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From burned out to on fire again ...

Photo by Rob Wicks on Unsplash

*** This is long and personal. But it needs to be said. ***

In 2018, after years of staying home and homeschooling and working part time here and there, I needed to return to work full time. At 52, I was facing the reality of where life choices and circumstances had us financially, and I was worried. We also have complex medical issues in our family, and that complicates things with insurance greatly, and so I had to work somewhere that I could afford to pay for the insurance.

My husband had returned to ministry the year before after a hiatus, a very long one, where we healed from an experience in the last church he had pastored that left us with 30 days to find a home, a trail of gossip that made us pariahs in the ministry community for a couple years until the other pastor who caused the problems wrote a letter and repented for his actions. Even then, the church where it had happened ignored his gesture and carried on without a word of remorse or apology for what had happened. In fact, they were advised by Bible college professors who knew the situation and us, people who had assisted them through their crisis and ignored us, to just focus on healing and not to respond in any way to what had been revealed about what had been done in that church and to us in that letter. The church needed to just keep it quiet and let it die, it was said. Everyone would be better off if it was not spoken of was the advice they were given. And the advice they took.

Before the return to vocational ministry, it had taken years for the Lord to deal with me, to get me to the point I was able to and actually wanted to be back in ministry. And it had taken another few years after that before it actually happened. During those years, Satan nearly destroyed my family with trials of complex medical issues with one child, addiction issues with two children, and financial strain that was unrelenting, one where we struggled to keep the roof over our heads and the food on the table a lot of the time. God always provided, but always in ways we knew for sure it was coming from Him alone. Before that, we had always been workers who believed in the American Dream and a man that doesn’t work doesn’t eat.

I know that part of our struggle isn’t unlike what many families today face. I only share it to preface how I got to the point that at 52 going to court reporting school was a good idea. I was scared to death of failing, but knew something had to be done on my part, and it was time. I knew I was intellectually capable but read all kinds of things about how court reporting was hard for older students due to the demands on your mental processing. I did it anyway, because I felt that was what I needed to do. I was successful in school, and at 53 I found myself as brand new court reporter in a courtroom in the largest city in our state, just two weeks before Covid shut us down and remote work became a thing. Add learning in a remote court room to that brand new court reporter role. Anxiety doesn’t even begin to describe my daily state in that season. But I had learned to compartmentalize that both from past experience and in school. And I was good at that if nothing else. I thought when I certified and was tested by fire in a live courtroom in that huge courthouse and hired on that same week that I had arrived. Little did I know.

I have always loved true crime shows where they solve crimes. I don’t want to see the gore. I don’t want the scary music. I just liked the detective work and the courtroom drama. Or I thought I did. I soon realized that a courtroom is nothing like what you see on TV most of the time. You are not privy to the back story. Even juries often aren’t. And there are so many more questions than those shows often tie up so neatly. You don’t have your informational ducks in a row before the trial ever starts.

And the difference in watching on a screen and sitting a few feet from a witness, a defendant, and/or a victim is a very real one. The emotions run high a lot of the time. Some days are like watching paint dry, but they were few and far between for me. And I learned to look for those. When I wasn’t doing the paint drying days, I did many child sex trials in the midst of the murders and drugs and regular sexual assaults. But child sex was the worst. And the first few months back to in-person court after Covid, we did those trials almost back-to-back as the DA wanted to clear that backlog first.

What I learned is I don’t like the true crime experience. I like it neatly tied up in an hour and justice served through a TV screen. Today, I don’t even like that much anymore because I learned I couldn’t separate myself from the emotion of the room. I could compartmentalize performance anxiety but couldn’t separate myself from the traumas of the people in the room. I kept my face blank and my transcripts going, but I was carrying that and not unloading it. I knew better. I read and tried to find ways to deal with it. But I wasn’t successful. But I would not quit, not of my own volition.

What does this have to do with hurry, you may be asking. Let me explain court reporting. Someone once described it like this. You are typing. Except someone took away some of the keys. Figure it out. The machine is on fire. Accuracy of 95 percent is the bare minimum, and 225 words per minute minimum requirement. The person on the stand may be crying or mumbling or both. They may be illiterate, or English may not be their first language. The attorneys will pressure a witness by cutting them off or questioning them rapid-fire. And you are to get every word they say as they say it and be able to read it back to them. You are to call them all down and control the flow of the courtroom to make sure you can do your job and that they aren’t actually speaking over one another because you can only take down one speaker at a time. And someone’s freedom and someone else’s justice often depends on how your transcript holds up for the appeal process. Is it accurate? It better be.

