Let it burn

on resilience, non-attachment, and freedom from identity

Browsing through the 'Reading List' of my old New York Times account feels like looking into a mirror and seeing our collective psyche reflected back. One year after the onset of Covid, everyone was talking about burnout. In August of 2021 alone, I'd saved several articles: "How to Get Things Done When You Don't Want to Do Anything," "How to Beat Burnout—Without Quitting Your Job," and my personal favorite, "There's a Name for the Blah You're Feeling: It's Called Languishing." By then, I'd been languishing for so long I wondered whether I could even call it that. I studied each article, listened to podcasts, and read a book about the science of burnout. Nothing stuck. While there was a modicum of comfort in knowing I wasn't alone, I still oscillated between panic and resignation at the prospect of being burnt out forever.

In college, I learned about a group of plants called pyrophytes. Passive pryophytes like Sequoia trees have a uniquely thick bark to tolerate extreme temperatures. Sufficient flames will eventually burn through the bark, but a Sequoia tree can withstand a great deal. Lodgepole pine trees, on the other hand, belong to a group called active pyrophytes. What the Sequoia can withstand, the Pine tree and other active pyrophytes require. Only after a fire will the seeds of these plants germinate. As I stood in the middle of the Pine Barrens and listened to our professor marvel at these ingenious adaptations, I pictured a small pinecone amidst a pile of ash on the forest floor, waiting for its turn to inhabit the earth.

These plants possessed a sort of invincibility. The capacity to thrive in the midst of unimaginable devastation is nothing short of miraculous. In my early twenties, if you asked about my capacity for resilience in the face of adversity, I would have thought of those trees. It was a reasonable assessment—until that point, my tenacity only increased with every obstacle. Those who knew my history commended my perseverance. While I dismissed their praise and tried to distance myself from the trauma that prompted it, I found solace in the knowledge that while the future was uncertain, my ability to persist was intrinsic. Looking back, I can see myself and a chorus of other voices worshipping at the altar of suffering, grateful for the martyrs it made.

It's difficult to be critical of how we've glorified resilience without seeming dismissive of the strength it takes to endure. To survive is admirable, but we often spend more time turning people into heroes than we do disrupting systems that necessitate such heroism. It's easy to call someone brave. It's uncomfortable to confront why they've had to be so brave in the first place. When we view people as human rather than invincible, we admit they bleed, too. We sit with our discomfort at the suffering around us rather than perpetuating the myth that some are immune to it. People don't endure things because they have some unique capacity. There is an innate impulse to survive, and people survive because they must—not because it's easier for them.

It's also impossible to broach this subject without pointing out there are many forms of adversity—enduring trauma/s, experiencing structural racism and oppression, and growing up in poverty—these are each unique experiences. I can speak to some of these but not all; even then, there's so much nuance.

A few years ago, I participated in a pilot program run by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) called "Becoming a Resilient Scientist." Given the rise of burnout in Academia post-pandemic, the NIH reached out to several universities to offer training to PhD students on handling setbacks and managing imposter syndrome. I didn't learn anything groundbreaking, but much like scrolling through dozens of post-Covid burnout articles, there was comfort in knowing I wasn't alone.

Yet, over the years, I've grown more skeptical of how resilience has been pushed on people. Something was irritating about being presented with it on a platter and told to eat—even if it was good for you. Mostly, I'd grown resentful of how I'd pushed this identity on myself and then become trapped in it.

Here, I'll interject to say many things can be true simultaneously. The skills we are taught about grit and resilience have value. We live in a system where survival requires enduring varying levels of adversity. Even without this, life includes unavoidable periods of pain, and collapsing every time things become challenging is unsustainable. Still, identifying strongly with anything, even if it's something like resilience, leads to destabilization when you can no longer be that thing—and as we know, nothing lasts indefinitely.

After the onset of Covid, I was exhausted and no longer able or willing to exhibit the resilience I'd come to identify with so strongly. Perhaps expectedly, by my late twenties, the same fierceness and defiance that allowed me to survive my childhood and succeed academically led to an unshakable sense of separateness that was deeply unsatisfying. It's impossible to walk through the world as if it's something to conquer without developing a sense of bitterness, and I eventually found myself more bitter than I wanted to be.

When I was a sophomore in college, I had my first real relationship. Everyone loved my partner, which only made me like him less. I was away for the summer, and during one of our weekly phone calls, he said, “You’re just so perfect.” I could see his boyish smile on the other side and felt a pit in my stomach. I interjected and, with conviction, listed all my flaws. He went on to say how those weren’t actually flaws. How lovely. I felt my face flush as my body became hot with rage. I was indignant. It took all of me not to end our relationship right then and there. I hung up, as taken aback by my reaction as he was. I was barely twenty, not yet out, and devoid of any self-trust. What was wrong with me? Shouldn’t I be grateful to have such an adoring partner?

Only later did I realize why it upset me so much. When someone sees only the parts of you they find acceptable, it’s worse than not being seen at all. It’s flattening—it flattens people into one-dimensional fragments of themselves, and in clinging to resilience as my identity, I’d unwittingly flattened myself.

As I searched for a way back to the land of the living, a sense of urgency transformed my innate curiosity about the world into something more intentional. What followed was a painstaking journey to create a world I could tolerate and eventually feel safe in. Reconstructing my sense of self required a level of deconstruction that left me feeling like I was in free fall, tending to the flames of a life I’d just set ablaze. I had to find meaning in a world I hadn’t yet envisioned. It meant asking: is there something on the other side of this longing? And then tolerating the silence of uncertainty.

In the spirit of embracing surrender and moving away from black-and-white thinking, I searched for truth everywhere: Buddhism, poetry, drunken confessions from friends who suddenly wanted to be more than friends. I wanted someone to tell me who I was. I explored plant medicine and psychedelics and forgiving myself. The solace I eventually found wasn't in returning to my resilient, impenetrable self. It was in the freedom to be more than those things, to be anything, anywhere, and at any time. That wasn’t something anyone could bestow on me—I had to give it to myself.

Four years later, I haven't fixed my burnout problem. It doesn't seem like I'm alone—the collective languishing is palpable, and it might more accurately be described as grief.

This post is as much about trees as it is about burnout and more about identity than trees. Surviving required crafting an identity as an impenetrable force that remained untouched by the world. To live required something gentler. It asked of me a softness, surrender, and openness that was both terrifying and liberating. I had to relinquish a one-dimensional view of myself and ask who I was if I couldn't always be resilient. Was I made up of more than longing? Was I capable of something beyond survival?

I decided that I was.

Above all, this is about attachment—what it means to put yourself inside the safety of a box and what it might mean to step outside of that.