I came to the University, I’d published a book, Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Inuit & Métis in Canada. It was being used as a textbook across the country, including in my own Faculty. Along with Molly Swain, we launched the Métis in Space podcast, an Indigenous feminist sci-fi exploration of mainstream media potrayals of Indigeneity. It took us such strange places, including into the formation of a land trust. I was a frequent commentator on current events in media outlets across the country, and I was travelling up to six times a month to do speaking engagements. I had a thousand cool projects on the go and I was also working full-time. I felt like a competent parent – I brought my kids along with me as much as possible and we were involved in local Indigenous community events. We had four kids at the time, and they ate and ate and ate – I whipped up meals like it was effortless.

But by this time last May I hadn’t been able to cook a meal in a year. We survived off hastily made smoothies and quick snacks and a LOT of take-out. I’d published Buffalo is the New Buffalo, but hadn’t had an ounce of energy to spare for any of the other writing projects I wanted to do. The podcast lapsed – though we haven’t given up – and we weren’t able to do any of the things we’d wanted to with the land trust yet. I barely had the energy to leave the house when work ended, and when I thought about the future, the space that was usually filled with so much excitement and hope, all I felt was dread.

I did try to negotiate some sort of break – something two years down the line that I could look forward to. There is nothing in my collective agreement like a sabbatical or administrative leave, and my union advised me to try to arrange it with my supervisor. I knew, even then in the depths of my exhaustion, that what I needed was some time and space to be creative again. It’s what got me the job in the first place – it’s WHY they wanted me. And it’s about more than my own enjoyment, it’s how I give back to community. It’s how I ensure that the work I’m doing remains generative. When it became clear that I’d never ever, EVER have that kind of break – that teaching eight three-credit courses an academic year was my only future… I suppose it broke me.

I think I would have hit this point eventually, no matter what, but there are some crucial factors that led me to therapy and finally, admitting that the burn-out I was hoping to avoid was indeed here already. The pandemic was horrific and jarring, and though my own bout of COVID seemed mild at the time, it left me with heart palpitations and brain fog, and it directly preceded what I now know is perimenopause. Hot flashes, sudden rage, worse brain fog, exhaustion. I was struggling to do what had come naturally for me and all the coping strategies I’d been using for a lifetime started to crumble. I was diagnosed with ADHD which seems obvious in hindsight – but it became unmanageable without treatment. Once I had that treatment, I was also diagnosed with autism – surprisingly common but still a shock to me.

All of this, coupled with no time or energy for myself or my family ran me full speed into a brick wall. I went on medical leave after the spring semester and tried to recover. I learned a lot about burnout, about passive and active recovery. I learned a lot about ADHD and autism and perimenopause. I went to medical appointment after medical appointment, did therapy, and put together a comprehensive accommodations plan so I could get back to work.

But visualizing going back set off panic attacks – my very first experience of thinking I was having a heart attack. Trying to deal with all the different administrative tasks needed to be on medical leave, to apply for long-term disability – it made things so much worse. I could barely sleep, waking up at 3 a.m. to consider whether this whole living thing was really for me. And that scared me.

My family had never seen me so timid, and unsure. I felt worthless and unvalued. When I talked to friends who had chosen to leave the academy, they understood how I was feeling. They told me the only regrets they had about leaving was that they hadn’t done it sooner. Colleagues shared their own stories of increasing burnout and could offer no hope. And then there were all the ethical considerations of considering to support an institution through my material and intellectual labour that set cops on students, staff, and community members who were peacefully speaking out against ongoing genocide. The institution’s post-hoc justifications and doubling down on their actions disgust me down to my core. This on top of all the additional emotional labour of being an Indigenous prof in a colonial institution that prioritizes publicizing recruitment numbers but doing nothing about retention.

In the end, the only thing keeping me in my job was health insurance. I’ve got young kids, and we need it. And as the months of medical leave ground by, it became increasingly clear that no one cared if I stayed. I am easily replaceable by another Academic Teaching Staff employee who can pump out eight courses a year at a savings compared to tenured faculty. I would miss all my amazing students – but I run into them everywhere, catch up on their lives.

My family basically gave me an ultimatum – I had to leave the university. My partner reminded me that I’d worked much, much harder than this before, but that I came home full of energy and self-confidence. My kids need me present, and my community needs me doing the joyful things that carry real meaning.

Choosing joyful uncertainty

It was an agonizing decision to make regardless. I am the sole source of income for my family of six, and we all have fairly profound disabilities. My salary barely covered our basic expenses – I continued to do speaking engagements around the country and internationally to meet the rest of our needs. There was nothing we could cut – our expenses don’t include extravagance. I had nothing lined up to step into, just one month of final pay to get it figured out.

But just making the decision had an incredible impact. I completed edits on a ten-year anniversary, new edition of Indigenous Writes (look for it next year!). I pitched a series of books and immediately got a contract with an Indigenous imprint for the largest advance I’d ever gotten. I scored a couple of great speaking gigs – and one that didn’t pan out causing me to add “activist educator” to my description so folks wouldn’t think I was there to stroke their egos and tell them they could achieve reconciliation through ignoring the harm their profession continues to do. I wrote grants for projects I’ve been wanting to do for the past 15 years – and I got them.

All of that within three months of leaving the academy – where doing any of this had become impossible.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still terrified! I’ve got the bills covered for the next few months, but I’ve got a lot of work to do AND I need to find more income streams to get us through beyond that. I’m still exhausted all the time and if I manage to make two meals a week I consider that a win – in a way all of us being autistic lowers the pressure a bit because we all have such limited preferred foods that it works anyway.

I am also still grappling with what it means to be disabled, because I am. Some days are better than others, but I simply cannot do the things now that used to come easily for me a few years ago. I still don’t know what that means for all the things I want to do, but it’s simply something that has to be factored in.

And I was right – while I agonized over leaving the academy, and tortured myself with narratives of how I was letting everyone down and abandoning my responsibilities, life went on. I wasn’t valued, and my absence is only a big deal to myself. Now I’m the one telling others that my only regret is not leaving sooner.

Maybe everything will come crashing down and we’ll be building tiny homes on the land to survive – but I grew up dirt poor, and I’ve lived the majority of my life without any certainty. This year that I’ve spent focusing on my own health and prioritizing time with my amazing family is worth anything. Ideas that have lain dormant for nearly a decade are rocketing to the surface and I’m ready to do the kinds of amazing things – and work with amazing people – that gave my life meaning. I’m sad that it couldn’t happen in the academy, but then again – I’m the last person to believe that we can find fulfillment in these colonial institutions.

I guess I just forgot for a while.

What’s next? OOoh, I’m excited to share that with you, and I’ll be doing an update on my next project pretty soon. This time, I’m actually going to be able to get past the imagining-it phase because it’s literally my job for the next two months… but for now, I’ll just say – we don’t need these institutions to make anything possible. We always had it in us.

êkosi