How Burnout Made Me Quit Everything
Twenty years fighting climate change finally took a toll
When we think of climate change effects, we often imagine hurricanes, heat waves, and wildfires — all the massive ecological manifestations of a world overcommitted to consumption and fossil fuel emissions. I’ve worked to change that perception for 20 years as a climate change expert and filmmaker drawing attention to the human effects: to lives lost in heat waves, novel illnesses conveyed by deadly mosquitoes, and the mental health burdens of living through unanticipated, extreme events.
It took those two decades for me to realize that there was another, critical effect of climate change going unnoticed: the intense mental, emotional burden on the people fighting against it.
Eventually, I would be forced to confront how working myself into a state of burnout was connected to the burning out of the planet, the tie between the Earth’s atmosphere and the personal one I created in my life.
I am not someone who likes to ask for help. Like so many others in Gen X, I was taught to do things myself and to be different. Raised by divorced liberal parents in conservative Georgia, I was encouraged to think independently, and to figure things out for myself.
My mother was an environmental activist. She raised me to see all resources as finite and to be cherished. While girls around me were taught to smile and say sir and ma'am, my father made me read The New York Times on the morning drive to school, stumbling over vocabulary I didn’t understand, learning how to navigate the world of politics, not just manners.
It wasn’t until after college that I remembered how important one childhood experience was. At age eight, my home was contaminated by a toxic chemical after a company used it to kill powder post beetles, a termite-like pest in Southern homes. We moved out and lost everything. My mother settled in court for a pittance, teaching me the need to better protect people from environmental harm.
"As for the end of this month, I will have no salaried job, no boyfriend and no home."
I went to graduate school to try to find ways this could be done, the childhood loss always an embodied fear of the potential for more loss and harm. The chemical was banned in 1988, but the experience of it taught me to empathize with the victims of wildfires and hurricanes, other people who had also lost everything to the long-term consequences of short-sighted corporations.
I became a public health professor devoted to questions of climate change and went on to work at the Environmental Protection Agency. It was only then, 30 years after the chemical incident, that I was diagnosed with a series of health issues that could be linked to that childhood exposure, the scariest one being thyroid cancer. Trained to navigate the scientific literature, I tried to figure out what had caused it. Was it my exposure at age eight to a toxin known to raise the risk of other cancers? Or the chemicals in the air, water, and food that we’re persistently exposed to every day?
Being diagnosed with cancer did not make me slow down. It made me speed up. The realization that life is ephemeral created a sense of urgency. We only have so much time in our lives as individuals — and also in the race to stop climate change.
My work became my whole being, a compulsion. I sacrificed everything for it. Some of it I loved, but much of it was simply hard.
By the spring of 2021, I found myself lying on my back on the floor of my office one day, staring out the window, unable to move. I was back in an academic gig, but also running my own company and working on film projects of my own.
It wasn’t a heart attack. I was deeply burned out. In the days that followed, I found I could do almost nothing, at least by my standards. I had no idea what was happening to me. I had never even considered burnout as a real experience that could possibly be a risk for me.
I asked to take a leave from my job. It was denied because, I was told, my students needed me, the world needed me. So I just slowly ramped down the things I was doing. Against the very grain of who I am, I began to quit.
It was not a question. It was absolutely necessary. My body was forcing me. Any deep-seated fears I harbored about becoming homeless — a legacy of losing our home and belongings in Georgia — became secondary.
I systematically quit almost everything over the next two years, including the relationship I was in that didn’t seem likely to ever provide the support I needed, and put my apartment up for sale.
As for the end of this month, I will have no salaried job, no boyfriend and no home.
One of the projects I was working on in the midst of this unwinding examined the question of what, in a film, would motivate audiences to take action to address climate change. Our findings led me to learn more about how joy, happiness, and well-being can change behavior.
"Being diagnosed with cancer did not make me slow down. It made me speed up. The realization that life is ephemeral created a sense of urgency."
I examined the research with intense curiosity, as one of the most shocking aspects of my experience of burnout was that the way it erased the unrelenting optimism I’d always had and thought was intrinsic to my character. Burnout showed me my outlook was mutable. I wanted my optimism back, all while doubting it would ever return.
I learned that joy comes from acting with integrity and making sure values and actions don’t conflict with one another. That sustained happiness is gained more from good relationships than material goods, and that a community of people aligned with one another was more powerful in lifting spirits than winning awards or accolades or even large sums of money — things that give short-term boosts that always subside.
I decided to employ these ideas in my life, and to pursue the question of how to do a different kind of climate change storytelling.
Now all my other work has dropped away, and this is the only project remaining.
As I pack boxes to sell my house and wonder where I’m going next, I’m thinking about how a story about climate change can convey happiness rather than doom.
In truth, I have come to see that arresting climate change hinges on engaging in this internal battle I was forced into. It involves stopping the excruciating hustle and listening to our own integrity, and knowing that unsustainable lifestyles will never build a sustainable world.
Already I can feel my energy and optimism returning.
I have moments where I am ecstatic about doing something new. In others, I wonder where I will end up. My favorite moments are the ones where I hear stories from brilliant women who left high-powered careers — as judge, CEO, leader — and how they never looked back.
I hope I will be like them one day, someone who offers hope that we can live in a way that respects who we are at our deepest cores, people who take care of our dignity and needs, and whose lifestyles don’t burn down the planet or our spirits.