#5: This Is How You Burnout, Ctnd

This is the continuation of an essay that began here.

Act III: An Education

When opportunity meets you, you are prepared. The irony is, it’s the things you gathered in the years that felt wasted that propel you. Scattered seeds bloom.

While you are prepared for the work, you are not prepared for whiteness. Not whiteness as a general construct: whiteness in the specific ways it manifests in the international non-profit world. Because the premise of this sector is doing good, it’s easy to miss a subtle yet pervasive racism that hides in plain sight.

Your education starts before you’re even done unpacking your bags. One White Woman who adored you when you were her colleague in a country office, starts to bend out of shape the day you meet on level playing ground: the HQ. When you refuse to yield a conference opportunity to her that she believes she deserves more than you do, she declares: “You may know about Africa, but I know about gender!” Never mind that gender—not Africa—is your expertise. Her tantrums are relentless.

You meet many white women like her: women who wax poetic about the patriarchy in a bid to bond with you, but whose allyship is often like glass: transparent, and if not held with care—easily breakable. It’s an allyship that too frequently depends on your compliance and subordination. When a colleague tells you a White Woman called you a DEI hire in a meeting, it barely stings. Experience has taught you: it’s not the tantrums you should fear— it’s white women’s tears.

The White Man is surprisingly the more complicated archetype. On your climb, you meet white men who mentor you, support you, and champion your growth. They do not treat you like a threat. In a patriarchal world, you are not a threat to them. But what you must not forget—what you forget to your deep detriment more than once—these men are not your friend. Their cuts leave the most lasting scars.

And it is not that you don’t meet good white people who support you—you do. And it is not that you are always faultless—you aren’t. It is that you have so little room for mistakes. It is that the micro-aggressions happen too many times. It is that your day job is not your only job: there’s the mental labor of processing unconscious biases and the emotional labor of managing them. It is that the biases are not just individual—they are coded in the infrastructure of a sector birthed in colonialism. It is how quickly you’re expected to transform your wounds to wisdom— to teach those who harm you, to speak to every DEI consultant, to chime in on every damn staff committee.

The lessons you learn come at a cost, but the price you pay is invisible. The price is something that seeps through your psyche to your bones. It’s a thing that comes to protect you, but also starts to drain you: hypervigilance.

Act IV: The Jungle

God dreamed a bigger dream for you than you dreamt for yourself. The scale of your ambition was the UN. But one day, you are sitting in a meeting contributing to discussions about whether to fund an entire UN agency—the agency that had once been your life’s goal—and it hits you: you’re in the big leagues. You have crossed over to the world of philanthropy. Here, the debates are not about who gets to attend a conference or speak on a panel, but about what global conferences will get funded and what the agenda of global development discourse should be.

The air on the top floor is different. People respond quickly to your emails. You are invited to nice things. A retreat in Italy. A panel in Paris. A corporate party in LA. Private meetings in places you didn’t know existed. Rooms within rooms. Your LinkedIn inbox buzzes more than bees around newfound honeycombs.

The bougie conference rooms and business class flights almost blind you to the fact that you are in a jungle. The jungle isn’t that different from the barrel—it just looks different. Battles take place in inboxes and Teams chats; weapons of warfare are bcc/cc lines and side meetings. Sometimes, you dream of emails. One night you dream of a real jungle, and in that dream a tiger scratches your back. A few weeks later, a colleague stabs you in the face—the betrayal is dished over fine dining and seasoned with laughter.

The thing about the jungle is: most acts of aggression are passive and disguised in sophisticated sentences. There is a lot of English in the jungle. So. Much. English. And. So. Many. Slides. All this to disguise a primal instinct: fear. For many, this place represents the peak of ambition— a final landing pad—so, animalistic tendencies kick in to protect territory. Power is the currency of the jungle and fear is its undercurrent.

Despite the drama, you are fueled by a flame that becomes a fire: at each new table, you see fewer faces like yours—it’s this gap that ignites you. You feel a responsibility to make easier for others what was so hard for you: access. You make it your mission to diversify your team and vendor list. Once, you spend weeks passionately arguing that an African firm—not a US firm—should get the contract for an African project. You remain unyielding, and you are called hostile. Managers get involved. By the time you want a US-based Black-owned firm to get a contract, you’ve learned to play the game better. Your goal is simple: you want to be a corporate Robin Hood.

But Robin Hood had his Merry Men. You have so few spaces to unburden. Many friends consider your position the Promised Land, and because you don’t want to sound ungrateful or inconsiderate, you withdraw from them. Your family tells you to pray, and you don’t know how to explain you are wrestling against flesh and blood, and you also need earthly tools—tools you don’t have. You pull away from them, too.

In isolation, you start to have a crisis of imagination. You realize that surviving this system will require you to change: to harden, to be more Machiavellian, to center a job at the expense of everything. Two paths emerge: change who you are and elevate or remain who you are and stagnate. You cannot see a third pathway. Where does one go from what feels like the top floor? What are the keys to unlock golden handcuffs?

There are few safe places to explore these questions because the people who love you the most can be the most fearful for you. Their fear, while rooted in love, is poison.

The most toxic thing your body contains though, is not hypervigilance, or responsibility or fear: it is a disillusionment that starts to douse your fire and gives way to despair.

You start having one too many days when you dread the day ahead and dread coming home—because work is war, and home offers no peace.

And this…this is how you burnout.

And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? (Matthew 16:26)