There’s a particular kind of work exhaustion that doesn’t come from working too hard.
It comes from working too far outside yourself for too long.
I know what that feels like.
I’ve lived it more than once.
And one of the clearest seasons of it was a period in my business where I looked up from the work one day and genuinely couldn’t remember where the client’s vision ended, and my own began.
The Slow Drift
It happened gradually, the way most meaningful things do.
I was deep in client work – the kind of deep where you take on their problems like an actor takes on a role.
You think in their voice.
You problem-solve through their lens.
You celebrate their wins and absorb their frustrations. And because I genuinely care about the people I work with, I was doing all of that fully, without reservation.
Which sounds like a good thing, and in many ways it is.
But there’s a cost to that kind of immersion that nobody talks about enough.
When you pour yourself that completely into someone else’s world, your own world gets quieter.
The vision you had for your own work starts to feel distant…
The things you came into business to build start to feel theoretical.
And one day you realize you’ve been so busy dreaming someone else’s dreams that you’ve stopped tending your own.
That’s not a failure of caring. If anything, it’s a consequence of caring too much without a container around it.
The Non Sibi in me—the deep, genuine need to help, serve, and be useful to the people in front of me – had been running at full capacity for so long that there was nothing left for the work I was meant to be building.
The Sunday Feeling Came Back
Here’s how I knew something was off.
When I was working a traditional job years ago, I had what I privately called the “Sunday feeling”. It’s a particular shade of dread that would start around noon on Sunday and sit on my chest until Monday morning. The anxiety of not knowing what the climate would be when I walked into work. The low-level performance of trying to read the room, manage the dynamics, be enough without being too much.
When I started my business, I remember thinking, specifically, “Yay!” No more Sunday feeling to avoid or try to hide from!
And then one season, it came back.
Not because the business was failing.
Not because I didn’t love the work.
But because I had accidentally recreated the same dynamic I’d tried to leave behind – trading one set of bosses for a whole roster of clients who I was letting dictate my time, my energy, and my sense of what I owed them.
I thought I was running my business. But my business was running me.
What I Did
I went back to the foundation.
Not to start over, but to look honestly at what was there and what had shifted.
I pulled out notes from the early days of Fresh Take Productions. I revisited the questions I’d asked myself when I first started:
- Who is this for?
- What do I actually believe about this work?
- What does it look like when I’m doing it well?
And I started asking myself some harder questions that I’d been avoiding:
- What had I learned?
- What had I gotten wrong?
- Where had I let the boundaries blur in ways that weren’t serving anyone?
I’d learned that my communication wasn’t always as clear as I thought it was.
That 90% of the time, my loyalty was going to other people rather than to myself and my own direction.
That integrity isn’t just what you say. It’s what you do when it’s inconvenient.
And I’d learned something that felt both obvious and somehow new: you cannot pour from an empty vessel.
Not sustainably. Not well. Not in a way that actually serves the people you’re trying to help.
The Thing About Excavation
This period – the getting back to basics, the returning to foundations – is what I now understand to be excavation work.
Not the dramatic kind. Not the lightning bolt kind. The quiet, methodical kind where you clear away what’s accumulated and look honestly at what’s underneath.
It’s the kind of work that eventually led me to the assessments I’ve written about in this series.
To the values work I did with Alice Karolina. To the frameworks I’ve spent years building. To this site, these words, this moment.
Because here’s what I’ve come to understand about losing yourself in the work: it’s a signal, not a sentence.
It doesn’t mean you’re broken or you made wrong choices or you should have known better. It means you care deeply and you’ve been giving from a place that ran dry without your noticing.
The answer isn’t to care less. It’s to tend to yourself with the same attention you give to everyone else.
That’s not a productivity strategy. It’s not a boundaries framework. It’s just the most basic form of self-respect, and it’s the foundation that everything else gets built on.
What “Back to Basics” Actually Means
When I talk about going back to basics now, I don’t mean simplifying or scaling back or doing less.
I mean returning to the questions that actually matter:
- Who am I when I’m doing my best work?
- What do I believe about the people I serve?
- What experience am I creating — for them, and for myself in the process of creating it?
Those aren’t one-time questions.
They need to be revisited. Especially in the seasons when the drift sets in. Especially when the Sunday feeling comes back.
Because the foundation isn’t a place you get to and then leave behind.
It’s something you return to, again and again, and each time you go back, you find something you missed the last time.
That’s the work. And it never really stops.
