Some might call it burnout, but I just didn’t care about work anymore.
For the last decade, I have devoted my career to the mission — to help people see and understand data — of a tech company called Tableau in the data visualization space. I built a career as a brand evangelist, setting the standards of how our brand interacted with our customers and served as the heart behind our Data Culture campaign. I’ve represented the company at conferences around the world and have written articles published in the likes of Forbes.
I had the perfect job for me at a company whose mission I believed in. I had the much sought after work life balance. So it came as a bit of a shock to me in July 2021, on the eve of my thirty-fifth birthday to realize that I didn’t really give a damn anymore. Not about the company’s success, my career aspiration, or the quality of my work.
Some might call it burnout. Others tiredness, exhaustion, or depression. However you want to define it, I know I am not alone in feeling it. We’re in the midst of the Great Resignation. In September 2021, the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted an all time high of employee “quits”, with over 4.3 million people leaving their jobs. Not to mention the loads of people who have quit or were let go earlier in the pandemic that just haven’t returned to work.
I can’t speak for everyone, but for me the reasons weren’t clear cut. The pandemic for sure and all the WFH, zooming that entailed. The end of business travel and the canceling of tech conferences meant my job had changed in unforeseen ways. Also Tableau had been bought in 2020 by Salesforce, a Tech giant. The transition from our scrappy, small, successful IPO’d startup was harder than I had anticipated. At home, my husband and I had been talking about a baby for a while — and it hadn’t happened. I was turning thirty five and it felt like the window for it to happen was closing.
When I write it out like that, it not so surprising that I found myself in tears on my birthday standing in the driveway of an airbnb in Juneau, Alaska talking on the phone to Tableau’s CMO.
The company has a flexible leave policy and my leadership team encouraged me to make use of it. A week unplugged to start, and then another. After three weeks my caring barometer hadn’t moved. I wasn’t really sleeping. I’d spent several long conversations with my therapist (everyone should have one, btw). I was having trouble focusing, but I wasn’t having a mental health crisis, per se. Rather to quote a favorite book, I was starting to feel like maybe “my heart was two sizes too small.”
On the day I reached out to HR to inquire about long term leave, I was filled with scary thoughts about upending something I had once so diligently built. I was sure someone was going to say, just try harder. At the same time I didn’t want my team to depend on me and then let them down. Six weeks, I thought to myself, I can be better in six weeks.
In the end taking FMLA leave was easier than I thought. A doctor’s appointment, some forms, and a confirmation email. They approved 12 weeks with options to extend up to six months. I couldn’t bring myself to send my team a note on Slack. I didn’t know what to say. I left it to my manager. I boxed up my work computer and put it in the closet. I signed out of my work social media accounts and went on an unfollow spree on my personal IG.
I just sort of disappeared.
In the proceeding weeks I took long walks with our then year old pandemic puppy. I helped get my step-daughters settled back into in-person school. I worked out with a group of friends virtually two nights a week and relished our virtual happy hours after. I started going to yoga most days. I signed up for a pottery class.
I worked really hard to be present.
The seasons started to change. The leaves began to get crisp. The air took on some bite. Twelve weeks had passed, eighty four days. I was grateful for the time, but it just didn’t feel like enough. On the day my FMLA job-protected leave ended, I spoke with my boss and he assured me not to worry. “There’s only one Ashley. You’re sorely missed. While we’ve been keeping your spot warm, it will still be here for you. Take all the time you need.”
I cried when I hung up.
I was going to therapy. I was taking medicine to sleep. I was exercising. I was doing all the things, but I wasn’t getting better. It would have been so easy to believe a new job at a new company might fix it. Or if I just got pregnant, my joy would make everything better.
And then it happened. No, I didn’t get pregnant. On day 102, in the middle of a hot yoga class as I was holding a plank into the third minute, I broke down crying. Heaping sobs that shook my body. I collapsed into a child’s pose, tears pooling on my mat. I was physically in the room, but my mind felt like I had travelled to another time. As I came back to the awareness of the present space I could hear my voice repeating words over and over, “I don’t want this. I don’t want it to be this way.”
There it was. The crux of why I had stopped caring. I didn’t want to work from home. I didn’t want to live in fear of Covid. I didn’t want our company to be bought. I didn’t want to feel disappointed there might never be a baby. I was trying to be strong and put on a brave face. But the truth was there were a lot of things I didn’t want to be the way they were and I was feeling powerless to change any of it.
The only thing that felt in my control was how much I cared.
When a young child trips and falls, there is a moment before the tears come. If you watch closely, you can see their little minds whirling as their lip quakes. So often in that moment we run to them and assure them, “you’re alright.” But maybe in our good intentions we get it wrong. Its not about whether they are physically hurt. It the unexpected that hurts. They were running along full of joy, without a care. They didn’t expect to trip and fall. Their little soul hurts with the shock of it.
