An overachiever’s confession
A Reckoning by the Sea
It happened while I was watching the pelicans.
They dive with such certainty, folding their wings at the last possible moment, surrendering to gravity and instinct. They do not second-guess the trajectory. They do not calculate whether the fish is worth the effort. They dive, surface, swallow, and rest on the water until the next impulse moves them.
Watching them, coffee cooling in my hands, I felt something crack open inside my chest. The realization arrived without announcement, without the careful preparation I usually require before allowing myself to know brutal truths.
I am an overachiever. And I am burned out.
The words felt foreign, even as I knew them to be true. For decades, I had called it other things: dedicated, committed, hardworking, passionate. I had worn exhaustion like a badge, proof that I was earning my place in a world that seemed to demand constant demonstration of worth.
What I Could Not See
Brené Brown (2010), in The Gifts of Imperfection, names the belief system I had been living inside without recognizing its walls. Her research reveals that perfectionism operates as a self-destructive and addictive pattern, rooted in the belief that flawless appearance, behaviour, and accomplishment can somehow shield us from shame, judgement, and blame. Brown’s work demonstrates that most perfectionists were raised receiving praise primarily for achievement and performance, whether academic grades, good manners, rule-following, or people-pleasing. Somewhere in that conditioning, many of us internalized a dangerous equation: our worth equals our accomplishments and how well we accomplish them.
Reading those words by the sea, I felt the shock of recognition. That belief had been the operating system of my entire adult life. Every committee I joined. Every extra course I taught. Every student crisis I absorbed as my own responsibility. Every late night, every weekend sacrificed, every moment of rest interrupted by the nagging sense that I should be doing something more, something better, something that would finally prove I deserved to be here.
Brown’s research reveals a more complicated truth: perfectionism fundamentally concerns itself with earning approval and acceptance rather than with genuine self-improvement (Brown, 2010). The pattern follows a predictable sequence: please, perform, perfect. I had been following that formula in education for twenty-five years, believing it would eventually lead to security, to belonging, to the sense that I had finally done enough.
It never did. It never could. That is the nature of the trap.
What Burnout Looks Like From the Inside
Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter (2016), the researchers who developed the most widely used measure of occupational burnout, describe it through three interconnected dimensions. The first involves overwhelming exhaustion, the sense of being worn out, depleted, and unable to recover. The second manifests as cynicism and detachment from work, a protective numbing that separates us from caring too much. The third is a diminished sense of professional efficacy, a creeping belief that nothing we do makes a real difference.
What struck me, reading their work, was how the third dimension creates a vicious cycle. The more burned out we become, the less effective we feel. The less effective we think, the harder we push to prove our worth. The harder we try, the more depleted we become. I had been running that cycle for years, perhaps decades, without seeing it clearly.
Bessel van der Kolk (2014), in The Body Keeps the Score, observes that people who have experienced chronic stress often feel perpetually unsafe within their own bodies. While I would hesitate to claim trauma as an identity, I recognize its residue: the years of institutional vigilance, the constant calibration to others’ needs, the way exhaustion became so familiar I forgot it was exhaustion. My shoulders, perpetually braced. My jaw was clenched through the night. My sleep, fractured by worry that arrived without specific content, just a generalized dread that something was undone, someone was disappointed, some standard had been missed.
Here, by the sea, those symptoms have begun to ease. The shoulders are learning to drop. The jaw softens. Sleep comes and stays. The body is remembering safety, one quiet morning at a time.
Exhaustion as Status Symbol
Brown (2010) names something I had never consciously examined: the cultural tendency to treat exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as the measure of self-worth. In academic culture, in caregiving, in so many of the roles I have inhabited, exhaustion signals commitment. To admit tiredness is to demonstrate that I am working hard enough to deserve my place. To acknowledge a need for rest is to risk appearing uncommitted, unserious, insufficient.
The contract I wrote this morning, the one promising myself eight hours of sleep and mornings without performance, pushes directly against this belief. Every clause is a small rebellion against the culture that trained me to equate worth with output, value with visible effort.
Jenny Odell (2019), in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, writes about a different kind of productivity, one focused on maintaining oneself and healing rather than generating output. That concept stopped me when I first encountered it. The productivity of healing. As if rest could be framed as output. As if I needed permission, even from myself, to justify time spent recovering.
Perhaps I do need that permission. Maybe the language of productivity is the only dialect my overachiever’s mind can currently accept. If so, I will use it as a bridge until I can cross to the other side, where rest requires no justification at all.
What Solitude Makes Visible
Christopher Long and James Averill (2003), in their foundational study of positive solitude, found that being alone provides a particular kind of freedom: release from external constraints, from the performance demands of social interaction, from the need to calibrate ourselves to others’ expectations. In their research, people reported that solitude allowed them to see themselves more clearly, free from the distortions of social performance and others’ expectations. Solitude strips away the roles we perform, leaving us face-to-face with who we have become.
That confrontation can be painful. What I am seeing here by the Sea of Cortez is a woman who has spent decades outrunning her fear of inadequacy. A woman who believed, at some level too deep for conscious examination, that if she ever stopped performing, stopped achieving, stopped proving, she would discover she was nothing at all.
This is what Brown (2010) means when she describes perfectionism as a heavy shield we carry around, believing it will protect us, when in reality it prevents us from taking flight. I have been carrying that shield for so long that I forgot it was heavy. Here, I am finally setting it down.
What Comes After Recognition
The novelist Anna Quindlen once observed that the truly difficult and truly amazing work lies in giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself (as cited in Brown, 2010). That work starts here, in this place where no one knows my credentials or my accomplishments or how many hours I have logged in service to institutions that offered little security in return. Here, I am simply a woman by the sea. A woman learning to rest without guilt. A woman discovering that her worth existed before she proved anything, and will remain after she stops proving altogether.
Brown (2010) describes herself as a recovering perfectionist and an aspiring good-enoughist. That phrase makes me smile, this gentle reframing of recovery from perfectionism. I am an aspiring good-enoughist. I am learning to accept that enough is a destination, perhaps the only one worth reaching.
The pelicans are diving again. They do not keep score. They do not compare their catches to yesterday’s haul. They rest when they are full and dive when they are hungry, floating on the water between efforts, trusting that the sea will continue to provide.
I am watching them. I am learning.
Learning to Be Alone Without Loneliness
References
Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden.
Long, C. R., & Averill, J. R. (2003). Solitude: An exploration of benefits of being alone. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 33(1), 21–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5914.00204
Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311
Odell, J. (2019). How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House.
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
