What therapy taught me about work, worth, and who I am without the performance.

A story of burnout, boundaries, and becoming whole again.

May 26, 2025

I’ve carried this essay with me for a while. And as May marks Mental Health Awareness Month and my birthday just a few days away, it felt like the right time to pause and reflect. A personal check-in of sorts. An inward glance at how far I’ve come, how much I’ve grown, and how much more gently I speak to myself now.

As I look at this photo of younger me, I can’t help but wonder what I’d tell her, not to prepare her, but to protect her.

Maybe: “You don’t need to try so hard. You’re already enough.”

This is the girl I carry with me. The one who thought the world was full of wonder and hadn’t yet equate achievement with worth.

Here’s to rewriting that story. One birthday at a time.

The Mask of High Achievement

This piece is part quiet celebration, part resistance to the glossy wellness narratives we’ve come to accept as truth. Mental health doesn’t always show up as falling apart. Sometimes it wears nice Sandro clothes, smiles on Teams, delivers quarterly targets, and still crumbles the moment the front door clicks shut. For years, I lived that duality, a high-functioning perfectionist performing at full volume while quietly fraying at the edges. I achieved. I overachieved. I pushed through. Until I couldn’t.

I hesitated to write this. Not because I don’t believe in the power of vulnerability, but because it demands a kind of truth-telling that makes your fingers freeze mid-sentence. Still, if sharing this helps someone recognise themselves before they burn out, then it’s worth the discomfort.

Starting Over in a New City

Let’s rewind. London, 2015. I arrived for a master’s in International Business at the University of Warwick, hopeful, determined, wide-eyed. I had just left behind a crumbling country, Greece, which at the time was in the depths of an economic crisis, teetering on the edge of a "Grexit" that ultimately never happened. My first job came quickly: a Shoreditch-based digital agency working on luxury clients. Fresh off internships in Athens and my family’s business, I was eager to dive in. The commute from Leamington Spa, four hours a day, felt like a rite of passage. I soon moved into a flat in Isle of Dogs, where I learnt, the hard way, that there’s a difference between subletting and renting. Let’s just say, the deposit never came back.

Agency life was vibrant but unsteady. Leadership chased new clients instead of nurturing the ones they had. When a media agency offered me a role in their content department, I said yes before they’d finished the sentence. It turned out to be the right thing to follow my instincts, the agency I was leaving soon lost its main client and eventually closed, some of whom, coincidentally, ended up under my new agency. I swapped East London for Tottenham Court Road and immersed myself in media life. The pace was relentless. The culture, intoxicating. There were lunches, dinners, drinks, complimentary manicures, concerts, even Barry’s Bootcamps. But none of it was enough. My hunger for “more” never slowed.

Eventually, stepped into a newly created role, leading social, content, and creator strategy for a global personal care portfolio, all within an in-house agency setup. I learned the language of media plans, KBRs, and viewability metrics and I had a crash course in managing high-stakes clients. I thrived, until I didn’t. WhatsApps at dawn, copy edits at night. I had no boundaries. I was exhausted.

And then came COVID. The pressure dialled up. The work was non-stop. Every campaign felt urgent. Every task felt existential. And under it all, this quiet fear: that if you slowed down, you might be next. Redundancies were rumoured. Teams were shrinking. I didn’t know if I’d still have a job the next week, so I just kept going.

I pivoted to other brands but something was off. The spark was fading. Then came an even bigger media agency, where I led cultural strategy and activations: a major TV partnership that shifted perceptions around fashion, and a travel-focused docuseries that aired on a global streaming platform. It was creative, impactful, fulfilling, but still something in me felt unsettled, as I always wanted to see the world of brand marketing.

When Everything Started to Fracture

That’s when a global health company came calling. A client-side role, leading content and creative across Northern Europe. I nearly didn’t reply yes to the recruiter. Imposter syndrome whispered all the usual lines. But I got it. And I learned about PAGB, consumer health, digital transformation, managing agencies (switching sides was fun and challenging as I was able to bring all my agency experience building the right agency setup) and just how broken internal systems can be. The hours were punishing. The culture, dysfunctional and full of conflicts and politics. I burnt out.

Luckily, I’d started coaching by then. It helped me see what I couldn’t from inside the mess: this wasn’t about personal failure. It was about being in an environment that made success impossible. Eventually, I made the painful decision to leave and yes, I stayed to help my replacement get my job. Because boundaries were still a lesson I hadn’t learnt.

I moved into another global health company, expanding my remit across even more markets. I got stuck into UX, GenAI tools, global rollouts, and website migrations. Then came the restructure. Redundancy. At first, I was shocked. But then it became the permission slip I didn’t know I needed.

The Work That Actually Changed Me

That’s when therapy began, the proper kind. Not coaching. Not goal-setting. But the kind that makes you excavate. I looked at old stories, relationships, family dynamics. I started to understand why I’d tied my identity so tightly to achievement. Why stillness felt unbearable. Why I kept chasing future versions of myself without ever pausing to ask if I liked the present one. Face my childhood trauma right in the face of it all and all the ways it shaped me.

Therapy showed me I’m not just a marketer. I’m a person. I love film, pottery, photography, and dissecting a soundtrack like it’s literature. I read directors’ choices the way others study wine labels. I wander through exhibitions not to be seen but to feel. I want to create again, not for clout, but for joy.

I’m learning to say no. To sit with discomfort instead of fixing it. To stop turning hobbies into hustles. To accept that rest is not a reward. And that starting something new doesn’t require instant mastery. Therapy didn’t hand me a blueprint, but it gave me something far more useful: awareness. It helped me realise that while ambition is commendable, never feeling satisfied or proud of yourself isn't.

The real issue was not the drive itself, but the inability to stop, acknowledge, and celebrate the present. I was constantly sprinting towards the next milestone, never pausing to notice the view. That, I learned, was where the real burnout lived. A way to check in, to recalibrate, to stay grounded in the present rather than constantly performing for the future.

A Return to Self

Therapy helped me return to who I’ve always been beneath the coping mechanisms: someone bubbly, warm, sociable. I love hearing people’s stories, understanding what drives them, finding ways to support them. That’s always been my superpower, bringing people together, building alignment, defusing tension. I shine in cross-functional, collaborative environments because I make others feel seen, involved, committed to something bigger. It took therapy to help me realise those aren’t just nice-to-haves. They’re leadership traits.

A Letter to Myself

So yes, this is a love letter to my therapist. But more than that, it’s one to myself. For sticking with it. For doing the work. For piecing things back together slowly, and gently, and still choosing kindness even when I felt anything but.

Looking inward is rarely graceful. You meet parts of yourself you’ve spent years trying to outrun. You grieve versions of who you thought you were. You sit with the moments you wish had gone differently. But eventually, you emerge. A little clearer. A little steadier. More aware of what you want and what you no longer need to carry.

If you’re in the thick of it, wondering when it gets easier, I promise you it will. You’re not behind. You’re just getting started.

And the best parts? They’re still ahead.

And to the girl in the photo, with the big brown eyes, the red cup, and the loud laugh, you were always enough. I see that now. And I’m finally learning to live like it.

If this resonated with you, I’d love to have you along for the journey.

I write about marketing, mindset, and the messy middle of figuring it all out, with a side of strategy, storytelling, and self-reflection.