The decades of not having a choice contributed to my extreme burn out. I allowed my lack of power at work to leak into my personal life and found myself in a field needing to learn that MY life was MY choice.

Every brain and person is different. This short series is intended to inspire you to find the path that helps you recover if you find yourself at the same rock bottom as me.

Below are just some of the people making up the force of nature we call the Human freaking Resources Community. I’m honored and excited to present to you the August 2023 HR Carnival!

We spend billions of dollars training people how to do their jobs, yet we spend about $10 on a slide deck we send to a new manager the moment they’re promoted teaching them about the compliance of management and not the heart of leadership.

So they fail.

After sitting with my grief about that destroyed HR department, and allowing painful memories from my career bubble to the surface, I decided that Sacrificial HR is the cause of a few catastrophic truths.

We watched, in real time, as HR traumatized people for life in 2022.

The use of the term “burnout” had become such a buzzword for me that I’d come to fully reject it by the time my staircase moment happened. Burnout is clinical, and real, and I felt disconnected from it. Perhaps it was the way brands were using it as clickbait or marketing manipulation, but it never resonated with my soul enough to explain why I was ready to quit the profession that saved my life for over a decade.

The only way I could think about addressing this was writing you an open letter; a raw and unfiltered letter about why I was absent and what that did for me. So before this letter I want to say how much I love this community, how sorry I am I couldn’t verbalize I needed to be absent, and I hope you hear my soul in this letter.

Surviving a religious cult and being an HR professional in Corporate America have more similarities than you might think.

What was happening to my body and my heart during these 5,658 hours was what happens to a human that has found and fought for their passion, and then gave it up.