Last week, I asked a pretty simple question:
What the hell happened to me?
I hadn’t written anything new in months. I hadn’t prayed. I’d barely been to church unless somebody needed me to work a desk. I was exhausted, overwhelmed, frustrated, and honestly couldn’t see an end to any of it.
I had disappeared from my own life while being present for absolutely everything in it.
Writing that post helped me put words to where I was.
But it left me with another question.
How the hell did I get here?
How did I let one part of my life become so dominant that everything else started getting pushed to the side?
How did I get so overwhelmed by something I voluntarily signed up to do?
There are plenty of easy answers.
I have terrible boundaries.
I have a control problem.
I volunteer too much.
There aren’t enough people helping.
I’ve taken responsibility for things that were never actually mine to carry.
All true.
But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized none of those things are the smoking gun.
The most inconvenient answer is much simpler.
I liked it.
Actually, that’s not quite accurate.
I really love a lot of it.
And maybe that’s the dangerous thing about burnout nobody warned me about:
Sometimes the thing burning you out is something you genuinely love.
The Problem Is, I Love the Work
It would be much easier to explain the last several months if I’d spent them doing something I hated.
I could blame the work.
I could quit.
Problem solved.
Except I love the work.
I’m an accountant. Give me numbers, data, processes, puzzles, discrepancies, and something that needs to be figured out, and my brain is ridiculously happy.
I love the finance side of what I do.
I love QuickBooks.
I love tracking things.
I love figuring out what is selling in the concession stand and what isn’t.
I love looking at costs, inventory, sales, and trends.
I built an entire concessions analytics system because apparently simply knowing we sold food wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to know what we sold, how much we sold, how events compared, what we should stock, what we should eliminate, and eventually what historical data can tell us about how to prepare for future events.
Nobody made me do that.
I did it because I wanted to know.
Because data makes my brain happy.
I like helping run the concession stand. I like helping figure out inventory. I even like running a cash register and interacting with people, despite being an introvert who will require approximately seventeen business days to recover afterward.
I like taking an idea and figuring out how to make it work.
And yes, ultimately all of that helps support a music program I care about.
But if I’m being completely truthful, the socially acceptable volunteer answer of “I do it all for the kids” isn’t the whole story.
I do it because I genuinely enjoy doing it.
That’s probably important to admit.
Apparently, I Don’t Know How to Moderately Care About Things
And there it is.
Possibly the real problem.
I found something I loved doing, discovered I was good at it, and then failed to notice when:
“I care about this”
became
“This gets everything I have.”
This isn’t exactly a new character development for me.
I’m an all-or-nothing person.
Something catches my attention and suddenly I’m researching it, improving it, building systems around it, buying supplies for it, tracking it, analyzing it, or somehow turning what should have been a perfectly normal activity into an entire operation.
I don’t seem to have a particularly functional setting between:
Not interested
and
WELCOME TO MY NEW PERSONALITY.
My brain likes projects.
It likes problems.
It likes having something to figure out.
It especially likes chaos when the chaos contains problems I know how to solve.
And marching band/concessions season provides a nearly unlimited supply.
There’s always another event.
Another order.
Another number.
Another deadline.
Another problem.
Another thing that could work better.
Another puzzle.
My brain stays occupied.
Apparently, I Like 100 MPH
And as exhausting as running at 100 miles per hour is, I’ve learned something else about myself:
Going from 100 miles per hour to 20 is incredibly uncomfortable.
When the season ends, there’s always this weird period of:
Now what?
There’s plenty to do. My life doesn’t suddenly become empty.
But the constant operational intensity disappears.
The problems stop coming quite so quickly.
The puzzle goes quiet.
And apparently part of me misses it.
Which means I have to admit something I don’t particularly like:
Some part of me loved the chaos that was simultaneously running me into the ground.
Not the drama.
Not the complaints.
Not the interpersonal bullshit.
But the pace?
The problems?
The constant need to figure something out?
Yeah.
My brain ate that stuff up.
I Tracked Everything Except Us
This may be the most ridiculous part.
I track damn near everything.
Sales.
Inventory.
Cash.
Credit cards.
Food.
Candy.
Chips.
Costs.
Event performance.
What sold.
What didn’t.
What we might need to change.
I’ve spent an absurd amount of time trying to understand exactly how our concession operation works so we can make better decisions.
You know what we never tracked?
Us. (Matt, the kids, myself)
The ordering.
The shopping.
The pickups.
The inventory.
Putting everything away.
Preparing the stand.
Preparing food.
Building volunteer schedules.
Managing volunteer schedules.
Covering shortages.
Running events.
