Student Blog: Running on Empty

I’m burned out right now. Not the kind that comes with some big dramatic moment, just the quiet, heavy exhaustion that sits in your chest and makes everything feel harder than it should. I love my majors. I love theatre. I love learning how to teach. But right now, all of that love feels buried under a mountain of deadlines, expectations, and the constant feeling that I should be doing more.

Although we may finally be on break, this semester has been relentless. My days are packed with classes, my nights with rehearsals, and whatever time is left gets filled with homework, emails, or worrying about what I forgot to do. As a Theatre Arts and English Education double major, it feels like I’m always switching gears. I’m analyzing literature, rehearsing scenes (nobody told me how much stuff you had to memorize), finishing up papers and presentations without ever really shutting my brain off. There isn’t a clean ending to my day. It just sort of… fades into the next one.

What surprises me most about burnout is how sneaky it is. I don’t usually notice it right away. It starts small: procrastinating a little more, feeling annoyed at things that normally wouldn’t bother me, staring at assignments I actually care about, and quite literally feeling… nothing. It’s like my motivation is still there, but it’s buried under a layer of exhaustion that makes even starting feel impossible.

For a long time, I thought burnout meant I wasn’t strong enough. That I needed to be more disciplined, more organized, more productive. Now I’m realizing that burnout is usually the result of giving everything you have for too long without stopping to refill anything. You don’t run out of passion. You run out of energy.

Lately, I’ve been trying to meet burnout where I am instead of fighting it. When everything feels like too much, I give myself a reset. I literally set a timer, sit on my bed or the floor, and do nothing productive. I don’t scroll. I don’t plan. I just breathe and try to let my mind go blank. It sounds silly, but it’s the only way I know how to interrupt the spiral.

After that, I don’t aim for “get everything done.” I aim for one tiny step. Open the document. Write one sentence. Read the assignment prompt. That’s it. Burnout makes big tasks feel impossible, so I make them small enough that my tired brain can handle them.

I’m also learning to take care of my body in the most basic ways: water, food, stretching, and sleep when I can get it. I’m terrible at this, honestly. I’ll go hours without realizing I haven’t eaten, then wonder why I feel like I’m falling apart. But when I pause and actually give myself what I need, even in small ways, it helps more than I expect.

What helps the most, though, is not pretending I’m fine. Saying “I’m tired” out loud, to a friend, a cast mate, even just in a text, makes the weight feel lighter. Burnout gets louder in isolation. The moment I share it, it becomes something I can live with instead of something that controls me.

I still love what I do. Burnout doesn’t erase that. It just means I’m human. And right now, surviving the day is enough. Tomorrow I’ll try again. Not perfectly, not gracefully, but honestly.