I burned out three times before I asked the right question.

I quit my corporate job after almost ten years, completely exhausted. I remember a scene at 2 am in the morning, I was supposed to log in on a telco (this is 2011) and I have a 4 digit pin in front of me which I cannot enter. It doesn't work. I think it's the PIN but in fact the PIN is perfect. I am just out of my mind tired and do not manage to enter the PIN correctly. I sat in front of my blackberry crying. Feeling like the biggest loser on the planet. Two years later, I was let go from a startup. A company I didn't fit in which I knew already from the very first job interview. But I came in as the hero, thinking I could make things right. Convince them of my values and my way of doing things. I was wrong and my pride took a serious hit when I was fired (together with the CEO who hired me, it was a pretty big thing at the time and it was clearly not personal, but then: what is less personal than getting fired in the eye of the person who is getting sacked?) Then I worked with my husband for a while, until Covid kind of closed my niche. A year after that, I filed for bankruptcy as the CEO of a nonprofit. A nonprofit created by someone who rushed to leave the country and left behind a total and utter mess. Nothing was in order on any level: financially, legally, HR-wise. And still, I couldn't let go, I fought with my blood & sweat until I sat crying in front of a judge who was determining the cause of the bankruptcy.

Three industries. Three sets of leadership. Three completely different circumstances.

Same ending, every time. Total exhaustion.

The feeling I had given everything and it was still not enough.

Why do I keep burning out? I never let myself ask.

For a long time I filed each one under its own explanation. The corporate job ran on military-style demands I couldn't keep meeting. The startup moved too fast for the structure it never built. The nonprofit inherited problem

s years before I walked in.

All true. None of it was the whole story.

Here's the part I didn't see until the third time: I never once asked why I kept ending up back in the same place, run into the ground, in rooms that had nothing in common except me.

I grew up believing employment was safety. Not as something I decided. It was the only model I'd ever seen. My father worked for the same company for 45 years. Building something of my own wasn't a choice I turned down. It never occurred to me it was a choice at all.

So every time a job asked more of me than it should have, I gave it anyway. Delivering more felt like advancing my career, not like danger. The belief that leaving was riskier than staying was invisible to me. It didn't feel like a belief. It felt like reality.

Three environments taught me the same lesson eventually.

The circumstances kept changing. I didn't.

I'm not telling you this so you feel sorry for the version of me that kept ending up back there. I'm telling you because I built something of my own after the third time, not because I finally found the right job or the right industry. I built it because I stopped asking what was wrong with the workplace and started asking what was running underneath me every time I walked into one.

If this is the third time a completely different situation has ended the exact same way, it's worth asking the same question I did.

Take the space. Love, Angela

Know someone in the middle of their third one? Send them this.