The Kind of Burnout No One Talks About

Burnout part 1: Why high-functioning people on the frontlines are exhausted in a different way

I used to think burnout would feel louder. Collapse, tears, or not being able to get out of bed; something you could point to and say, that’s it, that’s the problem.

Instead, it felt more like being slightly out of focus in my own life.

From the outside, everything looked sharp. I was traveling constantly, moving between airports and field sites. I was spending my days with wild animals, working as a wildlife photographer for magazines like National Geographic. It’s the kind of job people repeat back to you slowly, as if tasting it. National. Geographic. Usually followed by, “That’s the coolest job ever.”

And it is. But I remember standing in places I had once fantasized about, watching rare animals move through landscapes most people never get to see, and feeling oddly absent, like I was there, but not quite inside myself. Like I was witnessing my own life instead of inhabiting it.

It didn’t feel dramatic. It felt normal, busy, full, slightly overwhelming, slightly numbing, the kind of state you slip into without noticing, especially when everyone around you keeps telling you how lucky you are.

Over time, I stopped noticing how little space there was in my life. No real home, no consistent community, no unstructured time, no sense of internal rhythm. I didn’t know where I belonged, geographically or emotionally. I was always in motion, always producing, always saying yes, always thinking about what was next. I didn’t know who I was without a camera in my hands, or how to be unless I was performing some version of “Nat Geo Photographer.”

From the outside, I looked fearless, adventurous, tenacious.

From the inside, my body felt tired, and flat, and strangely far away from itself.

I drank a lot of caffeine and alcohol. I took antidepressants. I was praised for being resilient, for handling a lot, for keeping up with a life that looked, on paper, both impressive and enviable. But my nervous system never actually turned off.

And when the tension finally became too much, I would crash, sometimes for days, feeling empty and uninspired. Like someone had quietly turned down the volume on the world.

People kept telling me how great my life was, and I kept thinking, guiltily, why doesn’t it feel great to me?

I had achieved things I’d wanted since childhood: recognition, validation, a literal dream career. Still, I felt anxious and numb, haunted by this vague sense that something essential was missing, even though I couldn’t articulate what it was. I assumed it was a personal flaw, that I was lazy, ungrateful, or secretly incapable of being happy.

It took a global pandemic for the whole structure to collapse.

When COVID hit, there was suddenly no work, and therefore no identity to perform. I found myself living in my parents’ attic, with nowhere to go and nothing to distract myself with. For the first time in my adult life, I had to sit still.

I realized, slowly and a little painfully, that I didn’t actually know who I was, what I wanted, or how to be with myself unless I was achieving something.

This is the kind of burnout no one really talks about. Not the kind that comes from too many emails or too few boundaries, but the kind that comes from living too long in a state of quiet survival while calling it purpose.

It shows up a lot in people who work on the frontlines of conflict and collapse, war photographers, conservationists, journalists, activists, healers. People who are rewarded for being resilient while quietly overriding their own bodies every single day.

We tend to think of burnout as a problem of workload or time management, but what I’ve come to understand is that burnout isn’t really about how much you’re doing.

It’s about what your body has been carrying without ever being allowed to finish.

In the wild, stress is physical. An animal escapes a threat, its heart pounding, muscles firing, adrenaline flooding its system. And once the danger passes, it shakes, breathes, discharges the energy, and returns to baseline.

The stress cycle completes itself.

Humans don’t live that way. We sit still, we overthink, we scroll, we drink, we numb, we override. Maybe we even work harder, telling ourselves we’re fine.

So the stress never resolves. It just accumulates quietly in the body.

What I thought was a personal failure turned out to be biological. My nervous system had been in chronic activation for years, always scanning for what was next, always bracing, even in moments that looked successful from the outside.

I wasn’t burned out just because of my workload. I was burned out because my sense of self depended on staying in motion.

For most of my life, I believed I had to earn my place in the world.
Burnout was what happened when my body stopped agreeing.