Today’s Question For Your Uncommon Evolution: What responsibility would you happily give up?
For a long time, I felt like the fact that I was burned out was a personal failure.
I thought I had taken on too much (well, in all honesty, I had) and that my failure to set better boundaries or manage my time properly was all my fault. I was also wracked by the idea that a little more discipline would have kept me from becoming burned out – discipline in all areas: work, fitness, scheduling, self-care, etc.
Whenever I found myself exhausted, resentful, unable to concentrate, or staring blankly at work I would normally finish without much trouble, my first instinct was to question myself.
Why couldn’t I handle it anymore?
That question is much more common than we may realize, especially among high-achieving women of color. Society has made us feel like it’s us, as though, if we just optimized a tad bit more, we could have prevented the burnout. There are all sorts of strategies we’re meant to try to “keep on top of things”: wake up earlier, sleep more, improve our morning routines, ignore morning routines and find a schedule that works for us, protect our energy but let in friends and family, meditate, journal, delegate, exercise, say no, say yes…it’s never-ending.
I want to be clear: some of that advice is definitely useful. None of it, though, is enough.
And the reason is that burnout isn’t a personal failure that we can optimize our way out of. You aren’t the sole woman in the world who wasn’t able to manage her life and now deserves to pay for it by dealing with burnout.
For many high-achieving women of color, burnout is not simply the result of poor boundaries or an overcrowded calendar. It is the predictable outcome of spending years inside cultures that reward us for overperforming while making it difficult to feel safe doing anything less.
We learn early that competence – and even more so, exceptionalism – can protect us.
Being prepared protects us. Being impressive protects us. Being agreeable, polished, useful, emotionally controlled, and capable of handling more than everyone else protects us. We learn to anticipate what people need before they ask, to make ourselves indispensable, and to avoid giving anyone a reason to question whether we belong in the room.
Eventually, overfunctioning stops feeling like a strategy and starts feeling like a personality.
We become the person who can always be counted on. The person who solves the problem, remembers the detail, stays late, smooths over the conflict, mentors the junior colleague, absorbs the emotional tension, and still produces excellent work. Other people admire our capacity, and because they admire it, they continue to use it.
The difficult part is that this often works for a very long time.
Overachievement can create real opportunities. It can produce money, credentials, praise, authority, and a life that looks successful from the outside. It can also make it nearly impossible to recognize when ambition has stopped being freely chosen and has become a form of self-protection.
You may genuinely want the career, the degree, the business, the promotion, or the beautiful life you are building. You may also be terrified of what it would mean to stop proving yourself.
Those two things can be true at once.
Women of color are often expected to navigate an exhausting contradiction. We are supposed to be exceptional, but never threatening. Confident, but never difficult. Warm, but not overly emotional. Direct, but not aggressive. Accommodating, but still authoritative. We are expected to work hard enough to justify our presence while pretending that the extra labor costs us nothing.
That labor is not always visible.
It is the constant calculation before speaking in a meeting. It is deciding whether correcting someone is worth being labeled combative. It is changing your tone so your message can be heard. It is noticing who is uncomfortable and instinctively making yourself smaller, softer, or easier to digest. It is doing the job while also monitoring how you are being perceived as you do it.
Then there is the unpaid emotional labor outside work: maintaining family relationships, remembering birthdays, managing household logistics, supporting partners, responding to friends, caring for parents, and remaining available to the people who have come to understand your strength as an unlimited resource.
By the time burnout arrives, it can feel strangely embarrassing.
You may look at your life and think you have no right to be unhappy. You worked hard for this. You asked for this. Other people would be grateful for this. You have survived harder things than this.
So you keep going.
You tell yourself you only need to make it through the quarter, the case, the semester, the launch, the move, the next deadline. You take a vacation and spend half of it recovering enough to enjoy the final two days. You begin to resent people for asking things of you even though you rarely tell them no. You lose interest in work you once cared about, then blame yourself for becoming lazy, ungrateful, or undisciplined.
But burnout is not laziness.
It is what happens when the demands placed on a person repeatedly exceed the resources available to meet them, especially when the person does not feel free to reduce those demands. It is not always solved by becoming more efficient, because efficiency often teaches the system that it can safely give you even more.
That is why recovery cannot only be personal.
A bath cannot fix a workplace built on chronic understaffing. A morning routine cannot undo discrimination. A meditation app cannot create affordable childcare, redistribute domestic labor, or make a manager respect your limits. Better boundaries matter, but boundaries are more difficult to hold when your livelihood, reputation, family role, or sense of safety has always depended on being the one who can handle everything.
This does not mean we are powerless. It means we need to stop confusing personal coping strategies with structural solutions.
Recovering from burnout may require rest, but it also requires honesty. We have to become willing to examine the systems around us, the expectations we have internalized, and the identities we have built around being endlessly capable.
We may have to disappoint people who benefited from our exhaustion.
We may have to tolerate being misunderstood. We may have to allow work to remain unfinished, let someone else solve the problem, or admit that we no longer want the version of success we spent years pursuing. We may have to build lives that look less impressive to other people but feel more inhabitable to us.
Most importantly, we have to stop treating burnout as evidence that there is something wrong with us.
Perhaps the exhaustion is not proof that we have become weaker.
Perhaps it is information.
Perhaps our bodies and minds are finally refusing to cooperate with a culture that has mistaken our resilience for consent.
I love working with millennial women of color as they reconnect with themselves and build lives that feel authentic, intentional, and fully their own. I also genuinely love connecting with people and hearing their stories. If you want to share what this essay brought up for you, or if you’re a millennial woman of color who would like to work with me, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out through my Contact Page or email me directly at anjali@uncommonevolution.com.
