Burnout, LinkedIn, and the Ghost of Who I Used to Be

I’ve been teetering on the edge lately.

April and May were supposed to be better than Q1. But instead, I’ve been trying to hold everything together while preparing for a two-week trip to Europe—my first real vacation in a long time. It also happens to land on my 30th birthday, which feels huge. I’m excited… but I’m also completely burnt out.

Taking two weeks off as a manager at a corporate job is chaos. I’ve been pushing my team hard. I’ve been pushing myself harder. I’ve been working ahead, fielding last-minute executive requests, putting out fires left and right. Visibility is a double-edged sword: the better we do, the more we’re asked to do. I’ve been drowning in it.

My coworkers noticed. I’ve been visibly stressed, exhausted, running on fumes. And then one of them opened her desk drawer and cracked a joke that somehow opened the floodgates.

A while back, we pranked her by taping pictures of our team inside her drawer—like a weird little shrine. It was supposed to be funny. But when she opened it again, she looked at a photo of me and said, “Wow, look at you back in October. You looked so happy. So glowy. You looked… younger.”

I laughed it off at first. But it hit me harder than I expected.

She tried to walk it back, saying I’d grown so much since then, that I’m a badass now, that I’ve matured professionally. And while I appreciated her softening it, I had to tell her the truth.

I don’t feel like I’ve matured. I feel like this job has made me less professional. Like I’ve regressed.

And I told my boss the same thing—not in a dramatic way, but in the kind of cheeky honesty I use when I’m trying to stay tethered to my sanity. I said, “I refuse to let this place rot my brain. I’m not going to start using the wrong marketing terms just because everyone else here does.” And I meant it. If I start throwing around fake terminology at a real marketing company, I’ll be laughed out of the room. Words matter. Precision matters. Standards matter.

That conversation reminded me just how much I’ve had to adjust downward to survive here. And it stirred something I hadn’t processed in a long time.

The night before, I had seen a post on LinkedIn that quietly wrecked me. A woman I used to work with—someone I wasn’t close with, but had collaborated with over the years—passed away recently. Pancreatic cancer. She’d been with the company for 25 years.

Someone wrote a beautiful post in tribute to her. It was respectful and heartfelt. But then… LinkedIn did what it always does.

It prompted people to “congratulate her on 9 years at the company.”

And people did.

Automated messages poured in. Congrats on your work anniversary! So well deserved! But she was already gone.

They didn’t know.

That moment haunted me. Not just because she passed. But because of what it said about the system we’re in. She dedicated decades of her life to a company, and when she was gone, people still tried to “network” with her. That’s what it felt like—this hollow, performative, hustle-culture algorithm spewing fake congratulations into the void. The entire thing felt dystopian. Like we’re all in this loop of overworking, overproving, burning out—and then what?

We die? And no one even knows.

It made me question everything.

And then—on the same day, almost like the universe was trying to really make a point—an old coworker texted me. She asked if I remembered someone we used to work with. A manager. I couldn’t even remember his name at first. He was supposed to be this “big shot,” but the only reason I recalled him at all was because of a serious incident that happened under his org.

A teammate—someone who sat right in front of me—got into a verbal altercation with him It escalated into a physical threat. He was fired immediately. We were told not to come into the office the next day. Security was brought in. It was handled seriously.

Meanwhile, at my current job, someone literally put another employee in a chokehold… and nothing happened.

That’s what I mean when I say this place has chipped away at my professionalism. Not because I changed, but because I’ve adapted to a space where integrity isn’t protected. Where chaos is normalized. Where my standards—my brain—have slowly eroded just to keep up.

And I miss who I was before all this.

I used to walk into the office excited. I looked forward to seeing my teammates—my team. That’s what they were. People I trusted. People who wanted to see me grow. I had mentorship. Community. A sense of pride in what I did and who I was doing it with.

It wasn’t perfect. But it was safe. It was structured. And I felt like I mattered.

Now, I walk into work with anxiety already lodged in my chest. My heart feels tight before I even sit down. Saying that out loud makes me emotional, because it’s the first time I’ve really allowed myself to feel the grief of what I lost.

I don’t want to be here. Not in this environment. But I feel stuck. Because the economy is what it is, and I do understand how lucky I am to have a job when others are still trying to find one. I know what a privilege it is to have income and stability.

But that doesn’t make the feeling go away.

Because I lost something. Not just a good workplace—but a version of myself that I loved.

The one who was energized. Joyful. Supported. The one who didn’t have to brace for impact every day.

And if I’m being honest?

This trip won’t bring her back.

Because maybe it’s not just this job.

Maybe it’s the state of the world.

Maybe we’ve all shifted in ways we haven’t fully acknowledged.

I don’t know exactly when it happened.

I just know something’s changed.

In me. Around me. Maybe in all of us.

And I miss who I was before all of this.