In 2024 I picked up HEMA as a hobby. I started off not believing I’d ever compete in a tournament. I was dealing with a bad breakup I joke about calling my divorce, a lot of new responsibilities, learning how to really live on my own, and trying to exist in a political environment that has only gotten more hostile to people like me. I ended up falling so in love with the sport I joke that I fenced 8 days a week. Group practice, private lessons, extra strength training for the muscles I used most in fencing, all of it. I went to some incredible tournaments, got a few medals, made a ton of friends, and kept training hard.
In early 2025 I was settling into the second year of my career. At work, things got weird fast. The coworkers who trained me and who I was close to either left for new jobs or got moved away from me in a reorg, and suddenly I was one of the people everyone kept coming to. Around the same time I got handed a project I cared about way too much, and I convinced myself that whether it went well would decide whether I got promoted. So I started waking up early, staying late, and trying to keep fencing at the same pace anyway. Eventually 8 days a week became 3. I felt weird about asking for help on my “promotion project,” and even when my lead and I tried to get another developer, nobody really had time. I was training new people, building the project, taking brutal oncall shifts, and still trying to keep up with my normal work. A lot of nights I stayed until 10 or 11 just trying to get one more thing done before I went home.
Then the project was almost done. There was about a week of development work left on my end before it got put on hold, but by then I was already cooked. I had developed a habit of drinking Celsius and craved them even when people told me to rest, because by that point I did not really know how. If I was awake, I wanted to be busy. I wanted to be useful. I wanted every hour to turn into something I could point at. At some point I dropped fencing completely, even though I had recently become a coach at the club. I barely registered the loss while it was happening because work had taken over all the space I used to keep for joy, movement, and other people.
In late December, when I learned my promotion was not going to happen, I crashed out. I dropped whatever I was working on, left, went home, and went to bed absurdly early. I actually got good rest that night, but it did not fix anything. It just proved how exhausted I had been. The next week was its own kind of collapse. I cried to my boyfriend and got comfort and reassurance, and then within that same week he dumped me. I had made birthday plans for the following week, and suddenly even that small thing felt unstable. The promotion falling through made me feel like I had failed at work, and the breakup right after it made me feel even more untethered. I tried to go to work after that, lasted maybe thirty minutes, and then went back home. My body was done before my brain was willing to admit it.
I knew it was burnout when my own life started feeling optional to me. If the work got done, I could ignore basically anything else. I have always put a lot of effort into doing a good job, but this was different. I was not proud of what I was doing. I was just running on fumes and acting like that counted as discipline. I kept myself busy because the amount of work meant I could not actually deliver the project the way I wanted to, and when I could not deliver, I started to feel like maybe nothing I did mattered anyway. That feeling spread into the rest of my life. Work took the place fencing used to occupy, and on a normal night I would leave the office at 10 or 11 PM, go home, eat, and sleep. There was not really a night left to live in. My body did not do anything dramatic. It was quieter than that: random spikes of insomnia, chronic tiredness, feeling more and more achy, and the constant refrain of “I’m tired.” People noticed. People commented. People invited me places. Nobody sat me down for a big serious talk, but the people around me could tell something was wrong long before I had words for it.
I realized this was not one bad week because I kept falling into the same cycle: feeling exhausted every day, then feeling unproductive and lazy every day, and then watching my life shrink into a predictable loop of work, sleep, home. That loop was the real warning sign. My whole life had narrowed down to surviving one workday at a time. Losing fencing made that worse because it had been one of the clearest sources of joy and community in my life. Going back did not feel simple. My physical ability had slipped enough that returning meant facing how much I could not do anymore. The first time I started going again, I was relieved to find that I had more muscle memory than I remembered, but next to no endurance and a lot less strength than I was used to having. Going back sucked. I could still see openings, but after a few bouts my legs were gone, and that gap between what I knew and what I could do got under my skin.
Breaking the cycle did not come from one big realization. I just started changing things. Tuesday game nights with friends. Leaving work before dark once in a while. Going back to fencing even when I felt rusty and embarrassed. Reconnecting with two different friend groups brought my social life back in a way I had not realized I missed. It reminded me that stability and fun could come from community, not just from romance or work. The breakup changed my day-to-day from work and homebody isolation into actually making time for the friends who were worried about me and wanted me around. None of it felt noble. Mostly it felt strange, and a little guilty, and also better.
Prioritizing myself felt selfish in a way that is hard to explain unless you have spent a long time measuring your worth by how much strain you can absorb. It felt bad not to take on more responsibility at work than I already had. It felt bad leaving the office before other people did, even when I knew staying later was not making me healthier, kinder, or even more effective. For a while, taking care of myself felt like I was getting away with something.
Returning to fencing brought a different kind of grief with it. The hardest part was not just feeling weaker or slower. It was being seen through the lens of who I had recently been. People still recognized me as Natalie, one of the assistant coaches, a really good fencer. Sometimes I would fence someone I had taught only a few months earlier and watch them catch me on things I knew I used to be better about. Getting tagged by someone I had coached bothered me way more than I wanted to admit. Everyone around me was being kind. The problem was that I still remembered exactly what I used to be able to do.
That is part of why I started my website and this blog. I get to decide everything about it. Nobody is waiting on it. I can spend an hour fussing over a paragraph or a layout choice and not justify it to anyone. Burnout took away what I found fun at work for a while, which was one of the strangest parts of it. It did not just make me tired. It made me feel cut off from parts of myself I liked, including the part that genuinely enjoys building things. Some of that has come back now that I have relaxed and started recovering. I have been able to find what I enjoy at work again, which feels less like a big victory and more like proof that burnout can mess with almost everything.
I do not think this gets solved once. I think I am just more aware now of how easily my life can start shrinking around work if I let it.
Maybe that is what equilibrium means for me now. Not never burning out again. Just noticing sooner when it starts happening, and pulling something back into my life before work eats the whole week. Some days that means looking forward to my next fight. Some days it means finding an interesting problem or project to work on. The point is not to become permanently healed. The point is to keep building a life that still feels like mine.