Two weeks ago, I started a new role at PetPlace, and it's been incredible. The responsibility, the challenge, the potential for growth. Everything I'd hoped for. But there's been an unexpected side effect. I can feel myself getting close to burnout.
This isn't your typical "I'm working too many hours" burnout. It's more subtle than that. As an individual contributor with emerging product owner responsibilities and potential management duties, my brain is being pushed to new limits every day. By the time I close my laptop, I'm mentally exhausted in a way I haven't experienced in years.
The ripple effects have been immediate. I've been out of ketosis for three weeks despite sticking to my keto diet. Stress has a way of messing with even our best plans. My daily practices are still intact, but barely. And Midlife Momentum has shifted into what I can only call "maintenance mode."
I'm still hitting publish every Tuesday morning, but that's about it. The community engagement, the promotional work, the thoughtful responses to your comments. All of it has fallen by the wayside. I'm going through the motions, but the energy that made my newsletter valuable simply isn't there anymore.
Even in maintenance mode, my newsletter still demands significant mental bandwidth. There's the pressure to find a meaningful insight each week, the expectation to mine my personal development work for publishable content, and the feeling that I should be doing more to grow this community. It's become a weight I carry rather than something I enjoy.
The Garden Lesson
This morning, during a tarot session, something clicked for me. My life over the past few months has been like a gardening season, and I've been thinking about it all wrong.
In spring, any good gardener plants more seeds than they expect to harvest. You plant extra because you know some won't grow, others will struggle, and some might get eaten by pests. It's a numbers game at first. But here's the part I forgot about. Once things start growing, successful gardening requires making tough choices.
You can't let every plant that sprouts continue to grow. If you do, they'll compete for the same nutrients, water, and sunlight. What you'll end up with is a garden full of weak, struggling plants instead of a few that actually thrive. Sometimes you have to pull up perfectly healthy plants. Not because they're bad, but because letting them continue will prevent something more important from growing strong.
The newsletter was one of those spring plantings. It served as accountability. A way to make sure I showed up to my personal development work every day because I knew I'd be writing about it. It was like training wheels for building daily practices. And it worked really well.
But now I have those daily practices. The training wheels did their job, and keeping them on is actually holding me back. The mental energy I'm spending on my newsletter, even at the bare minimum level, is energy that needs to go toward my new role at PetPlace.
This isn't about failure or giving up. It's about recognizing when something has served its purpose and being smart enough to let it go so something else can thrive.
Making Space to Thrive
So I'm pausing my newsletter.
This decision isn't easy. Over the past three months, this weekly practice has been a catalyst for big changes in my life. The daily journaling, the self-reflection, the accountability. All of it helped me land this new role and build the foundation for what comes next.
But if I've learned anything about personal growth, it's that holding onto what got you here can prevent you from getting to where you need to go next. Right now, I need to give my full attention to my new responsibilities, to fixing other areas of my life that have slipped into maintenance mode, and to finishing the projects that are draining my energy instead of giving me energy.
I'm not shutting down completely. I'll still be working on personal projects, still journaling daily, still growing. But I need to create space for what's actually right for this season of my life.
Thank you for being part of this journey. If you've found value in these weekly thoughts, I encourage you to start your own practice of regular self-reflection. The real growth happens in the daily work, not in the weekly recap.
If there's anything I can help you with as you navigate your own seasons of growth and tough choices, please reach out. Sometimes the most helpful thing we can do is step back from what we've been doing so we can be fully present for what we're supposed to do next.
This essay was originally published on my Substack newsletter.