After a few scrappy startups, I landed a role at Google, then switched to Facebook, where I gained more money and leadership opportunities. My career plan was moving along smoothly; I never imagined leaving. Move to San Francisco, cultivate UX mentorships, build credibility, and earn a multi-six-figure income while solving the world’s most critical problems.
But gradually, my inner pain grew too loud to ignore. It’s been one year since I turned in my credentials at Facebook, and I have no desire to continue building a career in technology.
Despite the external success, I felt anxious, disillusioned, tired, stressed out, and overwhelmed with my basic tasks. I burned out and felt like a failure.
But with an excellent fall-back portfolio and large savings fund, I took an open-ended soul-searching sabbatical. Through Jungian depth therapy, trauma healing, and several shadow work methods, I discovered two key root causes for my burnout:
Now, I’ve begun metabolizing anger from emotional, sexual, and physical abuse into creative work that empowers and frees others. I’m discovering that burnout and toxic work environments are merely surface issues, symptoms of much deeper dysfunctions.
As I leaped into the fires of uncertainty, I felt ready to get very uncomfortable.
Through investigative tech writing in my previous career, I became enthralled with emerging technologies like AI, drones, self-driving cars, and AR/VR. Automation gave us more free time; VR simulations could increase safety for construction work and soothe PTSD symptoms. Self-driving cars would save millions of lives, eliminating human error behind the wheel.
Working in technology seemed like the best way for me to have a significant positive impact. But ultimately, people make the technology we use, and our numerous unsolved human problems surface into the products we build.
When we don’t deal with our inner shadows, they surface in inconvenient, unpredictable ways.
Growing up, I adopted masculine values; I was “one of the boys.” I liked being a tomboy, playing football and video games, getting competitive, earning high grades, and generally optimizing everything. I lost all respect for femininity because I never wanted to seem weak and emotional.
But we need a balance of masculinity and femininity to ground our ambitions, like yin and yang. Instead, I grew addicted to productivity in an effort to prove my value, but most people would just say I was good at my job. Like codependency hiding in monogamy culture, workaholism hides easily in the tech industry.
“We’re an industry that likes to burn people out and not have respect for people’s lives outside of work. I think the industry is kind of perverted,” said Jason Fried, co-founder of project management app Basecamp.
As I improved my UX research skills, I felt empowered to lead teams with human insights, detailing the most crucial problems for us to solve. But my starry-eyed optimism began to fade as reality set in: engineers far outnumber researchers even in the most human-centric companies.
Instead, I found myself spending many hours trying to understand what the team had built and finding a problem for their solution. Though I had this challenge with startups, I hoped larger companies would actually be more user-centric. So much for solving critical problems.
Technology has led to many positive changes, but it’s definitely not going to solve our core human issues.
When I first heard statistics about women making less than men for the same work, I felt infuriated. But solving this problem isn’t just about giving more leadership roles to women; it’s about honoring feminine values and stories equally. But for right now, it generally sucks to be a woman in a male-dominated work environment.
“The truth is that around the world, women continue to be disadvantaged by a working culture that is based on the ideological belief that male needs are universal,” writes Caroline Criado Perez in “Invisible Women.”
Despite having better leadership skills than men, we have deeply ingrained negative biases about women and power (remember Adam and Eve and the “fall” of humanity?). Women make up half the world’s population, so why don’t our power structures reflect feminine needs, struggles, and desires?
As I asked questions to define problems, I felt like our main issues were with collaboration (or lack of). When our engineering manager interrupted or dismissed my ideas in staff meetings, I sensed a “king of the hill” culture. The loudest, most authoritative-sounding voice gains the most influence, impact, and respect.
Though I was brave enough to address these issues head-on, people kept reminding me that culture changes very slowly.
As it turns out, the most high-performing teams have psychological safety in common, an atmosphere where people are more supportive than competitive. As a sensitive person, these micro-aggressions often sent me into fight-or-flight mode and dampened my enthusiasm. Suddenly I was having emotional breakdowns at work; now I understand why.
Though I knew my past impacted me, I had no idea how intensely. As children, we are entirely dependent on our parents and usually morph to please them for our survival. Discovering narcissistic personality disorder caused a massive perspective shift for me; it was the tip of the iceberg for me to finally understand where my unhelpful patterns came from.
Our bodies hold infinite wisdom as well as every unprocessed painful experience throughout our lives. But without the tools and attention to process trauma, toxic behaviors go unchecked.
Once I understood how trauma impacts us, my coworkers’ behaviors made more sense. Things like mansplaining, interrupting, lack of empathy, or dominating conversations rang more clearly as threatened egos. I sensed a lot of inner pain in the bodies around me.
What if we taught boundary setting in schools or company workshops? We’d likely have way fewer burnout cases. A large 2018 study of tech workers showed over 57% reported currently feeling burned out. I’m far from the only one who felt drained and cynical in tech.
When I faced my fear of embarrassment to share my realization with a coworker, she advised me to set better boundaries (like it was no big deal). But without the confidence to be assertive, I regularly took on too many responsibilities.
Additionally, I felt pressured to perform constantly, steadily increasing my workload from my managers and teammates.
As an optimist who believes in solving real problems, the profit-first culture began to drain me. Leadership always seemed to prioritize profitable features over user problems.
I chose to work in large companies because I wanted to master my field and have more opportunities for a positive impact. But I remember vividly when one manager told me: “You just care too much,” followed by a “stay in your lane” speech. Was muting my passion a prerequisite for professional success?
Far from feeling appreciated for my enthusiasm, I felt like an enemy of productivity for asking hard-to-answer questions and being difficult to manage.
Overall, my UX journey was thrilling, empowering, and tiring. Over years of work, I strengthened many transferable skills like problem-solving, empathy, persistence, storytelling, communication, big-picture thinking, and curiosity. I did earn a lot of money while making millions of people’s lives a bit easier.
But more importantly, I built confidence in myself and my ability to walk away from something that isn’t good for me, even when others won’t understand.
Looking back, I feel grateful for the pain that led to personal insight. Plus, I know the experience of success itself transfers well.
As I reconnect with my intuition and authentic creativity, I feel far more alive and aligned with fulfilling work. After spending thousands of hours with soul-searching inner work, I know three things for sure:
I believe breakdowns lead to breakthroughs. After being in numerous toxic-masculine environments, I feel clear that my sensitivity, self-awareness, compassion, fire, unique perspective, kindness, and boldness are priceless gifts. Fragmenting myself to fit in has never led to fulfilling work or relationships.
Instead of chasing recognition, I choose to validate myself.
“May I have the courage today to live the life that I would love, to postpone my dream no longer, but do at last what I came here for, and waste my heart on fear no more,” — John O’Donohue.