Sara Sweat, MA – Founder, Monarch
I remember feeling eerily disoriented after doing press in a live webinar.
Everyone said it went well. My colleagues were pleased. The attendees had asked good questions and kept us over time. By every measurable standard, it had been a success.
But I could not remember a single word I had said.
Not one. It was a complete blank. An hour of my own voice, my own expertise, my own carefully developed professional perspective — gone. Like someone had walked into the room and quietly removed it while I wasn’t paying attention.
Now, I am someone who can walk into any room and read it with ease. Leveraging skills I built through dozens of traumatic experiences and subsequent years of trauma healing, I have honed a particular set of skills. A combination of strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, and communication instinct that’ve been with me for as long as I can remember.
Webinars like this were my playground. Just the right blend of unpredictability to keep me on my game, but in my wheelhouse enough that I am always in the zone.
Whenever we wrapped a session like this, I loved debriefing – assessing what had worked well, reviewing what could have gone better, and coming up with strategies for next time. But, this time, I didn’t even have access to the event.
I had no clue where I had been for the last hour. Not. One. Clue.
I called my colleague. What did I say in there?
He laughed, assuming I was being self-deprecating. But, I wasn’t. I genuinely needed the information. I had shown up, performed, delivered — and left no trace of it in my own mind.
That was the moment I knew something was very wrong.
What Just Happened?
The thing I relied on. The thing I trusted absolutely. The safety net I’d built on survival skills – the one that was always there when I stepped off the ledge professionally – was suddenly gone.
I had built an entire career on the unique “edge” my life experiences had created. Over twenty years in big rooms, high stakes, challenging environments. I was far from perfect – but I had never once doubted my ability to think clearly, speak precisely, and move mountains when it really mattered.
That’s why this moment threw me so much. I didn’t even know what to call it.
Some kind of temporary amnesia? An early sign of dementia? Some kind of extreme dissociation?
I didn’t know it at the time, but this sudden disconnection from myself was the final symptom of a slow and persistent burnout.
I thought burnout looked like it does in memoirs. Crying on the bathroom floor. Dramatic pleas for help. Finally snapping and flying into a violent rage.
But mine looked, at least from the outside, exactly like everything else I had ever done — competent, composed, strong.
But inside, it was as unfamiliar a landscape as I’d ever traversed.
I imagine it’s something like what Grammy award winning singer Celine Dion must have felt when she lost her voice to a mysterious illness called Stiff Person Syndrome. It wasn’t like she delivered a bad performance. She didn’t have an off night.
Her voice – the thing that propelled her to stardom itself — the specific, irreplaceable thing that was just there when she woke up every morning, the thing she never once had to question — was suddenly, inexplicably gone.
My leadership skills are not Celine Dion level awesome – but they are equally core to my being. They are how I go through the world. How I keep myself safe and solid and in control.
But, in that moment, I wasn’t in control anymore. The very thing that made me…me…had exited the building and I was the only one who even knew.
A Disclosure
I think it’s time I disclose that, in my opinion, the first four seasons of The West Wing are just about as good as TV will ever be. And, it has been my experience that there is a scene from the West Wing for just about every situation in life.
There’s one I kept coming back to – when, after decades of surviving my way to success, I finally burned out. This scene is as close as I can come to articulating what burnout looked like for me.
President Bartlet’s daughter has just been kidnapped. They have no idea what’s happened to her. Is it local crime? A foreign government? A terrorist attack? It’s blind chaos everywhere. Bartlet is debriefed by his military advisors in the Situation Room and as he exits, he sits down on the steps with his Chief of Staff, Leo.
“Leo, please listen to me. Did Fitz give me target recommendations a little while ago?”
“Yes, sir. He wants to attack the bases…”
“I don’t remember having the conversation and I don’t know what targets he wants to hit. Did I green light the targets?”
“Of course not.”, Leo encourages him. He reminds the President of his strong and capable team, and reassures him that he’s not going to hurt anybody.
