I burned out as a manager and nobody noticed. Including me.

Last fall I took six weeks of medical leave. Officially it was "a health matter". Unofficially, I had been running on fumes for most of a year and my body finally made a decision my calendar wouldn't. I'm writing this because when I came back, three people on other teams quietly asked me how I knew. The honest answer is that I didn't, not until very late. So here are the signs I missed, in the hope that you catch yours earlier.

The signs I explained away

• I stopped being curious in 1:1s. I was still showing up, still asking "how's it going?", but I was listening for problems I'd have to fix, not for the person. My best engineer told me later she'd stopped bringing me ideas because I "seemed tired of them". I was tired of everything.
• Sunday at 4 pm, my stomach would drop. Every week. I called it "getting ready for the week".
• I was the bottleneck and proud of it. Every promo packet, every incident review, every hiring debrief went through me. I told myself it was quality control. It was control.
• I stopped reading. I've read about a book a week since college. I went from February to September without finishing one. That should have been my canary.
• Small things made me disproportionately angry. A late Jira update. A meeting that ran two minutes over. I'd apologize afterward and do it again the next week.

The conversation that turned it around

It wasn't my VP. It was my sister, who is a nurse and doesn't care about my job title. She asked me one question over dinner: "When did you last do something just because you liked it?" I couldn't answer. I genuinely could not think of a single thing in the previous three months. I cried in a restaurant in Harlem and the waiter brought me extra cornbread, which I will never forget.

I called my doctor the next morning.

What I do differently now

1. I keep a "not my job" list. Every quarter I write down three things I'm doing that someone else on the team should own, and I hand them over properly, with context and authority, not just the work. This quarter it was the on-call rotation, the hiring rubric and one recurring meeting I'd been running for two years out of habit.
2. My calendar has two blocks I don't move. Tuesday and Thursday, 12 to 1, "lunch, actually". Not "focus time". Lunch. Away from the desk.
3. I tell my team when I'm running low. Not the details. Just "I'm at 60% this week, so I'll be slower on reviews, ping me if something is blocking." Nobody thought less of me. Two of them started doing the same, which is the part I'm proudest of.
4. I measure my weeks by one question. On Friday I ask myself what I did that week just because I liked it. If the answer is nothing two weeks running, something has to give, and it can't be my sleep.
5. I go to therapy. I'm saying this out loud because for a long time I thought it was something other people needed. Black women in particular get told we're "strong" so often that we start to believe we don't need anything. We do.

I'm back, I'm reading again (four books since January), and my team is doing better work with less of me in the middle of it. Funny how that works.

If you manage people: your team will copy what you do, not what you say about work-life balance.

What's your canary? The small thing that tells you you're running low before the big thing does?