Onstage, you look calm, collected, and confident, but internally, you feel like a hot mess. Maintaining a facade of confidence while your insides are freaking out is extremely depleting. Performing full-out, literally and figuratively, has you pushing past your limit, but honoring your own needs feel impossible in an industry with toxic attitudes about personal suffering for art’s sake.

You’re proud of your dedication to your craft, but that pride vanishes the second someone critiques your technique. The constant anxiety and pressure is taking its toll, not only on your body, but also on your relationships and your life outside of work (if you even have one!). You’re tired of burning out and can’t understand how to feel confident and empowered in such a competitive, furiously-paced field.  

Even though you’d never say it out loud now, you genuinely became a designer to make the world a more beautiful, efficient and equitable place. Your training pushed you to experiment, refine your point of view, and discover meaningful, creative solutions to relevant problems. But now you’re disillusioned, because your professional projects are constrained, boring, and detached of meaning and purpose.

The further you’ve climbed up the corporate ladder, the more cynical you’ve become and the less design work you actually do. Not only do you battle your own bitterness, you also wonder if your overworking and burnout will actually pay off one day, especially if AI renders human designers obsolete! Your lack of purpose seeps into you overall outlook on life, making it feel impossible to feel excited and hopeful about anything. You try to find purpose and joy outside of work, but the void never really goes away. 

You’re burnt out from being your own accountant, HR rep, brand strategist, project manager, etc - you don’t even know how many hats you wear because you lost count a long time ago. Your to-do list is like a playlist on shuffle that you can’t turn off; focusing feels impossible your mind is in a million places. You feel depressed and lonely without a team, and also super jealous of your friends with 9-5s, predictable paychecks, and PTO. You keep trying to charge what you’re worth, but tend to chicken out then feel resentful later.

You’re depleted from a cycle of being swamped with multiple gigs, overworking and crashing, then freaking out about where you’ll find the next project. Balance, inner peace, and self care all feel attainable for others, but impossible for you. 

At this stage in your career, you actually get Kendrick’s lyrics - “Anybody can get it. The hard part is keeping it, motherf*cker.” While your success feels incredibly validating and hard-earned, you had no clue the pressure of maintaining it is its own exhausting daily battle. The very behaviors that got brought you visibility and acclaim (crazy work ethic, tunnel vision on your craft, leaving your personal life on the back burner) are creating new issues you didn’t anticipate.

The pressure of high visibility projects feels both crushing and isolating. You want to confide and vent about it, but you don’t, because others would judge your complaints as “champagne-problems.” Even worse, you feel survivor’s guilt among your colleagues who are just as talented but haven’t hit commercial success. And, with new tax-bracket-changing income, perpetual new decisions about who to trust, who to hire, and how give back (or not ) are their own heavy burdens to carry.