Bartlet tells Leo that none of that matters because he no longer trusts himself. The turmoil in his personal life has so disordered him, so robbed him of the skills that make him fit to be President. That make him competent in his own eyes – that he cannot in good conscience keep going.
He invokes the twenty fifth amendment of the constitution and temporarily transfers the power of his office to someone else.
That was me. Standing outside my situation room, asking someone else to tell me what I had just said.
And, like the fictional character before me, I invoked my own kind of 25th amendment. I stepped back. Because for the first time in my adult life, whatever was required to push through was simply not there.
How Did We Get Here?
The bomb that went off in my personal life a few weeks before the webinar wasn’t as dramatic as an episode of prime time TV, but it rattled me to my core just the same.
I won’t give the details or the person any space here, because neither deserves it. But, suffice it to say, I was served up an act of betrayal so complete that something fundamental in me, simply cracked. Something I hadn’t known could be destroyed.
It made me question my belief that I could read people. That my instincts were sound. It made me doubt that I even knew, at the most basic level, who was safe and who was not.
Those instincts had kept me alive since I was a child. And suddenly I didn’t trust them at all. I didn’t trust myself at all.
In the face of all that distrust, I had no idea what to do. So, I kept going, because that’s what had always worked before. Just “suck it up, Sweat” and get on with it.
I kept showing up. Kept supporting my child. Kept doing webinars and acting like the world wasn’t completely out of focus.
Until I couldn’t.
I thought stepping back from my role as an executive would give me the perspective I needed to get my legs under me again. But, the break I was envisioning was not in the cards.
At that time, I had been the primary caregiver for my eighty three year old stepfather for several years. Jim, was a brilliant and caring man who bore a rare and progressive blood disorder similar to leukemia with quiet determination and joy.
The disease had created a slow decline, robbing him of energy and isolating him from the travel and exploration he loved. But, he was stable. He was okay.
Then he fell in his apartment. He spent two weeks in the hospital – unable to regain the strength needed to go back home. Standard rehab facilities couldn’t handle his special needs and skilled nursing facilities were all booked up.
I spent hours on the phone with social workers, nursing homes, rehab coordinators, nurses, and his oncologist. It was a privilege to help shepherd him through this time. Genuinely. I loved him and I was grateful to be of some help.
But I was also doing it alone, while solo parenting a grade schooler, with my own personal world loudly collapsing around me.
I got him settled into a good facility and took him to his doctor’s office and the hospital to get life saving blood transfusions once or twice a week. One afternoon, on my way to pick him up for one such visit I called to tell him I was almost there.
He answered the phone and said the words no child wants to hear from their vulnerable aging parent.
“Oh, I’m so glad you called.”, he said. “This nice lady from Venmo found out someone was trying to steal my money and I’m giving her all my account information so she can help me get it back.”
He was being scammed. In real time.
What followed was one of the more surreal hours of my life. I started grabbing the laptop out of his hands and resetting all of his passwords. I called his banks and canceled his credit cards all while the scammer kept trying to reengage and take control of his laptop again.
While attempting to stop this financial bleeding, I also wheeled him out to the car and escorted him to his doctor’s appointment to stop his actual bleeding. I didn’t have a choice. We had to go get bloodwork done and get an order from his oncologist to get him checked in for the transfusion he desperately needed. Every transfusion was literally life or death.
I sat in the doctors office – working both my phone and my stepfather’s laptop at the same time – context switching from health care to credit cards to banks – all while rushing through our clinical tasks to get it all done before my son got home from school.
By some miracle, we got it all handled. Catastrophe was averted. I had held it all together one more time and saved my stepfather from the loss.
Then, two days later, he died.
Broken Open
I have thought a lot about those last few days of my stepfather’s life. About the particular cruelty of doing everything right and still losing the one thing you were trying to protect.
I think about how familiar that feeling was. How many times I had held everything together and still ended up standing in the rubble anyway.
