I Thought I was Healed

It was 2023, and my life looked great on paper.

I was good at my job. My salary kept increasing. I had spent years being the person who could handle things, solve problems, and figure out what needed to happen next.

I had it together. Or at least that was how it looked.

Behind the scenes, I was drinking too much, trapped in a dynamic that was draining me, and becoming increasingly aware that my life was not working.

I could feel it before I could really explain it.

I have always been good at solving problems. If something needed to improve, I improved it. If a process was broken, I fixed it. If a project was stuck, I figured out how to move it forward. That approach had worked for me for a long time.

My personal life, however, was far less interested in being project managed.

Eventually, I reached a point where I wanted relief badly enough that I stopped negotiating with what I already knew. I became painfully aware of the three things taking the most out of me: my job, my relationship, and my relationship with alcohol.

So, I quit all three.

I left the company I had worked at for 13 years. I ended the relationship. I stopped drinking.

Then I cashed out my 401(k) and gave myself something I had never really given myself before: time to heal.

And I took that very seriously.

Meditation retreats. Yoga. Therapy. Coaching. Psychology. Neuroscience. Nervous system regulation. Journaling. Reading. Learning. Unlearning. More journaling.

If there was a rabbit hole involving healing or self-awareness, I probably investigated it. In hindsight, I may have approached healing with some of the same intensity I had previously brought to work.

Apparently, the achievement mindset had not left the building entirely.

But that year gave me something I genuinely needed: space.

Once I was outside of the environments that had been consuming so much of my energy, I could finally hear myself think.

What did I actually want? What mattered to me? What did I want my life to feel like?

I started noticing how many assumptions had been quietly running in the background. Work hard. Hustle. Be responsible. Keep everyone happy. Make more money. Stay useful. Handle it.

A lot of those beliefs had helped me become successful. They had also helped me build a life that no longer felt like mine.

Over time, I felt better. I became more regulated. I understood myself differently. I started listening more closely to what actually mattered to me.

After about a year of this, I must have decided I was healed, because I went back to corporate.

I know.

I really thought it would be different this time. I knew myself now. I had tools. I had boundaries. I understood nervous system regulation. I had journaled extensively. Surely corporate America would be no match for this new and improved version of Emily.

And besides, responsible adults were supposed to have jobs, right?

So I went back.

Within nine months, I was burned out again.

At one point, after I had already worked something like 21 days straight, a friend said to me, “Emily, I think you’re burned out.”

I disagreed. I told her I just needed to work the next few weekends and then I would finally be caught up.

And as I heard myself say it, I knew. I was right back where I had been before.

That moment landed differently the second time.

This time, I was sober. I had spent a year taking care of myself differently, learning how to regulate my nervous system, setting better boundaries, and paying closer attention to what I needed. I could no longer explain the burnout away as something caused by drinking, chaos, or not taking care of myself.

That was the wake-up call.

The first time, I had assumed something in me needed to change. I needed to become healthier. More regulated. Better at boundaries. Less affected by everything around me. So I had spent a year doing exactly that.

And yet when I put myself back into an environment built around urgency, pressure, constant demands, and ways of working that did not fit me, I ended up in the very place I had promised myself I would never return to.

How did this happen again?

For the first time, I considered that maybe I had been asking the wrong question.

Maybe the question was not, How do I change myself enough to handle this? Maybe it was, Why do I keep trying to make myself fit somewhere that does not fit me?

That changed something.

I stopped treating my sensitivity as a defect I needed to overcome. I stopped assuming that feeling depleted meant I had failed at regulating myself. And I stopped believing that if I just did enough work on myself, I could eventually become comfortable living a life that felt wrong to me.

The second time I left corporate, the relief was immediate. Not because every problem in my life disappeared, and certainly not because I had finally become “healed.”

I had already retired that theory.

The difference was that this time, I believed what my experience had been telling me.

There are things we can work through. There are patterns we can change. We can become more resilient, more aware, and more capable of staying connected to ourselves. But I no longer think healing means reaching some permanent state where nothing affects us anymore.

Life keeps changing. Environments change. Relationships change. New pressures show up. Old patterns can reappear in different forms.

For me, healing has become less about arriving and more about noticing sooner. Listening more closely. Becoming honest about what fits and what does not. Recognizing when an old script is running and deciding whether I still want to follow it.

Sometimes growth means changing ourselves. And sometimes it means recognizing that the environment is asking too much of us.

That second burnout did not teach me that I was finally healed.

It taught me that healing is something I keep practicing as life changes around me.