Nobody Told Me 35 Would Feel Like This: On Overachiever Burnout and Showing Up Anyway

Vanessa Marquez-Kramme
4 days ago
4 min read

I'm going to be honest with you: I didn't plan for this to be a blog post. It started as a newsletter, the kind I almost didn't send because I hadn't shown up anywhere in weeks. No podcast. No social. No blog. Just a lot of life happening, and me—a lifelong overachiever—quietly dropping things I said I'd do and sitting in the particular exhaustion that overachiever burnout brings: the kind where you know what you should be doing, you want to be doing it, and you still can't.

"If I showed up at least once where it matters in my heart, that IS the win."

Carry that affirmation if you need it. Let's get into it.

Messy Musings

Coach Nane, a woman with curly dark hair and purple-framed glasses, stands outdoors looking slightly over her shoulder toward the camera. She wears a dark jacket. A softly blurred city skyline, paved path, railing, and a few people walking or biking appear in the background under a cloudy sky.

When overachiever burnout doesn't have a clear explanation

Here's the thing nobody says out loud: there's a specific kind of exhaustion that hits in your mid-thirties that doesn't trace back to one obvious cause. It's not the food. It's not the lack of exercise. It's not even the workload—at least not entirely.

I keep running the diagnostic on myself: I started meal prepping. I'm getting back to working out. My schedule, while full, has flex in it. And I'm still tired in a way I can't fully name.

My theory? We seriously underestimate what the state of the world is doing to our bodies on a daily basis. The ambient noise of everything being on fire comes at a cost. And we rarely account for it.

And the comparison doesn't help either. Scrolling past the person who works full-time, raises kids, and still creates content consistently. Or the one who started hustling a few years ago and now speaks internationally and has financial breathing room I can't picture. I see them, and I feel it. Maybe you do too.

I'm not fixing the fatigue right now. I'm naming it, moving accordingly, and trying to be kind to myself about where I am.

The gap is grief

At the start of this year, I said the podcast was coming back. I said I'd be consistent on social. I said a lot of things with the kind of January energy that felt completely sustainable at the time.

Then I went to Hawaii for a wedding; genuinely one of those magical, disconnect-from-everything moments the universe only hands you when you stop white-knuckling your life. Beautiful. Worth it. But also: I came back to a stack of midterms, a derailed schedule, and the quiet reality that three grad school classes plus a full-time job plus a coaching practice plus just being a person adds up to more than I planned for.

The gap between what you said you'd do and what's actually possible isn't a failure. AND it is okay—necessary, even—to grieve it. To sit with the loss of the version of yourself who was going to do all the things. And then, once you've felt that, turn around and celebrate what you actually did do. Both are true at the same time.

What's helping me here: Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart. Not just because it's Brené, but because expanding the vocabulary we have for our thoughts, feelings, and experiences is actually what allows us to process them. You can't grieve something you can't name. This book gives you the words.

There's a reason we call it prioritizing—we only have 100% to give (if that)

I've been living this loop: get a rhythm in one area of life, notice that three others have quietly slipped, go tend to those, come back, and find the first thing is all messed up again. For a long time, I thought this was a me problem. A discipline problem. A "why can't you just hold it together" problem.

Now I think it's just math. There's one of me. I have a finite amount of capacity, and I keep acting like I don't.

I'm slowly learning to move between things without treating every drop as a collapse. The drop is inevitable, and I'm learning to come back up as many times as it takes.

Good enough is good enough (and I'm learning to not hate this)

School has always come easily to me. Nonchalantly, even. So this semester, when I realized that even that nonchalance was requiring more effort than before, it knocked me a little sideways.

Making peace with "good enough" has been its own uncomfortable spiritual exercise. But here's where I've landed: instead of trying to be excellent at all of school equally, I'm focusing on what will actually matter—projects, case studies, showing up present in class. A quiz? I've studied for hundreds of those and retained almost none of the content. (Except the fact that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. That one lives rent-free forever.)

I'd rather graduate with work I'm proud of than a GPA I stressed myself into. That's a real-time, uncomfortable AF value shift for me (and one that took 20 years too long).

That's the musing. Messy, unpolished, and very much alive.

If any of this landed for you — or if your March has been its own particular flavor of chaos — I'd love to hear about it.

Coach Nane smiles broadly while standing against a light, neutral background. She has short, curly hair and wears glasses, hoop earrings, a patterned blazer over a dark outfit, and layered bracelets. Her hands are raised mid-gesture, conveying energy and warmth.

You made it to the end.

That counts. So does subscribing.

Once a month I send an honest, no-fluff email from inside the spiral—messy musings, lightbulb moments, and the kind of reflections that don't fit neatly into a caption. If this felt like something you needed today, there's more where that came from.