"For months, I kept telling myself I was just tired. Regular tired. The kind of tired you fix with a good night's sleep and maybe a WFH power nap between meetings. But one random Tuesday, as I stared blankly at my laptop trying to decipher a three-sentence Slack message like it was hieroglyphics, it hit me: This wasn't normal fatigue. My mind was cooked."
"It showed up subtly, in little ways that I dismissed. I'd reread emails multiple times because the words refused to connect in my mind. I had the attention span of a goldfish. I'd get irrationally annoyed by people asking me perfectly reasonable questions. I was just... over it."
"The breaking point wasn't cinematic. I was in a brainstorming session when I realized my mind felt blank. I managed to offer a few contributions to the meeting, but they were all cliché rehashes, none of the outside-of-the-box ideas I'd usually bring to the table. I felt like Charles Barkley in Space Jam after the Monstars stole the NBA players' skills - like a whole scrub."
A Black employee in corporate America experiences relentless exhaustion that standard rest cannot fix. The fatigue begins as subtle cognitive slips—rereading emails, an inability to process brief messages, brittle attention, and irritability—but escalates to blank-mindedness in meetings and a loss of original ideas. Fear of appearing overwhelmed as one of few Black staff and anxiety about layoffs compel continued overwork and self-blame. Short time off and a change of scenery fail to resolve the mental depletion. The workload remains unending, making the promise of resting later a recurring, unmet excuse and deepening chronic burnout.
Read at Fast Company
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