How to Slow Down and "Recharge"

Let me tell you about the morning I hit the wall. It was a Tuesday. I woke up before my alarm, the way I always do — but something was different. I didn't want to move. Not tired-sleepy. Something deeper. I made my tea — my good tea, the one I write about — and I drank it, and I couldn't taste it. At all. That's when I knew: this wasn't tiredness. This was something else.

Tiredness says "I need sleep." Burnout says "I'm disconnected." My favorite book sat unopened. My walks felt like walking through water. I felt like I was watching my own life on a screen — present, but not in it. Numb. That's the word. I, the feelings expert, had no feelings left to check.

And here's the confession I made to Lucia over a very long, very quiet dinner: I was the last person I took care of. You know how I can read everyone's weather? How I've always been the one who asks "are you okay?" — the emotional radar girl, the one who checks on everyone? I spent years being everyone's soft place to land. And somewhere along the way, I forgot to be mine.

I said yes to being there for people (I wrote a whole article about saying no — and I still wasn't doing it myself). I stopped doing my own check-ins. I stopped naming my own feelings. I poured from an empty cup so long that the cup stopped existing.

Here's what I want you to know, because I was where you might be: burnout isn't a sign you're weak. It's a bill you get for running on empty for too long. It took me three weeks to taste my tea again. Three weeks of boring, unglamorous, one-day-at-a-time recovery. No lightning bolt. No single magic morning. Just small charges, added up.

The day it happened, I cried in my kitchen — from relief, not sadness. My tea tasted like tea. The world came back in color. And I understood something I'd been teaching without knowing: you can't pour from an empty cup. But you can put the cup down, fill it, and start again.