The Shoe That Doesn't Fit

I’ve heard the word burnout thrown around so many times it has almost stopped meaning anything. It’s become a catch-all for any kind of overwhelm, and it has a shape to it that has never felt quite congruent to me.

Because what is it, really? Burnout is overwhelm. It’s the point where you can’t carry any more. You can’t do any more. You can’t be any more. In my practice I meet people at that point — though more often I meet them well past it, after they’ve already broken down. They reached what they called burnout, and then they arrived at being burnt out.

What sits underneath it is always the same thing: complete overwhelm. I’ve started calling it critical overwhelm, because that’s nearer the truth of it. And critical overwhelm never just arrives. It doesn’t turn up on a Tuesday morning with the milk. There is always a context, and the context is almost never one thing. It’s an accumulation — of being triggered, re-triggered, and triggered again; of having to face and reface things that go a long way back, often all the way to childhood.

What I see, again and again, is that people don’t break under the weight of the present. They break because something in the present reaches down and wakes up everything underneath it. The event in front of them isn’t the weight. It’s the thing that makes them suddenly aware of how much they were already carrying.

I want to be careful with the words childhood trauma too, because that’s another catch-all. People who actually understand it know it usually isn’t about one big, obvious event. Far more often it’s what we’d call complex trauma — a sequence of smaller things, sometimes so small they’re almost impossible to report. The steady experience of being unseen. Unheard. Invisible. Invalidated, over and over. Growing up somewhere you weren’t really loved or cared for in any way that landed. None of it makes a headline. But it accumulates, and it shapes how you feel — and because it shapes how you feel, it quietly shapes the decisions you make.

So you end up in a life that doesn’t quite fit. You make choices out of those old feelings and find yourself in situations that were never really yours. You learn how to live in them. You get good at it. But they don’t belong to you. They were adaptations, reactions, things you adopted to survive — not a true expression of who you are.

I think of it like a shoe that doesn’t fit. You put it on, it’s wrong, but you wear it anyway, for so long that you forget what your foot looked like before. And the foot does something remarkable and quietly terrible: it moulds itself to the shoe. It reshapes around the thing that doesn’t fit. Given enough time, a body will learn to live in almost any shape you force it into. That doesn’t mean the shape is right. It means the body adapted in order to survive it.

That is what childhood trauma does to an adult. You deform to fit. You become something you were never designed to be, because somewhere back there you were made to be something you’re not. And a misshapen foot can manage, more or less, as long as it’s only carrying itself. You can walk on it. You stop noticing. But the moment you start adding weight — and life always adds weight — the old malformation begins to hurt. Pile weight on top of weight, on a structure that was already bent out of shape, and sooner or later the pain becomes too much to stand on.

That is critical overwhelm. It is rarely the present load that breaks a person. It’s all the years of walking around bent into a shape that was never theirs, and then being asked to carry more.

So when you feel yourself getting close to that point — or if you know you’ve already gone past it — I don’t think the question is “why can’t I cope?” It’s quieter than that, and it goes much further down. Hold on a minute. What am I actually carrying here? Which part of me is malformed, and what has that been making me carry? What am I holding now that’s extra? What can I put down that was never mine to begin with — and what might I pick up that’s closer to who I really am?

Because the answer was never to force the foot back into the shoe and push through. It’s to take the shoe off. Maybe for the first time. And to learn, slowly, what it is to live without your shape being decided by something that never fit you in the first place.