I was a voice steno writer, not a steno machine writer, though I started out as steno. But voice writing is not what it sounds like. It’s not using Siri. It’s using software and voice codes (like another language) to make those words I heard come out looking like a transcript with near perfect accuracy. The good thing was in that courthouse my real-time screen was only visible to me when I worked in person. And those were my learning years, literal trial by fire. New reporters spend months or years building their voice model in their system to be able to produce real time that is excellent. The 95 percent accuracy early in your career is in your voice notes, not what the software heard and produced. And that’s fine, because the transcript isn’t legal until you check your voice notes against your transcript and certify it. And the stress of that task, that environment doesn’t leave when you leave the courthouse because you take the work home. Sometimes a transcript is needed overnight or in a few days. Sometimes in a few weeks. But if you aren’t experienced enough to be near perfect, getting that transcript ready is whole other process called scoping. And it can take longer than the actual hearing itself took. And these days almost everyone who is convicted appeals it seems, and the transcript will certainly be needed later.

After Covid, I still worked for our state, but I moved to a new district with two courthouses. One was always running. I wasn’t getting any days out of court to do transcripts, which meant I had to work every hour I wasn’t in court because my accuracy was so low. If you can’t do that, you are expected to hire someone to do them or do them yourself at night and on weekends. The problem with that is finding someone with the skill to do that who will do it for what I could pay them on my state page rates, which are the lowest in the nation. Plus, in order to improve, I needed to do my own scoping and corrections. Looking back, if told a new court reporter anything, it would be this, if you are going to straight into a courtroom, look at their dockets. Make sure you can handle it. Even if I had done that, I couldn’t have prepared for Covid and then backlog clearing phase. It was unreal. And in 2021, it wasn’t long before I was working almost every day in a courtroom and working several hours at night, on weekends, all with an hour commute one-way. Sixteen-hour days were the norm on weekdays. And usually at least 12 hours on Saturday. About four on Sunday. And I was still behind. I was living the courtroom drama, live or on repeat as I relived the events of my days when I got the transcripts ready. I never cooked. I never cleaned. And I seldom did anything in my home except work and sleep. We bought a new home during that time, our first in over 20 years, nothing fancy but a mansion to us. And I felt like I was getting somewhere at least, so I kept telling myself I could do this until it got better. And I was sure it would.

And I did all that while going through menopause. Looking back, I see the very real issues. But at the time, I was too far in the trees to see the forest I was lost in.

Still, we could pay our bills. We could go to the grocery store and buy what we wanted to eat, not what just what was the cheapest thing that week. We could buy clothing somewhere besides Goodwill. And for the first time in years, we had a family vacation. After years of being a stay-at-home mom barely making it, it felt good to contribute financially. Things were not perfect, but we started to feel like there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

There was. And I was headed toward it.

Until I burned out.

Which you probably saw coming when you read this. But I didn’t. I kept thinking I would get better, my accuracy was getting better slowly, and I would get there. The better I got at my skill, the easier the job would be. And that part was true. What was never going to change was the 5 days a week in court most weeks and the necessity of working another full-time job at home to keep up with transcripts in the district I had been moved to. And when I say work, imagine being in a production job every minute, in both places.

Eventually, I opted for a remote only job in another state. And it was refreshing. My voice model had come together to the point I could show my real-time to anyone and not be ashamed. There was no commute. I was still in a courtroom, and the workload was still very high at times, but there were breaks where I could somewhat catch up. . I still averaged 60 to 70 hours a week, not 80 to 90.

But I found a use for that 20 hours. It wasn’t sleep. One of my daughters and I opened a business. A clothing store. Yeah. I know. Now I know. But then I saw it as a way to slow down one day later when the business was profitable. I saw it as an investment for my future when I could no longer keep this pace up which, at that point, I was beginning to accept. But I thought I had it in me for a few more years, and then the business might be viable. The work and money spent would come back later I said. I was “fixing” burnout by working harder to get out of it.

It doesn’t work that way.

And I was also a pastor’s wife, at church every time the doors opened almost and involved in ministry.

I was also seeing that that slower boil in the remote courtroom was still a boil. Add the business, and it was catching up with me again^. . But then, all of a sudden my workload dropped to nearly zero. With the business just getting going, at first, I thought a few weeks of slow work was a blessing for me to focus on the store. I chose to see it as a gift from God. But it continued for months and there was little to no explanation from anyone in the know about where our work was going. We were not fired we were told. And it wasn’t just me. Lots of us were being affected. Court was still happening. We could see dockets. But something had changed. We were not filling the reporter chairs.

Eventually, it started getting hard to pay bills again. I won’t say anymore to protect the innocent (mainly myself so I don’t get sued for saying the truth no one else has spoken aloud just yet), but after talking with other court reporters over the country about what we were seeing in other places with the field, I knew I could go back into a courtroom in person if I could find a position near me. And by near, I knew I would be accepting the long commutes again if I wanted a job without waiting on a closer position to open when someone retired. It was an option, but not one I thought I could handle at that point. I was burned out and barely hanging on. And the very idea was overwhelming to me.

