When your body says no more, I am done: A letter to your exhausted self

Burnout in ADHD, LGBTQ and French expatriates

A letter to you, my exhausted client,

You told me about the numbness. Then, you told me about the pain.

And I want you to know that pain did not come from nowhere. It grew from years of carrying things you were never meant to carry alone, from the harm that was done to you, whatever form it took. And sometimes the body stops pretending.

When the body has had enough...

There is a tiredness that sleep does not touch. It's heavier than fatigue, older than last month. It is the exhaustion of living against your own grain for so long.

Dr. Gabor Maté spent years documenting this in his clinical work and research: the body does not forget what the mind tries to suppress. Chronic emotional stress, builds when we push through rather than feel. It manifests as physical illness, pain without clear diagnosis, and a nervous system stuck permanently on high alert (Maté, G., 2003, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, Wiley). Your body is speaking for you, because you stopped letting yourself speak.

And at some point, it simply refuses to continue.

This can look like a panic attack on a Tuesday morning; not being able to get out of bed despite a full inbox waiting; suddenly finding yourself on the edge of something very dark, wondering if staying is worth the effort. Not always literally. But sometimes, yes, literally.

exhausted at work

To you with an hypersensitive or ADHD brain

The systems you are trying to function within were not built for you. They were built for a particular type of brain that yours simply is not, and the effort of pretending otherwise is colossal.

Research by Dr. Russell Barkley shows that adults with ADHD experience executive dysfunction burnout at rates three to five times higher than neurotypical adults (Barkley, R.A., 2015, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment, 4th ed., Guilford Press). Three to five times. Read that again.

You are running a race on a track designed for someone else, wondering why you keep finishing last.

You build elaborate systems to compensate. You spend more energy appearing organised than doing the task. And then comes the perfectionism, you are attempting to be flawless at the very things your neurology makes harder. You apologise for forgetting. Each missed appointment sends you into a spiral of shame, and you believe that you are fundamentally not enough. Your mind is lying.

Your deep self, the creative one, the passionate one, the one who sees connections others miss, has been in a war with the performing self for a very long time. One of them is going to run out of ammunition eventually. Your body tends to decide when enough is enough.

sensory break

To my rainbow clients who had to hide who you are...

You learned early, perhaps before you had words for it, that certain parts of yourself required careful management. Which spaces were safe. How much to reveal. When to adjust, edit, be smaller. Researchers call it minority stress, and the evidence is substantial: prolonged hypervigilance in the face of social threat, creates measurable psychological and physiological damage (Meyer, I.H., 2003, "Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations," Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697).

Your body remembers the jokes you laughed along with; the family dinners where you left half of yourself outside. It stores the tension of editing pronouns at work, of holding hands only in certain areas, of representing your entire community in conversations where you just wanted to eat your lunch.

That toll accumulates. And one day the performance becomes simply impossible to maintain. This is the logical conclusion of years of overextension.

LGBT at work

For you who left France for the UK...

Expatriate experience deserves acknowledgement rather than another cheerful article about "thriving abroad."

Research on acculturation consistently shows that French expatriates in the UK report elevated anxiety and depression compared to their experience living in France (Berry, J.W., 2006, "Contexts of Acculturation," in The Cambridge Handbook of Acculturation Psychology, Cambridge University Press). Shocking, I know. Almost as shocking as the bread situation...

You did not just change geography. You changed emotional vocabulary entirely. In France, expressing dissatisfaction is practically a civic duty. Here, you are meant to not make waves, keep a stiff upper lip and wash it all down with a cup of tea.

Even when systems seem designed to test human patience, you have to politely smile once again when someone asks where you are "really" from, and you are slightly translating yourself in every interaction.

You miss being understood without having to explain. Successful adaptation does not mean erasing your French self to make room for a British one. You can maintain your cultural identity whilst building genuine participation in the new culture (Berry, J.W., 2005, "Acculturation: Living Successfully in Two Cultures," International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 29(6), 697–712). You are allowed to mourn August, a proper lunch break, and it's ok to find the weather genuinely, objectively, depressing. Because it can be. I live here too.

French expatriate

Do I detect a hint of perfectionism?

Across every one of these experiences, I see the same thread.

The attempt to be perfect: ADHD that never forgets, and compensates fully. The perfectly palatable lesbian or gay person, patient, educational, and reassuring to others. The perfectly integrated expatriate, fluent in both cultures, never struggling, making it look effortless.

Dr. Brené Brown's research is clear on this point: perfectionism is not high standards. It is a defence mechanism, to keep you safe and shield you from shame (Brown, B., 2010, The Gifts of Imperfection, Hazelden Publishing). It is armour, and worn long enough, it becomes a cage.

The irony is that fighting your deep self, trying to survive and preserve yourself, you have been inflicting pain on yourself; you have damaged your body and your stamina, sometimes in irreversible ways.

Survival is not the same as living.

What I Am Offering

I am not here to fix you. You are not broken.

What I am offering is a space where the performing can stop. Where you can be genuinely you, seen, accepted, and understood.

It is, according to decades of therapeutic research, the actual mechanism by which healing becomes possible. It's messy and slow and occasionally deeply unglamorous, like most things worth doing.

So perhaps we begin there, by listening to what your body has been trying to say. On a grey Tuesday in England, in the rain that has not really stopped since October, in a life that is yours and that you deserve to actually inhabit.

The door is open. The hand is extended.

When you are ready, we can talk about the joy of living. It is a genuine possibility. Even here. Even now. Even in Wigan, in England.

If you recognise yourself in any of this, I would love to hear from you. The first conversation costs nothing except a little courage, which you clearly already have, because you read all the way to the end. Counselling and life coaching sessions are available for individuals and couples navigating the challenges of being one of a kind.