Counting money.
Tracking sales.
Reconciling everything afterward.
Thinking about the next event before we’ve completely finished the last one.
The two people obsessed with measuring concessions forgot to measure what concessions was costing them.
In accounting terms, Matt and I have basically been providing off-balance-sheet financing.
Not with money.
With time.
Energy.
Knowledge.
Sleep.
Mental bandwidth.
Family time.
And because none of those things show up on an income statement, it’s incredibly easy to pretend they don’t have a cost.
They do.
I just wasn’t recording the transaction.
A Good Investment Can Still Be Overfunded
That’s probably the distinction I’ve been struggling to find.
I don’t think volunteering was a bad investment.
Far from it.
I’ve learned a ridiculous amount.
I’ve built systems I’m proud of.
I’ve gotten to use skills I genuinely enjoy.
Matt and I have learned enough from running concessions that we’re now looking at taking that experience and building something of our own someday.
There has been a return.
The problem wasn’t necessarily where I invested.
The problem was my allocation.
Something can be a good investment and still be overfunded.
And apparently when I decide something is worthy of Danece, I have a really hard time understanding why it shouldn’t receive all available Danece.
That’s where the rest of my life started paying the bill.
That’s where writing disappeared.
That’s where rest disappeared.
That’s where other priorities started getting squeezed around whatever needed to happen next.
That’s where something I loved slowly became something I repeatedly wanted to escape.
Not because I stopped loving the work.
Because I didn’t know how to love the work without letting it consume me.
Please, Volunteer
I don’t want any of this to sound like a warning against volunteering.
It’s actually the opposite.
Please volunteer.
Show up for your kid’s team.
Join the PTO.
Help the band.
Work the concession stand.
Serve at church.
Use whatever weirdly specific thing you’re good at to make something in your community better.
There is real joy in being part of something bigger than your own household.
You may discover skills you didn’t know you had.
You may find something you absolutely love doing.
You may learn things that eventually lead somewhere you never expected.
Just don’t make the mistake I did and assume that because something is worthy of your time, it’s entitled to all of it.
Volunteer.
Care.
Show up.
But don’t disappear into showing up.
Because apparently that’s possible too.
So…Now What?
Well.
This would be an excellent place for me to tell you what I’ve learned and provide some profound explanation of how I’m going to fix all of this.
Unfortunately, this is From the Trenches: Live now.
We don’t have that kind of reporting available. đŸ˜‚
I wish I could tell you I’ve figured out what healthy boundaries look like.
I haven’t.
I’m not even convinced “healthy boundaries” has one universal definition. What protects one person might unnecessarily restrict another.
And knowing me, if I tried to create the perfect boundary system tomorrow, I’d turn boundaries into another all-or-nothing project.
I’d make rules.
I’d track my performance.
I’d turn it into a game.
I’d break one of my own rules and immediately decide I’d screwed the entire thing up.
So perhaps that’s not where I start.
Maybe I Don’t Need More Rules. Maybe I Need an Approval Process.
Maybe for me, a healthy boundary isn’t always a hard line.
Maybe it’s an authorization step.
A pause between:
I can fix this.
and
Therefore, I should.
A chance to ask whether something actually belongs to me before I put it on my books.
A reminder that:
My ability to prevent a failure does not automatically create an obligation to prevent it.
That one is going to be hard.
Because I don’t like watching things fail.
I especially don’t like watching things fail when I know damn well I could have prevented it by just doing the thing myself.
But maybe relinquishing control doesn’t mean convincing myself everything will go perfectly without me.
Sometimes it won’t.
Maybe it means learning to tolerate the discomfort of knowing I could have made something better and choosing not to automatically make it mine.
I don’t know how to do that yet.
I’m working on it.
Slowly.
I Don’t Want to Become Less Danece
I’m trying to learn that something can matter deeply to me without receiving everything I have.
That I can love the work without letting the work consume me.
That I can volunteer without disappearing into volunteering.
That I can see a problem without automatically becoming responsible for solving it.
And maybe most importantly, that I don’t have to become less of myself to stop running myself into the ground.
The part of me that notices things isn’t bad.
The part that loves data isn’t bad.
The part that wants to solve problems isn’t bad.
The part that goes all-in has built some pretty incredible things.
I don’t want to become less Danece.
I just need to figure out where Danece is actually worth investing—and how much of her each investment gets.
I don’t know how to do that yet.
And for once, I’m not going to manufacture an answer just because an unresolved ending makes me uncomfortable.
The period isn’t closed.
We’re still accumulating transactions.
This is where the ledger stands today.
Books remain open. Adjusting entries expected.