We don’t need to hear reassurances that we’re alright, or that we’ve got this, sometimes we simply need to hear “you didn’t expect that to happen.”
I hadn’t expected any of those myriad of things of the last eighteen months to happen. I didn’t expect a pandemic to derail my work plans. I didn’t expect at 35 I wouldn’t yet have a baby. I didn’t expect to be taking leave.
Here’s the thing I’ve come to realize, it is really eff-ing important to say those words out loud. Because it is only when we acknowledge the derailment that we can allow ourselves to grieve the paths we’ve been unable to take, the moments that never came to be. Being fully on board doesn’t mean we have to stuff the disappointments away. They can co-exist together.
Society puts so much pressure on us to be grateful for having more than others. Yes, I have a impactful job with autonomy at a company where many would dream to work. It comes with quality benefits and generous leave and remote working policies — something every job should have. I live in a nice house, with a thoughtful spouse, and two amazing step daughters who I have helped raise since they were little. I’ve been spared the risk of many who work on the front lines. By any and all societal measures I am really fortunate.
All of that is true. Yet, with each of those statement, there is a second thing that on the surface appears to conflict. And yet, is equally as true. Tableau has been given a bigger opportunity AND we had to give up our autonomy in the process. I have the freedom to work remotely AND working in the same house as my spouse doesn’t really work. I have two awesome step-daughters AND I still want to have a baby.
Two opposing things can be true at once.
I can be grateful for everything I have and still sad that it didn’t work out how I expected. Its an interplay of emotions made harder by this era of wokeness, where the pains of those who are deemed not deserving enough are silenced. Its as if there is some unspoken algorithm — a correlation between privilege and satisfaction — that determines who is worthy to feel what. When one doesn’t head its calculations, they are shamed.
The truth though is there is enough room for everyone. There is enough space for what you’re feeling in every moment, what I am feeling, and what everyone is feeling all at once. Everyone’s feelings are worthy of being held, especially the negative ones. Those that we’ve been taught to label as bad: grief, sadness, frustration, doubt, dispare, envy, even anger.
I’ve come to see sadness as the soul’s way of saying “This mattered.” Anger as simply us trying to protect those things that matter the most to us. Grief as love and longing with no where to go. Our negative emotions are an invitation to awareness about life — the wants, the needs, the desires, all of it — that matter to us as individual humans and unite us in our humanity.
Compassion isn’t a limited resources. Our world is big enough for what matters to each of us to matter to ourselves and more importantly to each other. When we approach others with compassion for wherever their stead in life has taken them and however they feel about it, we actually create more capacity for compassion, not less.
I needed to grieve Tableau being bought by Salesforce, my job shifting in the pandemic. Collectively we need to grieve the pandemic and everything it changed. Even though the limits of space and time mean we can’t go back and travel a different path, the things we can’t do anymore still mattered. They mattered just as much as the opportunities now open to us.
As a society it is time to acknowledge that it is only through grief that we can have gratitude, only through sadness that we can have joy. Only through fully allowing ourselves the space to not care, that we can begin to care again.
While laying in shavasana after a particularly grueling yoga class, I allowed my mind to wander. Hidden in the middle of the word Tableau, I realized was the word ABLE. How in ten years, and all our talk about data literacy, had I never seen that before? And then a second, but equally profound realization; for the first time in so long, a thought about work had been met by the flicker of excitement.
To step towards the future we needed to first grieve the roads not taken and that requires space and time. I was grateful to have both.
A couple weeks ago, I reached out to my boss. We agreed to a slow re-entry. A couple days later I had coffee with a coworker. Then happy hour with a mentor. With trepidation I unboxed my computer. Without guilt, I deleted every one of the thousands of emails in my inbox.
Today marks 163 days since I had first stepped away. I didn’t quit. I am here typing away on my computer, trying to make sense of everything that has happened. With gratitude and grief and the space for dozens of other emotions, I am sitting at my dining room table working again.
It has taken me time, and a lot of yoga classes, to see it is not a failure if what we want and the outcome that happens aren’t in alignment. The desire and the decision are not one and the same.
Somewhere in the last five months, yoga stopped being about getting a great workout or achieving the perfect chatarunga. Rather each time I step on my 2'x6' mat, I have the space to practice bringing my awareness without judgement to exactly where I am. Only then can I develop a practice of compassion for the limits of what I can achieve as I move in the direction of where I want to eventually go. I do all of this with the hope I can show up as a better me in a complicated world.
Counterintuitively the more I let myself acknowledge and validate why I didn’t care, the more I found myself caring again. I found that to care, I had to develop compassion for myself and others. If you’re wondering, I am still not pregnant. But I am okay with that for now, and if later I feel differently, that is okay too.
