The Burnout - confessions of a workaholic

"Stay focused," my husband just said as he found me making a necklace in the art room.
I' was in there placing some bits and bobs on on my artroom table when the glint of green beckoned me to string more beads.
Flit. Flit. Flit.
Yes, I'm so easily distracted because everything interests me.
I teach and write for WITT, our local polytech, and I'm forever interviewing students about their courses and dreams. Then I find myself thinking: "Hmm, I could do that, I could do that."
But I just know in my heart of hearts that I'm not a nurse, a computer technician, a social worker, an electrician or an engineer. Then I seriously think about doing the art courses and the photography. You get the picture - I want to do it all.
The truth is I'm a writer; a storyteller.
So let's tell you a tale.
In 2006, a female journalist is doing a phone interview with an artist she knows from the past.
He tells her all about his latest project; what it's all about and why he's made these sculptures.
She gets off the phone and realises with a sick feeling: "I didn't understand anything he just said to me."
The journalist then feels her head explode, as if it is filled with tiny neon lights. She stands up from her desk, tells the chief reporter she feels sick and goes home. She never goes back.
A week later, this vivacious, never-lost-for-words woman can barely speak.
She has sunk into a depression so deep that the crisis team is called. She is admitted to the psychiatric ward of her local hospital and put on suicide watch. All night a man with a dragon tattoo on his arm checks on her.
She sleeps and sleeps.
In this place of unwell people, her faculties return. She can think again, talk again and she draws it all. Using bright coloured felt pens she let's it all out.
As she sits there finding relief in art, other ill people come to her. They sit, tell their stories and she listens to their anguish, pain, fear and sadness.
A young man just wants a girl to love; a beautiful woman has to contact her man every few minutes to see if he's OK; an elderly woman wants to climb tall buildings; a businessman has lost himself in mania; another young man won't eat food because he believes it's poisonous and then there is "radio man", who talks constantly to his ancestors.
The journalist understands then that her mental illness is temporary. It's from working 60- to 80-hour each week for months on end and she just needs to rest, to regain her sanity with serenity.
There are chunks of this time that she can't remember, but she does know that she feels stripped bare, right down to the place of asking: "Who am I? What do I stand for? What do I believe?"
The answer is: Love.
She finds peace inside by walking on Back Beach with the dog and talking to the spirits of her parents, by caring for her children, husband and a French exchange student. Her brother, sister and close friends are rocks. A dear friend offers her a part-time job, another helps her with an arduous task and a young occupational therapist teaches her about the power of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).
Slowly, the mother, sister, daughter in-law, friend and woman of joy returns to her bouncy, vivacious self and starts to write again.
That woman was me.
This year, I have been close to collapse again, but I have stopped just in time.
So this pledge of mine, isn't just about losing weight and getting fit; it's about finding peace again, living a life of great joy with balance and time for everything.
And what joy. Yay for today!!!