I guess I should start from the beginning, and sadly that means talking about my burnout and how I ended up there.
That’s not an easy question, in fact, it took me months to understand how I had let myself get to severe burnout with anxiety and depression and how I could have ignored all the signs, cause trust me, there were signs. But for you, it’ll just be a few minutes, just the time to get to the bottom of this page. Lucky you.
In January 2025 I got diagnosed with severe burnout, but what did led me to go seek professional help in the first place ? That’s an easy question. I literally exploded at work. And when I tell “literally exploded” I mean it. Mid December our top notch management thought it would be a brilliant idea to do a mid season check up with the senior team (which I was a part of). Just to give you some context : it was the end of my third year as a financial auditor in a private auditing firm, so if you are familiar with the job you’ve already figured out that said senior team was overworked and understaffed. If not, it’s okay we’re gonna dive into it.
So, senior team, well our role is simple, we are accountable for everything that goes wrong. After two years at the bottom of the production chain you earn the honor to climb up the ranks and join the senior team. Meaning that now, instead of just being a production tool and analysing financials records to make sure everything checks out and no asset or money got misplaced, you also have to train and manage the bottom of the chains. After 2 years on the job they deem you capable of evaluating the financial risks a firm represents : does this firm tend to overestimate their stocks to make their assets more important in the financials records ? Do they have the nasty habit to pay December 2024 bills in January 2025 ? Let’s be fair, we all do that, December is financially hard for everyone, but according to international accountability norms if you are a firm, you can’t do that.
So mostly boring financial and accountability rule that, we financial auditors, have to ensure that are respected. And to do that, we determine the risks, and the appropriate tests to implement. This is the role of the senior, but that’s not all, we have to do that for several jobs (again that still normal), we have to trains the new member of the team, we have to assign them task, make sure they do their job right by reviewing it plus do the job ourselves for some (non negligible part), ensure a good client relationship and manage the production timeline to deliver everything in the right time. All that listed, it’s start to feel a lot, especially when considering that most cabinet are understaff, meaning more jobs for everyone and more tasks to do in each job, client are often late in producing the documents we need and deadlines all come at the same time. So yeah that’s how.
As I was saying, mid December – management check up. Basically it consists of a HR manager reviewing and reading you your performance evaluations so far. And I learnt at this occasion that, according to my direction, I had no team spirit and was never at the office. Considering that I was working my ass off every week at my client’s offices and was spending my nights doing the extra work – because like I said we were understaffed, and if you fails to deliver in time it’s the senior fault, not the fact that last year you were 5 on the job and this year only 2 and a half for the same amount of work – in my hotel room. So no, I wasn’t at the office making connections with colleagues — I was drowning in hotel room deadlines, just like said senior colleagues were too by the way. That really was a dumb comment to make to someone who’s been overworking herself for months. Therefore I exploded, I got angry, I yelled, I cried and I had no more controls over my reactions or my emotions. That’s how I knew I needed professional help.
To be fair, my body did try to warn before – constant headache, waking up as tired as I was when I got to bed, making to do list in my sleep, throwing up before work, rising anxiety when I got a teams notification (we all hate that sound) cause I knew something will be added to my workload, and tension pain between my. neck and my shoulder blade. I literally got every symptoms on the burnout book and yet, I kept pushing, for what ? I still don’t know, but I did, and here I am now, trying to rebuild myself, to learn to slow down and to learn to appreciate the slow, quiet moment of life, cause they are the one we will remember later.
Welcome to my journey.
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