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.