I lived the college lifestyle of party hard, work hard, in my late twenties. Part of it was reclaiming my “youth,” and part of it was blowing off steam from the immense amount of pressure I was under.

I shut the company down in 2016 and recovering from a severe burnout tried many different things — streaming on YouTube, wrote a novel, building our own product — none of which panned out.

I then took a contract job to pay the bills, then permanent roles while continuing to recover from that burnout.

It took years, and then just when I thought I was over the burnout, my health failed. M.E debilitated me for eighteen months. I tried to keep going, but eventually I had to stop — full stop — and let my body and mind recover. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life — and I once built a booking system over the weekend.

At the worst of it, my fatigue was so bad that I needed a walking stick to move around and I could not leave the house. We have stairs in the house, and I had a quota of how many times I could go up and down those stairs each day — at the most three times.

I spoke slower — much slower. I would stop for several seconds as I struggled to think of the word I wanted to use. I gave up being as articulate as I once used to be. I was moving and speaking in slow motion.

When I could go out of the house, to go the shop, I didn’t want to go alone, and it took me longer to cross the road than the lights stayed green for. I could barely carry myself let alone anything else.

Overdoing was brutal, and I’d only know a day or two later when the fatigue has a litter and roosted. I had to be super careful if I was exerting myself in any way. I once felt well enough to go for a walk for fifteen minutes — and it took me two weeks to recover.

I would sometimes accidentally overdo when I was already recovering, and it would take even longer to get better. It was brutal!

I’d spent most of my life feeling like I had so many things to do and not enough time. I packed as many things as I could do into each day. When I was relaxing, it was so I could be more productive later. I never learned to relax or enjoy myself for nothing more than the activity in itself.

For one of my birthdays, I spent 48 hours deploying a brand new system for megabus.com.

I was nothing if I was not productive — if I was not responsible. Even when I was blackout drunk, I was responsible — I got myself back home, drank a bunch of water and got myself to bed, set the alarm to get to work the next day. I might not remember much about the previous night, and I might still be drunk in the office, but I put in a full day’s (or more) worth of work before I rinsed and repeated.

My therapist pointed out — here I was explaining how hard it was to do anything, and I was telling her about all the things I was doing. What would it mean to have nothing on my todo list? What would it mean to do nothing? What would it take before I let myself do that?

In some ways, I suspect she’d been leading me to this question for the last nine years — nine years of intense therapy so that I could finally let myself take a break — not so I could be more productive, or so that I could recover, not for anything — but simply because that’s what my body, mind and my soul needed. It’s what my whole being had been screaming for — for longer than I could remember.

I was so tightly wound that I could not even let myself have a breakdown. I used to think back to that first scene in Boston Legal with envy — the man who turns up to work without his trousers because he had a nervous breakdown. I used to wish that I could have had a proper breakdown, so that I could have ended up in a hospital and received the care I needed. Instead, I had to navigate the company to a reasonable close, park a bunch of things before I could let myself have that break.

In a way, seven years of that therapy work was to get myself to a place where I could experience that breakdown which had happened over a decade earlier.

I had squirreled away all of the self worth I had left into my ability to do things — to get things done — to provide. With M.E, none of this was possible, and here was my therapist suggesting that maybe it was time to stop trying.

I had just enough strength left to muster up the courage needed to try it out.

I spent the next few weeks watching tv — a lot of kids shows, because that’s all my mind could really understand. Happy shows because that’s all my heart could handle. I watched a bunch of slow moving YouTube let’s play series. I let go of my desire to know what was going on — to understand. I parked my life.

After I was just about better enough, my partner took me across the road to the Chinese clinic. He prescribed 15 weekly sessions of acupuncture plus Chinese medicine. I was unsure, and I was not working but I committed to it, and paid up front. It got me at least 95% of the way out of it.

I’ll never forget the day I walked into the Chinese clinic without a walking stick for the first time!

My partner and I ventured out for a short break at the end of last year, for New Year. It was two nights, to Glasgow. It was the first time I’d gone away for a break in years.

A couple of months later, I was ready to work again and I can do most things, as long as I am mindful about overdoing. Each day, I try and push the envelope of my capacity just a little bit more — occasionally I overdo it, and have to take it a bit easier for a couple of weeks to be better again.

Fortunately, even when I am recovering, I am well enough to work, which is largely just finding work right now. If it wasn’t for the financial pressure, I’d spend another few months taking it easy.

I still go for acupuncture — once a fortnight — at least until I feel 100% and it gets much harder to overdo!

I still feel like I have a lot of things to do, but I no longer feel like I don’t have enough time. I am able to focus on just what I am doing without feeling the pressure of all the things on my todo list.

Financially, and career-wise, I’m at the worst point of my life, but I feel more relaxed, comfortable and secure than I have ever felt in my life.