I Wasn't Burnt Out. I Was Tired of Performing.

I kept thinking I needed less work. 

It turned out I just needed less performing.

A few months ago I caught myself rehearsing something I hadn't even said yet.

Not for a meeting. Not for a client call.

For an Instagram story I hadn't recorded.

I was editing a version of myself before she existed. Getting her tone right. Making sure she sounded like she'd thought of this on the spot, rather than practised it twice in the kitchen with the tap running so nobody would hear.

That's when I noticed how often I was doing it.

At work, I've got a whole register for sounding certain about things I'm still half figuring out. Around other parents, I do a decent impression of a woman who has remembered library day. Online, there was a slightly different one again — brighter, better lit, the sort of woman who has useful thoughts while making coffee rather than just wanting the coffee.

She was tiring to be. I wasn't even enjoying her.

I don't think I was burnt out. I think I was tired of performing, which turns out to be a different animal entirely.

Not quite the same thing

Burnout gets talked about constantly now, and mostly for good reason. Some seasons really are too much for too long — I've had those, same as anyone.

But I've also had stretches where nothing was actually wrong. Work was fine. Home was busy in the usual way, not the alarming way. And I still finished most days feeling like I'd been wrung out for no clear reason.

Looking back, it wasn't the workload. It was the low hum of feeling like I should be presenting a slightly improved edition of myself, at all times, to whoever happened to be looking.

Nothing dramatic. Just polished. A better photo. A cleverer caption. A kitchen that looked tidier than it had any right to at 7am on a Tuesday.

It's such an ordinary sort of pressure that you stop clocking it as pressure at all.

The performance follows you home

Working from home has made a mess of the lines that used to separate things.

I'll come out of a Teams meeting, shut the work laptop, make tea, then open my own laptop to work on the blog. Same kitchen. Different audience, apparently — because for a long while I brought exactly the same version of myself to both.

Professional. Productive. On, in that particular way.

It took me embarrassingly long to notice my own business didn't need that woman at all. I'd built her for meetings, and then just kept using her out of habit, the way you keep wearing the good bra after the video call's finished.

No wonder I was tired. I was on shift twice.

What I quietly stopped doing

At some point — not a decision so much as a slow leak — I stopped trying to be impressive online.

I stopped needing every blog post to sound like it had arrived from somewhere important. I stopped treating each Pinterest pin as though it required approval before it was allowed outside. I stopped assuming strangers were studying me with anything close to the attention I was giving myself.

They weren't. They were busy wondering how they came across, same as me. Everyone's the main character in their own worry, and an extra in everyone else's. Oddly comforting, once it lands.

Quiet work asks for different things

Part of why blogging suits me better than social media is that the work is the point, rather than the performance of doing the work.

The article either helps someone find what they needed, or it doesn't. The pin either earns a click or it sits there, ignored. Neither one asks me to narrate breakfast, defend my skincare choices, or explain what I'm thinking every Tuesday at 3pm on cue.

That's not a dig at people who build it the other way — plenty do, and enjoy it, and I mean that. It's just not me. I like making things considerably more than I like being watched making them.

I wish I'd worked that out about five years and one abandoned ring light ago.

The energy came back

This is the bit that actually surprised me: nothing about my workload changed.

Same job. Same four-year-old, who still believes every stick found on a walk deserves a place in our home. Same teenagers. Same washing basket that appears to regenerate overnight, on its own, with no input from me.

My life is not objectively quieter. My mind is, though. Because I've stopped spending quite so much of it checking whether I'm presenting correctly.

There's a particular tiredness that comes from watching yourself constantly — how you sound, how you look, whether you've said enough or slightly too much. It's a quiet kind of tax. You barely register you're paying it until you stop, and something in your shoulders unclenches that you didn't know was clenched.

Writing, oddly, doesn't ask this of me. By the time you're reading a piece, it's already been through its worst drafts. I've changed my mind halfway through a sentence, deleted whole paragraphs, gone back the next morning because something sounded a little too tidy.

The performing happens in private, before publishing, where it belongs. The finished thing doesn't ask me to keep performing once it's out.

That's a genuinely different kind of work.

I think that's what I was actually after this whole time.

Not less to do.

Just less pretending while I did it.