I Couldn't Walk to the Letterbox

And other fun facts about what burnout actually looks like when it comes for you properly.

There's a version of the burnout story I could tell you.

The one that's tidy. The one that has a clear arc — struggle, rock bottom, breakthrough, redemption. The one that ends with me standing in golden light saying "and now I help other women do the same."

That version is technically true. But it leaves out the part where I had to hold onto the furniture to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen. It leaves out the vomiting. The complete inability to parent my own children. The feeling of being so raw and so disconnected from my own body that existing felt like too much.

So let's tell that version instead.

The thing about burnout is that it doesn't announce itself.

It doesn't arrive with a dramatic scene where you collapse in a heap and someone catches you. It's quieter than that. It's years of quietly sacrificing yourself. Years of being the good girl, the capable one, the one who holds it all together. Years of people-pleasing and self-silencing and swallowing your own needs because — god forbid — you inconvenience someone.

For me, a huge piece of it was guilt. I wasn't in paid work. I was a full-time mum. And somewhere along the way, I internalised the message that this wasn't enough — that because I wasn't bringing in money, I had to earn my place in some other way. So I became Supermum. Completely enmeshed. Carrying everything. Asking for nothing. Performing capability so convincingly that I almost convinced myself.

My body was less easily fooled.

In 2023, multiple physical systems just... stopped working.

I want you to really hear this because I think we throw "burnout" around a lot and it can start to sound like a fancy word for tired. This was not tired.

I couldn't walk to the letterbox. I had to hold onto furniture to move around the house. I was vomiting. I felt insanely raw — like all my nerve endings were on the outside of my skin. I was so disconnected from myself I could barely string a conversation together. I couldn't look after my girls. I couldn't do basically anything that a functioning human is supposed to be able to do.

That's what happens when you spend years overriding your body's signals. Eventually it stops asking and just takes over.

Recovery was not a vibe.

It wasn't green smoothies and journalling and learning to say no. Well — it was some of that. But mostly it was confronting, uncomfortable, ego-dismantling work on the patterns that had driven me here in the first place. The people-pleasing. The self-sacrifice. The compulsive good-girl-ness that meant I genuinely didn't know how to exist without performing for other people's comfort.

That's the bit nobody tells you about burnout recovery. The physical stuff — you can manage that. Rest, support, time, the right practitioners. But until you deal with the why, you're just waiting for your body to crash again. And it will. Mine still does — any time stress spikes or I let my self-care slip, the physical symptoms flare to remind me. My body is very much still the boss.

I still can't exercise. I function normally in most ways now, but that one's still off the table. Which, as a person who used to use exercise as a coping mechanism (read: another way to override my body), is probably the universe being funny.

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Here's what's changed.

I know who I am when I'm not performing. I've stopped self-silencing in relationships. I've stopped making myself smaller so other people feel more comfortable. I've stopped pretending I'm fine when I'm not, which — if you knew me before — is genuinely remarkable.

My nervous system is not the same nervous system it was in 2023. I've done enough of the work that my baseline is different. Calmer. More grounded. Less like a phone running twelve apps and sitting at four percent battery.

I'm not recovered in a way that means I never have hard days. I'm not on the other side of some mountain looking back serenely. I'm still in it — just differently. More consciously. With way better tools and significantly less martyrdom.

The reason I'm telling you all of this — and writing it here, publicly, in a newsletter called The Messy Middle — is because I spent years consuming content from people who had it figured out.

Coaches who were healed. Experts who were well. Voices that came from a place of "I used to struggle but now I'm sorted and here's how you can be too."

And I think that narrative, as well-intentioned as it is, accidentally makes the rest of us feel like we're behind. Like healing is a destination you arrive at and unpack your bags and that's it, you're done.

It's not. Or at least mine isn't.

Mine is ongoing. It flares. It asks things of me constantly. And I've built a whole business in the middle of it — not because I'm fully recovered, but because this is the work I'm most alive in. Because I understand something about the inside of burnout that you can only understand from having been there properly.

Not metaphorically. Holding-onto-the-furniture properly.

If any of this sounds familiar — not the dramatic physical bit necessarily, but the patterns underneath it — I'd love to hear from you. Reply to this, or find me over at Insta - @mama_knows_coaching - I'm always here.

Sally x

Written by Sally Dawson — motherhood coach, mum of two, person who is healing out loud and refuses to pretend otherwise.