The Moment it Stops Holding

Part 2 of 5 • When Your Life No Longer Fits 

By the time I began to recognize that something was wrong, I had already become very good at functioning through it.

I was tired, but still working. Overwhelmed, but still showing up. Increasingly disconnected from the life I was living, but still moving through it as though nothing fundamental had changed.

For a while, that was enough to convince me I was okay.

Because there is a strange kind of reassurance in still being able to function.

If you can answer the emails, make the meetings, meet the deadlines, keep the commitments, then whatever you are feeling cannot be that bad.

Or at least, that was what I told myself.

But eventually, the signals became harder to contain.

The pressure that had once existed quietly in the background stopped switching off.

Then came the exhaustion.

Not the kind that follows a particularly demanding week and disappears after a few nights of sleep. Something more persistent. A tiredness that seemed to settle into everything.

And then sleep itself began to disappear.

Some nights, I would wake at three or four in the morning, check the clock, calculate how many hours remained before I had to get up, and become increasingly aware that I was going to begin another day already depleted.

Other nights, I didn't sleep at all.

There is a particular kind of despair in going to bed at night and still being awake when you hear the first birds begin to chirp outside.

The room slowly getting lighter. The rest of the world beginning another day when, for you, the last one never really ended.

And then you get up anyway.

You shower. You open your laptop. You join the meeting. You answer the email. You continue.

That was perhaps one of the strangest parts of burnout for me: how unwell I could feel while still appearing, from the outside, to be functioning.

Until eventually, even functioning became harder.

Small decisions required more energy. Things I had previously handled without thinking started to feel disproportionately difficult. My patience shortened. My ability to recover disappeared.

I was still carrying everything. It was simply taking more and more of me to do it.

My life had not suddenly become impossible.

My capacity to carry it had changed.

And because I had spent so much of my life believing that resilience meant continuing, my instinct was not to stop.

It was to adjust.

By then, I had already started seeing a therapist. We had spent time trying to understand what wasn't working and what might make things feel more sustainable. Eventually, part of that work led me to a different role within the same company.

It felt like a thoughtful response to what I was experiencing. A way to address some of the misalignment without abandoning a career and a life I had spent years building.

And for a while, I genuinely hoped it would help.

But the underlying exhaustion came with me.

The role changed, but the tension didn't.

That doesn't mean the change was wrong. If anything, it showed me something I wasn't yet ready to see.

I was still trying to find a version of this life that I could remain inside.

Then, over the course of a single week, everything accelerated.

My grandfather died.

I took a few days away from work to grieve.

And when I returned, something happened that changed everything.

It was the Thursday before Easter.

I'd been looking forward to the long weekend. Four whole days away from work. Four days to rest, to recover, to have a little space to myself.

But that afternoon, a single conversation at work left me with the overwhelming sense that the security I'd spent years building was suddenly at risk.

And not just professionally.

For years, I'd worked to build a career and a life in Germany. And suddenly, I was confronting the possibility that I could lose both.

There are details of that conversation I won't go into here. But I remember exactly how I felt when it ended.

For so long, I'd been trying to make sense of a feeling I couldn't quite explain.

This was different.

For the first time, there was a moment I could point to.

I'd been counting down the days until I could finally rest.

Instead, that Thursday night, I stopped sleeping.

By Easter Sunday, I was running on almost no sleep.

I remember it was a beautiful day. The kind of spring Sunday that makes you want to be outside, enjoying the sunshine and the first real signs of a new season.

Instead, I was sitting inside my apartment, on the phone with my mom, sobbing.

I felt so uncomfortable in my own skin that I barely knew what to do with myself.

Even now, with all the distance I've gained from that moment, it makes me sad to remember how I felt.

There is something deeply unsettling about being that exhausted. When you've gone so long without sleep, even the ordinary experience of being in your own body can begin to feel unbearable.

I called my therapist.

She told me to come to her house.

So I did.

She had been there through much of what came before. In fact, we had worked together to help me find the role I was now in.

And now, on Easter Sunday, I was sitting in her home, completely depleted, trying to explain just how untenable everything had become.

I was frightened about what might happen next. About my job, my ability to remain in Germany, and the possibility that the life I'd worked so hard to build might be slipping out from underneath me.

And she believed me.

There was something strangely clarifying about that.

After so long spent questioning my own experience and wondering whether I was somehow failing to cope with a life I had previously been able to manage, someone else was acknowledging just how serious things had become.

I didn't have to convince her. I didn't have to explain it away.

And somehow, through the exhaustion and the tears, we laughed.

Because there was something almost viciously funny about it.

We had worked together to find this role. It was supposed to be the escape hatch. The thoughtful adjustment that might make things sustainable again.

And somehow, the escape hatch had caught fire too.

It wasn't funny, of course. But it was also completely absurd.

After all the careful adjustments, all the attempts to find a version of this life that I could keep carrying, here we were.

There was nothing left to optimize.

She wrote me off work immediately for two weeks.

Those two weeks would eventually become nine months of sick leave, a return to the same role I wasn't quite ready for, and another six months of mounting pressure and seemingly endless uncertainty.

But that is another story.

What mattered that Easter Sunday was this:

I stopped.

Not because I had carefully decided that this chapter of my life was over. Not because I had a plan or knew what I wanted instead.

I stopped because I could no longer continue.

And I think that is what a breaking point means to me now.

It isn't necessarily the moment when you finally understand exactly what is wrong or know what should replace it.

Sometimes it is simply the moment when the ways you have always managed to keep going no longer work.

That Easter Sunday, I still didn't know what came next.

But I knew that once I took that sick leave, there was no way I could return to that role on a permanent basis.

I didn't yet know how or when that chapter would actually end. I didn't know what would happen with my job, my visa, whether I would remain in Germany, or what my life might look like on the other side of any of it.

I just knew I could no longer return to the same life and carry on as before.

Something had ended before I was ready to say what would replace it.

I can see that moment much more clearly now.

That was the moment it stopped holding.

The life I had been trying so hard to hold together was no longer holding me.

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