The Shadow of Existential Exhaustion
Or, The Burnout of Being Alive
“How are you?”
For years, I only had two answers to this question.
Busy.
And tired.
I was tired because I was busy. But I couldn’t slow down if I tried. When I did slow down, I crashed. And I was still tired.
Tired wasn’t even the most accurate response - no matter how much sleep I got, I was never rested. No matter how much caffeine I consumed, I never felt awake.
It’s not that I was tired, I was exhausted. It’s not that I was busy, I was held hostage to pressures I was putting on myself. I was asleep to the ways I had lost myself.
This Existential Exhaustion is a fatigue borne from life itself. Similar to burnout, there are two key ingredients:
Misalignment with values - when key domains of our life are not aligned with our values and desires, it feels alienating to not be somewhere you belong (whether that somewhere is a job, a house, a city, a relationship, a friendship). When we are not aligned with our values, there is chaos. The chaos is a clue something needs to change.
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Performance - the feeling you must keep up with the standard you’ve set for yourself. This creates an imposter syndrome, always afraid your actual, “unworthy” self will be uncovered. This performance becomes a trap because we can never put the mask down. If you forget someone’s name, you can ask them early on in the relationship what their name is but if you’ve known them for years and don’t remember their name, it becomes awkward. Introducing yourself as a new person to people who think they have known you is similarly horrific.
These two ingredients overlap with burnout, often misattributing Existential Exhaustion as work-related when it’s so much more.
R had been burned out before and could feel herself slipping. She was irritable at the smallest inconveniences - the lid of the kittle wasn’t fully closed so it never stopped boiling, the grocery shop only had whole bean coffee, her friend kept complaining about the same roommate drama. Every task felt insurmountable - from responding to texts to tackling the Sisyphean mound of dishes. With each nagging obligation, she couldn’t shake this gnawing this, “is this all there is?”
Of course that question could be applied to R’s job, as well - the meetings that could be emails, the reports that are always due and are also completely meaningless. But it’s more than just the demands of R’s job. She isn’t happy at home either. It is the sheer force of will and fear of eviction that gets R reluctantly out of bed each morning. It is the stillness when she isn’t busy that nearly suffocates her.
Every symptom R was experiencing was a message from her body. But it had been so long since she had turned on her voicemail, there were so many messages to listen to. The blinking red light in her mind haunted her - the overwhelm of listening back to messages from years past was too much.
When we experience something significant, if there is a lot of emotions, too much to process at once, those emotions leave a voicemail. You weren't there to pick up the phone but the emotions still need to be felt at some point, the message still needs to be listened to. Things that happened a long time ago still feel very present because the voicemail hasn't been listened to yet - the light is still blinking on the machine - so until those emotions are felt, these old things still feel very new and present. These emotions and situations keep coming up is the blinking light - your body wants to clear the voicemail machine. When your voicemail machine is empty and clear, you have the space for new experiences.
But the less we listen to these messages, the louder they become. I had been seeing R for therapy because the whispers of her body had become screams. At first, her body whispered through unplaceable anxiety, a hollow yearning. Then it was sleepless nights, an inescapable “crawl out of your skin” feeling. Then it became a gnawing suicidal ideation and desperation to change anything in her life. She rearranged her house, dyed her hair, went out more and more and more but there it remained - a haunting, deep dissatisfaction - but at what?
The parts of ourself hidden away is precisely what becomes the shadow. The shadow represents all that is unacceptable because, as Gabor Mate puts it, “we are always choosing between attachment and authenticity and we will always choose attachment until we can no longer not choose authenticity. Basically we will always choose others until our psyche’s drive towards wholeness chooses ourselves.
The personal and collective shadow is the fodder from shame, but depends on the person, their family, their age, the gender they were socialized by, the generation they belong to. For some families, softness and vulnerability were not acceptable and become the shadow. For men, it’s common for fear to take up space in the shadow, while anger is one of the only acceptable emotions on the surface. In my early experiences in the church, ambition was a trait reserved for men or for God - personal ambition became tucked away. The collective shadow can mirror the personal shadow but is what we as a culture reject - anger, sex, suffering, vulnerability, are all part of the collective shadow. The shadow is us, it is part of the self and must expressed, it is compelled to be heard. The shadow will make itself known with intention and if not, it will become feral.
For Jung, the shadow was a repressed part of the unconscious, with most often negative aspects of a person, the “dark side”. But the negative attributions to the shadow are because of the darkness, not an indicator of the darkness itself. If we turn on the light to what is first perceived as darkness, we can see it is merely a bathrobe hanging on the back of the door. It is not an intruder if only we can find the light.
In most peoples’ shadow lies their strength. I can see this in sessions when clients will speak harshly of themselves because the strength that comes from self-compassion lies in their shadow. What that tells me is they were rewarded for shrinking themselves, for not taking up space. And their healing requires them to not abandon or betray themselves in the face of acceptance from others.
Repressing the Shadow takes energy, just as it takes energy and effort to clench all your muscles at once. Repressing the shadow not only means we are hiding parts of ourselves, it also means we are performing a part. In the repression of the shadow, the persona is born. While the shadow represents what we are punished for, the persona exudes the positive attributes we are rewarded for - working hard, being happy, saying yes.
Persona is not only useful for acceptance, it also is protective. In some ways, persona is a relief - if you wear the mask, you won’t be perceived, not your true self at least, and then you wouldn’t be judged. But in not being perceived, by covering your true self, you are also never known. And how excruciating to move through the world always being perceived and never being seen.
The repression of the true self takes energy, it is exhausting to always perform the persona, to forever keep the shadow at bay. We spend so much time, energy and resources being someone or something else, carefully orchestrating how we are perceived. Much of the burnout we have from our daily toil is exacerbated by this existential exhaustion - the fatigue of repression bringing weight with every step.
You don’t need to be exhausted in life. You can be more than tired. Or busy. You can be yourself.
Being yourself requires bringing together all of you - shadow, persona and everything in between. What you’ll find when you befriend and integrate the shadow is a gift - you will experience a return of energy, no longer squandered in repression. You will discover creativity, spirituality, connection, desire, strength that you couldn’t have fathomed you had. The shadow has so many aspects of yourself that are longing to be expressed. Give yourself space to be yourself. You deserve to be yourself.