Still, I kept going through the motions. And because I had waited on the work to come back for so long, months of barely getting by with that job, the stress of that the constant production mindset and the use of AI in the courtrooms looming large in my windshield, along with what I now see as God’s hand, I made a career change. To teaching. Mainly because it presented itself and I knew, after years of homeschooling, that I loved it.

I still had about 2 months of transcripts to do. I had committed to work for our local election board for the election. The week I changed jobs, I went to court one last time, worked the election the next day for 15 hours, then started my new teaching position the next day in the middle of the week.

Burned out would have been an understatement the morning I sat at that desk with the red ceramic apple-shaped paper clip holder that was a gift from my daughter. But I felt God and I both were on the same page. And that was a peace even as my mind raced from this to that, that morning, running on coffee and adrenaline. What else was new?

At that point, thank the Lord, I could still compartmentalize. So I showed up and did what needed to be done. I knew I could love this work too, and I really felt like it was a slower pace. And if I could just get past being new at one more thing, I would be okay. Here’s a clue, y’all. If teaching feels like an easy job to you at any point, you either were a court reporter before or you are halfway doing it.

I never halfway do anything except housework. Halfway might be a generous assessment there.

As my schedule slowed some, I noticed that I could not slow my mind down. I could not make it stop. Before I hadn’t wanted it to stop. But now I needed to. I wasn’t keeping up with things. The slower the schedule got, the less I got done. The more the pressure eased, the more tired I became. I wasn’t productive at all, going around in circles, no short-term memory function at all almost. Though I had a slower pace, I could not slow mentally, but all my body wanted was sleep. Now granted, I still had work from transcripts after school, so my days were still long, though not as long. But by a few months in, the transcripts were only sporadic, the pace was really slower. I had only one full-time job and a business now. But my issues were the same. Under pressure I would perform. I taught classes I was trying to prepare for to middle schoolers and high schoolers. Being performance driven, realizing I was now in a place where my effectiveness on my job depended upon someone else actually doing something with what I had done was unsettling. Teaching isn’t a solitary production job, and I needed to adjust my thinking to being only partially responsible for the outcome. I am still working on that. But I understand these kids are not in my home like with homeschooling, and I can’t control them the way I did my own. That was an adjustment as well.

Over the years though, no matter what has gone on, I have always written. Blogs. Social media. Privately for my own sanity. And so many have said, “Write books. I will buy them.” But there was never time. I thought this summer might be the time. But now I know, it’s taken me weeks to be able to slow my brain down, much less produce as much as I had hoped. And I still find myself with racing thoughts and extreme fatigue at times most of the time.

God is slowing me down in activity if not mentally just yet.

After a year, the store is closing. There are multiple reasons for that, including the health of my daughter and money. It’s always money. But I am choosing to see that as God’s leading too, because here is where I am today:

• I can’t remember anything short-term. It is so bad it interferes with my daily routine. Writing is the only way I can organize thoughts and retain at least a portion of them. But even there, I am not at my baseline.

• The smallest interruptions make me feel overwhelmed. I used to carry huge loads and multi-task like a champ. Now I can’t pee and read at the same time. If the dog barks while I am doing either, I want to punch a wall.

• Feeling overwhelmed makes me irritable. I am mean as sin a lot of days. So I have chosen to just be quiet in most places.

• My sense of humor has always been dry and maybe a little snarky. Now it’s absent. I try. But I don’t feel like laughing most of the time. I think that’s mainly because I can’t slow the thoughts down long enough to have a good time.

• I don’t want to take medication to mask this. I have, in years past, taken antidepressants and am not anti- anti-depressant in some cases.

• I have a constant low-level anxiety. I am always waiting on the next shoe to drop.

• I don’t think my problem is a lack of faith. The best relationship I have these days is with the Lord. He’s probably the only one who can stand me more than a short time.

• I have a strong desire to create things but no ability to follow through. Once I put the first stitch or brush stroke down, my brain freezes. And unless I am writing about anything other than the facts of my own experience, there is nothing there either. The stories are bottled up and can’t find a way out. I think they are there. I can’t access them, if that makes sense. I can’t create anything that isn’t personally driven by my own experience. And that’s unusual for me. I like to write about all kind of things normally.

You may be saying to yourself, after reading this missive, that the world might be okay if I just refrained from creating right now. This isn’t a feel-good piece for sure.

But this where I am. This is the place I am writing from these days.

And my hope is, when enough of this is spilled here, that the writer’s voice I have found in recent years but that seems to have gone dormant again except for a few gasps here and there will speak again the stories and inspiration it once did.

I am burned out.

I want to be on fire again. A controlled burn. Holy Spirit fire. Holy Spirit controlled. Here for eternity.

I am here for the spilling today. He’s here for the cleanup today and the call up one day. It’s going to be okay that day. But on this day, there’s a healing process to go through. And I don’t know where to start. Except right here, spilling. And I did most of it to myself.

No matter. I am taking the grace He’s given me in all that He’s taken away.

And I’m calling the losses a gift.

I can rest.

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