I’m a senior lawyer / have been suffering from burn out for the past year or so. I think I wanted this job long term for a while but I don’t even recall specifically when it all hit me. Last summer I had an incident where I got so stressed from people freaking out over holiday weekend and thought I need to be hit by a car and be hospitalized so I can get a break. I somehow powered through that phase and here I am, a year later, still at this job.
Some days I feel fine. Actually, most days of the week I feel okay enough, and the days just go by so chaotically that I don’t even have the time to complain. But I cry at home after I get things out the door, at least once a week. And on the weekends when I’m not even working or when there is no specific trigger, sometimes I just start crying for hours — and that’s once every weekend or every other weekend.
I’ve been wondering what is normal when people have these high intensity jobs. But crying once or twice every week because of work cannot be normal, right? Or… is it? I feel so mentally exhausted and find no joy in life these days. I am just always dreading the next day.
At work I am seemingly happy enough. I am also not bad, maybe even quite good, at my job. I’ve never just quit anything so I think it’s hard for me to accept that I am at a mental state where I can no longer handle this job and the deal work anymore. The— need to stay up at all hours and if juniors or midlevels have peaced out, I need to just do it, noone ever being grateful when things are going well but everyone yapping with snarky comments when one thing doesn’t go well, waking up and needing to scan emails the second I open my eyes… everything.
It’s hard to go on leave at my firm let alone use a vacation. For reasons I won’t go into detail here FMLA is not really something I am looking into.
I am thinking of quitting with nothing lined up. It scares me that I will forever ruin my career but people close to me who have seen me have all been telling me that I need to take a step back and cure the burnout. Would that be so reckless? I am leaning towards pulling the trigger.