I want to tell you how I learned that the armor is real, which is that mine failed. I had spent about ten years in software, in the dissociation — that is the only honest word for it — of being very good at a thing that asked me to not be in my body at all. And the failure did not arrive as a crisis. It arrived as a slope. I got slower. I stumbled more — not on the floor, on the work, on the simplest tasks, the way you stumble over a word you have said ten thousand times. And one day I stumbled and I could not get back up, so I lay down. I lay down for four months.
The floor is not a metaphor and it is not nothing. It is a place, with its own geography, and if you are on it right now I do not want to lie to you about it by making it sound like either failure or rest. It was neither, and it was stranger than both.
For the first time in my life I had nothing to do and no one telling me I had to do it. I could just be — and it turned out I had no idea how. It was profoundly disorienting. I cried a few times. I went through several entire existential crises without leaving my own head. Mostly I was inert. Some days Erin had a shift at a coffee shop and I would ride along just to be somewhere; they had a couch and a guitar, and I would pluck at the guitar and read. That is where I finally read Reich, all of him — The Sexual Revolution, Character Analysis, The Mass Psychology of Fascism — borrowed from the Redmond public library a few blocks away. So the man whose diagnosis runs through this whole chapter, I met for real while I was lying on the floor he was describing, by way of a public library that handed a broken stranger the most dangerous books in its catalog for free. The commons producing, as it does, something well in excess of what it was funded to produce. I studied ferociously, when I studied at all — esoteric Buddhism, Western and Chinese herbalism, Reich's somatotherapy. The mind that had collapsed at work would not collapse at this; it had only ever refused the thing it was being spent on.
Other days I stayed home. We lived in the woods on five acres, with a very small flock of chickens, every one of them named. They taught me bird language as much as any human ever has. I cooked. I wrote music. I did not have to carry water, but I chopped a great deal of wood. Many days we walked the valley trails — old railroad grades, the grade so gentle because a train once needed it to be — and somewhere out on one of them I caught myself asking, with genuine confusion, is this what it's like to be retired?
The cognitive dissonance was blinding. From the outside, from inside the career frame, my life had ended. I was done, finished, a cautionary tale. From where I actually stood, my life had just begun — or resumed, as if it had been waiting under the other one the whole time. And I have to be honest about why I got the gentle version of the floor, because not everyone does and the difference is not virtue. It helped that we had been aggressively building a nest egg for years. It helped that it was burnout and not a medical emergency that put me down. It helped enormously that I was in 2015 Seattle and not 2020 Norfolk. I was very, very lucky, and a reader on a harder floor than mine should hear me say it plainly: the five acres and the named chickens are not the lesson. They were the cushioning. The lesson is underneath the cushion, and the reason I am willing to spend this many words on my own soft landing is that the lesson is available even to the people who land hard — maybe especially to them, though they pay more to learn it.
Here is the lesson. The floor can be quite comfortable, once you abandon the desire to get off it and give yourself room to be curious about what it is actually like down there. It is not so bad. It can be peaceful. It can be lonely. Sometimes it is dark. But very, very often it is full of life, and full of light. I had cannabis, which helped me stop fighting the floor long enough to actually look at it. And what I found when I looked was the thing that still costs me the most to admit: the most painful part of the floor was never being down there. It was realizing how long I had held myself up — up and away from all that life and light — and called the holding a career, and called the exhaustion strength.
So what I can tell you with certainty is that it was not laziness, and it was not depression in the way the word gets used to mean a passing mood. It was a body that had finally refused — and underneath the refusal, once the holding stopped, was not only a person who could not stand up. It was also a person who, for the first time in his adult life, did not have to. I had mistaken strength for rigidity. I still do, sometimes; it is a hard habit to break. But the strength was never the holding. The strength was the thing the holding had been quietly eating the whole time.
Burnout is not the failure of desire. It is desire meeting a structure too small for it.
When the board left the solidarity vote off the agenda, the desiring production stopped. The flow met a wall. That is what burnout is. Not depleted desire. Blocked desire.