Little Belle's Mama

It’s not even the end of the week, but I’m feeling especially grateful for today. A public holiday. It sounds simple on the surface. But this one is landing like a lifeline. A pause in a calendar that has barely allowed time to think, let alone rest. Burnout doesn’t feel far away anymore. It’s circling closer by the day, and this break, brief as it is, might be the only thing standing between me and full-on overwhelm. Because June? June has been relentless.

Fiscal year-end brings a special kind of pressure. Everything tightens. Deadlines harden. The things you’ve been pushing to next week suddenly need to be done today. And most of that weight isn’t even from one single task—it’s from everything happening at once. There’s the chase on AR collections, the endless work of trying to reduce the overdues, the mental gymnastics of keeping all the account reconciliations straight. And then there’s the tricky part: the disputed items.

Helping chase past due payments is tiring even when everything goes smoothly. But when items are in dispute, and you need input from multiple teams just to understand what happened or to get the invoices resolved, the effort multiplies. You end up looping in client contacts, customer service, internal operations, sometimes finance. Everyone needs the backstory. Everyone’s stretched thin. And yet somehow, it lands on you to piece together the full picture—trying to connect conversations, clarify commitments, and resolve the issue so the payment can finally move forward. It’s like being a mediator, a detective, and an analyst all at once. And each unresolved item becomes a blinking alert you can’t ignore.

Meanwhile, the pressure mounts to resolve it all before year-end. Not “soon,” not “when we can,” but now. So you chase politely. You follow up, then follow up on your follow-ups. You draft careful messages that nudge without nagging. You balance firmness with empathy. You keep tabs on every open loop and update trackers that seem to refresh faster than you can. And through it all, you carry that invisible pressure: that someone, somewhere, expects this to be closed out in time—and it’s on you to make that happen.

But that’s only part of the picture. Because while you’re managing the numbers, you’re also managing people. Your team still needs you. They need support, answers, patience. And you’re trying to lead, even as you’re running on fumes yourself. You’re scheduling syncs, fielding questions, helping problem-solve. You’re keeping one eye on their workload and another on their emotional bandwidth—because everyone’s feeling the crunch, not just you. And that’s the part they don’t tell you about managing: it’s not just task delegation, it’s emotional regulation. For them and, increasingly, for yourself.

Then there are the meetings. Internal ones, external ones. Pre-reads to prep, KPIs to polish. Business reviews that demand slides, context, storytelling. You don’t just show data—you make a case for it. You explain why gaps exist and what’s being done to close them. You anticipate questions, even when you’re still working on the answers. You log off one meeting and jump into another with a different hat on—client call, team huddle, stakeholder review. All while making sure your tone stays professional, your camera stays on, your attention stays sharp.

And somewhere in that storm of meetings and messages, you try to stay human. You try to stay responsive. You try to remember which email you were supposed to reply to, which disputed item needed follow-up, which report was due by Friday. You triage constantly. Not just tasks—but your own focus, your own energy. You tell yourself you’ll catch up on rest later, when it slows down. But it doesn’t slow down.

That’s why this public holiday means more than it probably should. Not because it’s a long weekend. But because it’s a non-negotiable pause. It’s the one day the system lets you step back without guilt. No meetings to prepare for. No emails piling up as fast. No Teams messages blinking at you every five minutes. Just a day. A quiet space to reset.

I’m not planning anything ambitious today. No packed agenda, no errands disguised as rest. Honestly, I just want to un-plan. It’s still quiet—my little Belle is somehow still sleeping—and I’m sipping my tea while it’s actually hot. I might step outside soon, check on the vegetables in the garden, and just let the day unfold gently.

I might do nothing. Or maybe I’ll do something that doesn’t tick any boxes but feels like healing: a quiet moment while she naps, a slow walk with no destination, sitting still even if the house isn’t. Just small things that make space to breathe.

Because the thing is, this kind of exhaustion isn’t fixed by one good night of sleep. It’s not just physical tiredness—it’s mental depletion. You’re constantly on. Even in your “downtime,” you’re mentally rehearsing what needs to happen next. That’s not rest. That’s just work without a laptop.

And I’m not alone in feeling this way. So many of us are stretched right now. We’re operating in survival mode—getting through the week, the quarter, the year-end. Pushing ourselves to stay professional, collected, competent—even when the bandwidth is low and the inbox is high. We joke about it. We say things like “Just need to get through June.” But behind the humor, there’s fatigue. The kind that can’t be ignored forever.

That’s why today matters. Not just for me, but for everyone on the edge of burnout who hasn’t had a moment to process how much they’ve been holding. This one day won’t fix everything. But it gives us a breath. A break in the pattern. A small return to ourselves.

So I’m taking the break. Not as a reward, but as a necessity. And I’m going to protect it. No urgent emails. No sneak peeks at dashboards. No half-work under the guise of “just checking something.” I need to stop fully, even just for a day, so I can come back clearer.

Because the work will still be there. The AR items. The disputes. The follow-ups. The year-end madness. But I want to meet it from a place of steadiness, not survival. I want to lead my team not just by pushing through—but by showing them what boundaries look like. By modeling something better than burnout.

And maybe, just maybe, we can all walk into the second half of the year a little lighter.