There’s no other way to say it: I don’t remember the third week of August.
Not in the “oh, it was uneventful” way. Not in the “I guess nothing happened” way.
I mean, I genuinely don’t remember it. It’s a blank page in an otherwise packed journal.
Looking back, I can see the shape of what that week must have been. The files were updated in our Public Access folder. The edited policies stamped with dates I barely recall typing. The beginnings of handbooks taking form. A few new poems in my drafts. The emails I somehow answered. The messages I apparently sent.
The evidence is all there.
I was working.
I was functioning.
I was producing.
But I don’t remember doing any of it.
That’s the thing about burnout. It doesn’t always arrive as exhaustion or tears or shutting down. Sometimes it arrives quietly. Sometimes it slips in between the cracks of constant effort and settles in like fog. One day, you look back and realize whole swaths of your life have gone hazy.
The grief of the year, the pressure of building a nonprofit from scratch, the policies, the handbooks, the deadlines, the expectations, the physical exhaustion of chronic illness — it all blurred together. I kept going because that’s what I do. Because that’s what I’ve always done. Because slowing down felt dangerous. Because stopping felt impossible.
But a week vanished.
And that is its own kind of warning.
The missing week taught me something I didn’t want to admit: I was burning out faster than I realized. Faster than I wanted to believe. I was holding everything together so tightly that I couldn’t feel the pieces slipping.
Sometimes the absence of memory is the only evidence you need that you’re overwhelmed.
I didn’t listen then.
But I’m listening now.
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