But, the truth is that some things cannot be held together. No matter how capable you are. No matter how fast you move or how hard you work or how perfectly you execute the plan.
Sometimes, everything happens all at once – and nothing can stop the tsunami of life from overpowering your world.
I think that’s what finally broke me open.
Not the betrayal. Not the illness. Not the exhaustion or the disconnection or the webinar – or any of the dozens of physical symptoms that had been compiling for months.
All of it. All at once. Sweeping away a foundation that had been quietly cracking for years.
For the first time in my life, I couldn’t get back to solid ground. I couldn’t hold it together. I just couldn’t make it work.
So, I stopped. I stopped pushing, stopped performing, stopped trying to out-execute the pain. And, I surrendered.
I had spent my entire life believing stopping meant failure. But, in finally letting go, I found something I did not expect.
Peace.
Clarity.
Truth.
I wasn’t ashamed. I wasn’t angry. I couldn’t even properly numb. I didn’t have the energy to be anything more than present.
One moment. One experience. One quiet question at a time.
The question that kept rising?
Why, after everything I’ve learned and outrun and accomplished – does it still feel like I’m just surviving my life?
What Now?
That question is why I’m writing here each week.
That question is why Monarch exists.
Because I’m not the only top performer living like they’re being chased by lion. I’m not the only trauma survivor who has that question burning a hole in their pocket.
If you’re a high achiever who’s been through hard things, I’d imagine you are, too.
Maybe you haven’t asked it out loud yet. Maybe you’ve been too busy holding everything together to even let it surface.
Maybe your skills haven’t ghosted you yet. Maybe your body’s warning signals are manageable enough to ignore. Maybe the tools you’ve always used to navigate the world still feel trustworthy – at least some of the time.
But, the cracks are starting to show. You’ve started to have doubts. You’re starting to feel the ground shifting beneath you and you don’t know what’s going to happen next.
If that’s you – please hear the experience in my voice.
This is not the kind of thing that gets better on its own. You can’t schedule a vacation or take a day off and achieve the kind of reset that alters the trajectory of your path.
Foundational cracks like these can’t be repaired – they must be rebuilt. You’ve outgrown the system that saved you & are being invited to create something entirely new.
Stop being afraid of cracking open. As songwriter Leonard Cohen said…”that’s how the light gets in”.
Breaking is not the opposite of the achievement. It’s the origin story of your impact.
Surrender of the way you got here is not a failure – but the start of something you have never let yourself be before.
Alive.
Really, truly, alive. Not surviving. Living.
The question on the other side of the breaking is not how do I go back? How do I return to what I once was?
It’s what comes next? Who is it finally time to become?
That’s what we’re figuring out together, here. I don’t have all the answers and I won’t ever pretend that I do.
But, I’m learning how to live on the other side of survival. And, the view from here? It’s pretty freaking fantastic.
I’m architecting my after from here. I’m building the skills that get me even better results than I got by surviving. And, they don’t cost me my peace, my presence, or my joy.
For the first time ever, I’m living my life instead of surviving it. And, my only regret is that I waited this long to try.
So, this week – I want to invite you to consider where you are in your burnout journey. To examine the foundation of your life and really see the growing cracks.
Is there a question you’ve been too busy to ask yourself? One that keeps surfacing in the quiet moments and getting pushed back down by the next thing on the list?
Is there a symptom you’ve been ignoring? A quiet signal that has you worried about what’s coming next?
Write it down. You don’t have to answer it yet. But, let your own honest observation be a release valve for all that pressure that’s been building up inside.
Burnout doesn’t have to happen before you get to enjoy your life. You don’t have to break before you begin.
Listen to the cry of your life while it’s still a whisper. And, together, let’s decide where you want to go next.
Monarch is coaching and community for high-achieving trauma survivors who are done surviving their lives. If this landed, share it with someone who seems like they have it all together — and looks a little too tired.
