I Couldn't Remember If I'd Washed My Hair. Yeah, It Got That Bad.

I was standing in the shower one morning, conditioner in one hand, and I could not remember if I'd already washed my hair. I hadn't slept more than three or four hours in over two weeks. Pushing against a deadline and scattered in every way imaginable. I was in the shower, but my mind was already at the office, building a strategy for how I was going to handle a hard conversation I knew was coming that day.

I was dumbfounded. I could have told you my grandmother's phone number, or the Latin declensions I had to memorize in high school, but whether I'd washed my hair thirty seconds ago was vapor. So I washed it again, just in case, and stood there letting the water run, wondering if I'd lost my mind.

I can laugh about it now, in the resigned way you laugh at something that was that bad. At the time I didn't even register it as a symptom. I filed it under "tired," got dressed, and answered forty-one emails before 9am.

Here's what I want to say about that, because I think a lot of women reading this are standing in their own version of that shower.

That blank moment was not a memory problem. I have a great memory. It was my brain running so far past capacity that the present moment, the actual washing of the actual hair, never got encoded, because nothing was getting encoded. I was so far into autopilot that I had become a person things happened around. The meetings happened around me. Dinner happened around me. My own shower happened around me. I slept through movies and cuddles with the kids. I was performing my entire life from somewhere just behind my own eyes, and I'd been doing it so long I'd stopped noticing there was a me back there at all.

This is the part nobody tells you about high-functioning burnout. It does not look like falling apart. I wasn't crying at my desk. My numbers were good. My reviews were good. From the outside I had it handled, and that is exactly why no one caught it, including me. The dangerous kind of burnout looks like competence. It looks like the woman who never drops the ball, because she has gotten so good at catching them that she does it on autopilot, with the lights off upstairs, washing her hair twice.

I used to think the fix was rest. A weekend. A vacation. I took the vacations. Most weekends were a lot of couch time and afternoon naps just to juice up for the next week, with no true catch-up.

The fix was not rest. Rest assumes the problem is fatigue. My problem was that I had built an entire life that required me to not be home in it. A life that only worked if I stayed on autopilot, because if I'd actually been present for it, awake and counting the cost, I'd have had to admit it didn't fit me anymore. The blank shower wasn't my brain failing. It was my brain protecting me from a life I couldn't afford to fully feel.

I don't live that way now. I notice when I'm washing my hair. That sounds like nothing, and it is the whole thing.

If you read this and felt a little caught, the question worth sitting with is not how do I rest more. It's whether the tired is actually tired, or whether it's something underneath the tired that no weekend is ever going to touch.

I made a short quiz for exactly that question, the Golden Handcuffs Quiz. It's free, and it's quiet, and the day after you take it I'll send you a short audio I recorded called "Is It Exhaustion, or Misalignment?" The Golden Handcuffs Quiz is here if you want it.