I Never Felt Burned Out. I Just Wanted Something Different.

Lately, I've been reading a lot about burnout.

It seems to be everywhere. Newspaper articles, magazine features, podcasts and social media feeds are full of stories from people who have stepped away from demanding careers because they were exhausted, overwhelmed or simply couldn't continue at the pace they had been maintaining. Life feels incredibly intense right now. Work is demanding. Parenting is demanding. Relationships require attention. There is always another email to answer, another responsibility to manage, another decision to make. Most people I know are carrying far more than anyone else realizes, and it's not surprising that so many people feel overwhelmed trying to balance it all.

I can relate to many of the experiences people describe when they talk about burnout. There were certainly periods in my life when I felt stretched thin. I spent years balancing a demanding legal career, family responsibilities and a constant stream of projects, deadlines and competing priorities. Looking back, I can absolutely understand why someone living that way could eventually reach a breaking point.

What I've been reflecting on lately, though, is that burnout doesn’t truly explain my own decision to leave the profession I spent years building.

Maybe burnout was part of it. Maybe some of the symptoms overlap—that’s obvious. When you're constantly trying to meet expectations, carry responsibilities and perform at a high level, it can be difficult to separate exhaustion from everything else you're feeling. But when I look back on that period of my life, what stands out most isn't how tired I was. It's how uninspired I had become.

That feels uncomfortable to admit because there was nothing objectively wrong with the career I had built. I worked with good people. I respected the organization I worked for. There were aspects of my job that I genuinely enjoyed. If someone had asked me ten years earlier whether I would be happy with the career I had created, I probably would have said yes without hesitation. By most measures, I had built exactly the kind of career, and life, I had set out to build.

And maybe that's why it took me so long to recognize what was happening.

When we're young, we make decisions with limited information. Many of us choose a university program, a profession or a career path and then commit ourselves to it. We work hard. We develop expertise. We earn opportunities. We build a life around those choices. That's not a mistake—it's how most of us move forward. I certainly did.

For years, I measured progress the way many ambitious people do. I looked at responsibility, achievement, professional growth and financial success as evidence that I was moving in the right direction. Every promotion, every project and every new opportunity reinforced the idea that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

The strange thing about getting older, though, is that the questions start to change.

The person who chooses a path at twenty-two isn't necessarily the same person walking that path twenty years later. Life has a way of reshaping us. Marriage changes us. Children change us. Success changes us. Disappointment changes us. Experience teaches us things about ourselves that we couldn't possibly have known when we were first starting out.

At some point, I found myself asking a question that had never really occurred to me when I was younger: Is this actually what I want? Not what I should want. Not what looks successful from the outside. Not what I've spent years working toward. What do I actually want?

What I came to realize was that the tension I was feeling wasn't necessarily coming from the amount of work I was doing. It was coming from the growing gap between the life I had built and the life I wanted to be building.

That realization created a kind of tension that is difficult to explain to people on the outside. When you've spent years building a successful career, there is an expectation—from others and from yourself—that you'll continue. After all, you've invested so much time and energy getting there. Walking away can seem irrational. It can seem ungrateful. It can even feel irresponsible. But staying on a path that no longer fits creates its own kind of cost.

So for me, there came a point where I couldn’t keep pushing my thoughts aside. The feeling wasn't getting stronger because my job was getting worse. If anything, it was getting stronger because I was becoming more honest with myself. The more I reflected, the more I realized I didn’t need a lighter workload, a shorter work week, a vacation or a break. I did try some of these things—but what I needed was a different direction.

I kept thinking about how for years I had spent my energy helping build projects, solve problems and create results for other people. There is nothing wrong with that—in fact, much of my career was rewarding because of it. But eventually I found myself wanting to direct that same energy toward something that felt more personal. If I was going to spend my days thinking, planning and building, I wanted to feel a deeper sense of ownership over the outcome. I wanted to know what it felt like to put that energy into something that was mine.

So I stepped away from my career. And I think part of me assumed that if my career was the source of the tension I was feeling, then stepping away from it would somehow reveal exactly what I was supposed to do next. Instead, it created space for an entirely new set of questions.

For nearly two decades, so much of my identity had been tied to being a lawyer. My days were structured around it. My goals were connected to it. Even the way I introduced myself to people was tied to it. It had become a shorthand for how I understood myself. When you've spent so long becoming something, it's surprisingly difficult to separate yourself from it.

Who are you when you're no longer the thing you've always been?

What do you enjoy when nobody is evaluating your performance?

What matters when there isn't another promotion, title or accomplishment to chase?

Those sound like simple questions, but I've found they are surprisingly difficult to answer.

For most of my adult life, I was too busy to stop and ask myself what I genuinely enjoyed. Leaving the practice of law created space for that exploration again. But figuring out what excites you isn't something that simply appears one morning. It takes work. You have to ask questions. You have to try things. You have to pay attention to what captures your interest and what doesn't. You have to revisit parts of yourself that may have been sitting quietly in the background for years.

In some ways, this stage of life feels less like reinventing myself and more like rediscovering myself. I'm still figuring out what I want to build. I'm still trying new things. I'm still learning what energizes me and what doesn't. Some days I feel closer to the answer than others.

It’s strange. Now when I look back, I think the biggest shift for me wasn't leaving my career. It was finally giving myself permission to question it. For years, I assumed that because I had worked so hard to build something, I was obligated to keep building it forever. It never occurred to me that I could pause and ask whether the path still fit.

I think sometimes the path isn't wrong. You've just outgrown it. And while that realization can be unsettling, it can also be the beginning of something new. There is nothing wrong with asking whether the life you've built still fits. In fact, it might be one of the most important questions you'll ever ask.

I remember hearing Jay Shetty say “you will never regret working a little bit harder for something you care about”.