The always-on life has a breaking point.
When the girlboss burns out.
When you lean in so far, you topple over.
Burnout Confessions: Tales from the Trenches and Tools for Getting Your Life Back is a teaching memoir about what burnout looks like from the inside — and what it can teach us about ourselves, our work, and the systems we’re operating inside.
Burnout rarely appears all at once.
It builds through everyday friction —
unclear expectations, constant urgency, broken processes.
The signals show up early. But too often, they go unheard.
And most organizations aren’t set up to recognize them —
let alone act on them.
Decades of research show burnout isn’t just a personal failure
It’s a signal about how the systems around us are functioning.
But if no one is listening for the signal, the pattern repeats.
Take the Burnout Loud Survey.
As we learn more, we’ll share what we’re seeing — and use those insights to rethink work from the inside out.
Hi, I’m Vanessa.
I’ve seen burnout from both sides — experiencing it as an employee in the trenches and navigating it as a leader inside high-pressure creative marketing environments.
As a strategy leader, I started noticing something: the symptoms of burnout were everywhere, but the underlying causes were rarely discussed clearly.
So I began approaching burnout the way I approach complex brand problems — looking for patterns.
Today, I think of my role as a translator.
Connecting the symptoms people feel to the systems of work that create them.