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David Okigbo's avatar

This hit me so profoundly. The way you trace the physical spaces, warehouses, gyms, and rural roads to the inner journey is so beautifully done. Thank you for sharing this chapter of your story with such raw honesty.

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Rob Dawson's avatar

To Red, from the place between fire and function –

re: “it’s not burnout. it’s heartbreak”

This landed in the chest, not just the mind.

Because you’re right: it’s not burnout, not really. It’s not about workload or balance or even pace. It’s grief. Repeated grief. Grief with no funeral and no acknowledgement. The heartbreak of being in systems that extract your best and spit out your essence. Of giving and giving and watching meaning haemorrhage in silence while others clap you for resilience.

Your piece echoes the raw pulse that underpins so much of my own work—particularly the Liturgy of the Burnt Out series. There, we explore what happens after the Instagrammable collapse. After the wellness retreat. After the out-of-office auto-reply. The slow resurrection of people who were never supposed to break, but did. Or didn’t—but bled anyway.

What you name is the invisible fracture. The betrayal of putting your soul into the work and then being told you’re too much for caring. I’ve lived that. Built whole frameworks to survive it. And still, your words shook something loose.

This isn’t a call to quit. It’s a call to remember that what’s breaking is not you. It’s the conditions. The values. The expectations you were never meant to carry.

Thank you for lighting a signal fire for those of us still walking through it.

— Rob

Liturgy of the Burnt Out | postc4p.substack.com

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