Most people don’t burn out from work.
They burn out from carrying.
Carrying conversations.
Carrying decisions.
Carrying emotional weight that never gets acknowledged.
It starts subtly.
You’re capable, so you step in.
You see the gap, so you fill it.
You want things to move, so you absorb friction.
Until one day you notice something that’s hard to unsee:
If you stopped, everything would stall.
Not because the work is impossible —
but because the responsibility was never evenly held.
That realization lands quietly.
Not with anger.
With fatigue.
We’ve learned that exhaustion is often a signal of imbalance, not effort.
And that carrying what isn’t yours doesn’t make you strong —
it makes the system weaker.
The hardest part isn’t letting go.
It’s trusting that if something matters, it will rise to meet shared responsibility.
And if it doesn’t…
that tells the truth too.
