Is it really heavy?

I called my mom this evening to talk about timelines.

She’s in the middle of a big move and I’m helping her through it, so the call had a job. Dates. Logistics. A quick update so we could both plan.

I mentioned that I’d been busy. The renovation. My clinical work. And then I said that I’d been doing more to run my business.

“Well, your business,” she said. “What does that mean?”

So I told her. I told her I was making space to build out the part of my business that offers coaching and one-on-one support for a very specific woman: the one who takes care of other people. Maybe it’s her job, maybe it’s her life at home, and most often it’s both. The healthcare provider. The caregiver. The woman who is in burnout, or close enough to see it from where she’s standing.

At first, it felt like she kind of laughed it off.

“Well, how is this different from a therapist? Are you going into private practice?”

I understood the question. So much of my life has been spent in clinical medicine that there’s an automatic assumption that any work I do with people will eventually come back to patient care.

But that’s not what this is. Not for me.

What I tried to explain is that so many of the women I want to work with live in a world where their worth and their value are measured by what they provide to other people. Their roles get defined by who they are to everyone else, and not by who they are within themselves, at their core. And somewhere along the way, nobody asks about that second part anymore. Including them.

And then I started talking about my own burnout. I hadn’t planned to.

I told her how I used to make decisions every single day, some consciously and most not, about where my time and my energy would go. Almost all of it went outward, toward other people. Very little of it came back to me.

I told her how I would work through the week just to survive until the weekend. How I was the person who depended on vacations to finally take a breath. And how, when the vacation came, I needed the first couple of days just to breathe before I could even begin to enjoy myself.

Here’s what I know now. A vacation should not be your emergency plan. It can’t be the thing you hold out for, because you will fry yourself in between.

That’s not what I was raised to believe, and it’s not how I carried myself for a very long time. It took reaching a low point, feeling completely drained, for me to understand that things needed to be different.

On the other end of the line, my mom got quiet.

We are close. But this was not a conversation we had ever really had. As I named the parts of burnout that have stuck most firmly in my mind, I could hear agreement. Sometimes in what she said. Sometimes in her silence.

I didn’t laugh it off. I didn’t soften it. I didn’t blame her or anyone else. It was what it was.

As we were wrapping up, she said, “Well, on that heavy note…”

And I asked her, “Is it heavy?”

“Well,” she said, “it’s new for me to hear.”

So I told her that I don’t feel the need to soften my language about the things I feel strongly about. It may very well be one of the first times she’s heard that from me. But it is what it is.

Maybe this is new for you to hear, too. Or maybe it isn’t new at all. Maybe it’s the thing you’ve been living for years and haven’t said out loud to anyone.

So I'll ask you what I asked her: Is it really heavy?

Or is it just uncomfortable to hear something honest from a person you're used to hearing something different from?

Maybe it takes some getting used to.