IN 2020, my body made a decision my mind was not ready to make. I had spent years managing projects and directing teams. I was able to sit in rooms and connect the dots between projected goals, desired outcomes and the obstacles in between. I ignored several flags, even though I knew what they were. I knew the language of depletion and the particular silence of a woman who has been carrying something too heavy for too long. I witnessed it with my mother. And I felt it in myself, but I never really understood the gravity of it, even though I had been experiencing it and seeing it in many around me.

And then I burned out. Not a quiet burnout. Not the kind you can schedule around or explain away with a busy season. The kind where your body stops cooperating and the performance you have been maintaining, with considerable discipline and considerable cost, simply cannot continue. The kind where the message is no longer subtle.

What made it so difficult to recognise, even then, was how thoroughly I had been trained not to see it. I had learned, like so many Caribbean women, that strength meant endurance. That stopping to listen to your body was a luxury. That the right response to difficulty was to push through it, carry it quietly, and show up the next day as if nothing had happened. I had built a professional identity on the very conditioning that was now dismantling me.

Two pieces I wrote earlier named the patterns from the outside: how Caribbean women are taught to lead, and how burnout shows up uniquely for us. Both of those pieces came from my practitioner perspective. This one comes from somewhere else entirely. This one is personal.

The five practices I am about to share are not things I developed in a training room or discovered in the research literature. They are things I had to learn in my own life, through my own burnout, at a cost I would not wish on anyone. I share them here not as a practitioner giving advice but as a Caribbean woman who went through this and is still figuring out what it means on the other side.

Practice one: Name it without negotiating with it
The first thing I had to learn was the hardest: to name what was happening without immediately placating or avoiding it.
When the burnout arrived, my first instinct was to negotiate with it. This is just a difficult season. Once this project is finished, I will rest. I have been through worse than this. I am not the kind of person who burns out.

Every one of those sentences was a way of avoiding the plain truth, which was that I was burnt out and had been for longer than I wanted to admit.
Caribbean women are extraordinarily skilled at this negotiation. We were raised to reframe difficulty as endurance. To find the silver lining before anyone sees us acknowledging the cloud. I had done it so consistently, for so long, that I genuinely could not tell the difference between being resilient and being in denial.

What finally broke through was not a dramatic moment of clarity. It was exhaustion. The kind of exhaustion that makes negotiation quite expensive. I was tired of managing the story I was telling myself. And in that tiredness, I finally said it plainly: I am burnt out. Not as a complaint. Not for sympathy. As information. That sentence was the beginning. Not of recovery, exactly, but of the possibility of recovery. You cannot address what you will not name.

Practice two: Stop performing wellness while you are unwell
Around the same time that I was negotiating privately with my burnout, I was performing perfectly well for everyone around me.

This is something Caribbean women do with extraordinary fluency. We show up composed. We contribute to the meeting. We send the follow-up e-mail. We check in on the people around us. We make it look, from every external angle, like everything is fine.

I was very good at this. And the better I was at it, the longer the burnout went unaddressed, because nobody around me had any reason to believe something was wrong. The people who might have offered support did not know support was needed. The structures that might have adjusted did not adjust, because nothing in my external presentation suggested adjustment was necessary.
What I had to learn, slowly and with considerable resistance, was that the performance was not protecting me. It was to protect the burnout. Every time I showed up composed when I was not composed, I was extending the conditions that were making me unwell.

Practice three: Identify what you are holding that belongs to someone else
When I finally took an honest inventory of what I was carrying, I had to sit with a difficult reality: a significant portion of it was not mine.

Not in the sense that I had stolen anything. But in the sense that I had accumulated responsibilities, obligations, emotional labour, and invisible tasks over years of being the reliable one, the capable one, the one who could be counted on to absorb the extra and keep things moving.
None of those things had been handed to me formally. They had accumulated informally, the way things do when you are the person who never says no, never drops a ball, and never makes your limits visible.

At work: the projects nobody else had bandwidth for. The team dynamics nobody else wanted to manage. The translation work of being culturally fluent in spaces where nobody else was.
In my family: the coordination, the care, the emotional regulation of the household. The being the one who knew where everything was and what needed to happen and when.

I had not noticed how much of it belonged to other people because I had never stopped long enough to look. When I finally made the list, and asked honestly for each item whether it genuinely belonged to me, I had to reckon with how much I had taken on not because it was mine but because I was capable of carrying it and nobody had ever taken it back.
Returning those things was not easy. Some of them had been mine for so long that people had forgotten they were ever anyone else’s responsibility. But it was necessary. And it was the first time in years that I felt the weight actually shift.

Practice four: Build a delegation system, not a permission structure
Here is the thing I had to admit about myself: I had built a system in which everything required me.
I told myself this was because I had high standards. Because certain things needed to be done in a particular way. Because I had learned, early and repeatedly, that if I did not do it myself it would not be done correctly.

That last belief was not entirely without basis. There were genuine contexts, growing up and building a career, where the consequence of things not being done correctly fell disproportionately on me. And so I had adapted, as Caribbean women so often adapt: by becoming indispensable.

The problem was that indispensability and wellbeing are incompatible. You cannot be the person everything runs through and also be the person who rests, recovers, and sustains.
Eventually the system you built to protect yourself through competence becomes the system that prevents you from being anything other than always on.

What I had to build instead was not a system where I checked and approved and oversaw. I had to build a system where other people were genuinely responsible for their own portions of the work. Where a thing being done differently from how I would have done it was acceptable. Where my presence was not the prerequisite for progress.

Some things went less smoothly than I would have liked. Some things were done in ways that made me wince. And some things, honestly, were done well by people who had been waiting for the responsibility I had been hoarding without knowing I was hoarding it.

Practice five: Recalibrate your definition of strength
This is the practice that took the longest. It is still in progress.
I grew up with a very specific definition of strength. It looked like endurance. It looked like not stopping. It looked like absorbing what came at you and continuing to show up. It looked like the woman who kept everything together regardless of what it cost her to do so.
That definition of strength was modelled for me. I celebrated it in others. I performed it myself with considerable investment.

And I had to learn, slowly and against a great deal of internal resistance, that this definition was not strength at all. It was survival. And survival, while sometimes necessary, is not a sustainable leadership practice or a healthy life.

Real strength, I have come to understand, looks different. It looks like knowing when to stop before the stopping is forced on you. It looks like asking for help before the crisis rather than after. It looks like building systems that do not require your constant presence to function. It looks like choosing yourself not as an act of selfishness but as an act of sustainability.
It looks like being honest about your limits not because you are weak but because honesty about limits is one of the most courageous things a Caribbean woman can do in a culture that celebrates the opposite.

I did not arrive at this understanding easily. I arrived at it through burnout, through the humility of a body that refused to keep performing what my mind was insisting on. And I am grateful for it, in the way you are sometimes grateful for the difficult thing that turns out to have been exactly what was needed.

I wrote the first two pieces in this series from the outside looking in. This one I wrote from the inside. I am a practitioner. I have spent over twenty years helping people and organisations navigate change, burnout, leadership, and the particular complexity of doing all of that as a Caribbean professional in a world that was not always designed with you in mind. That work is real and I stand behind it.
But the five practices I described here were not things I first learned in a training room. I learned them in my own body, in my own life, at cost.

I share them here because I know I am not the only Caribbean woman who had to learn this way. Because the cultural conditioning that made these practices difficult for me to learn is the same conditioning many of you are still navigating. And because I believe that when one of us names it plainly, it becomes slightly easier for the next person to name it too.
You were not built to burn. You were built to last. Those are not the same thing. And the difference between them is worth everything.