Is this my American Dream? Burning out?

Burn out. It’s real. I have experienced it. And like many others, it came unexpectedly, like a punch to the gut, rendering me motionless on the cold bathroom floor of a fancy boutique hotel in Las Vegas. Okay, maybe I wasn’t quite motionless or on the bathroom floor but I was in Vegas and was most certainly in a hotel room whaling uncontrollably. The tears were so big and came so freely that my shirt, my hair and my entire face was drenched. My eyes glassy with cartoon sized water drops waiting to free fall with the next blink. I was completely devastated, physically, emotionally and spiritually.

Through my tears, I lashed out, verbally cursing myself AND my father (who’s dead by the way). Of course, no one could hear me, and if they had, they would certainly have called security. The desperation in my voice was real.

How had I let myself get here? How could I be such a fool? Why did I continue to push myself so hard and so far?

There was no one else to blame. The blame was ALL mine.

I was the fuel. The fuel that ignited the fire that blazed through the last 18 years of my professional and personal life.

The visual was so clear to me now. I was the fire stoker, throwing briquettes into the steam engine, willing it to burn hotter, the ship to move faster, in a race to the finish. But the finish line kept moving. Yet the stoker couldn’t stop, he couldn’t let the fire go out. Little did he know the wave was about to crash, a wave so big, it would surely destroy them all. The fire, the steam engine, the ship and the stoker himself.

One might think it was the 10+ hours standing in the unforgiving 100-degree heat, ensuring a client's program was executed flawlessly, which led to my meltdown. But that would be letting myself off lightly.

I had experienced this type of raw emotion before, in fact it was approximately 4 years to the day since I had found myself in a similar position, in a beautiful bathroom, this time in L.A. Earlier that morning I had received a phone call that my terminally ill father had been rushed to a hospital in Germany. He had experienced a life-threatening esophageal bleed. This was serious. We knew it. It had happened before. And our luck was running out. Doctor Death was knocking at the door and I could feel his piercing chill in sunny California. And so with 6,000 miles between us, I started to feel the gravity of losing my father.

The man who meant so much to our family, to our friends and our community.

The man I had learned everything from. How to dream big, how to will things into action, how to manifest what it was you wanted in life. The man who essentially sent me off into the world to achieve…

But that’s just it. To achieve what? Achieve success? Dad had never actually defined success for me and so I filled in the gaps.

Success meant professional growth, corporate and industry recognition, constant forward momentum, goal setting, and ceiling breaking. It also meant financial achievement, salary milestones, bonus incentives, and wealth accumulation.

All sounds pretty focused, right? But at what expense?

As I crouched over the bathroom sink 4 years prior in L.A. and now curled in a ball on the king-sized bed of a Las Vegas hotel room, I found myself shouting out loud, “ Dad why did you make me this way, why can’t I stop? What is so important that it is worth all of this?”

Silence.

No answer

Of course, there was no answer. There never is. It’s called burn out.

Check out My American Reality. Earn Out Before You Burn Out!