Джовиан Зейн выпустила книгу о том, как пережить выгорание и найти опору в трудные времена

It was the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 when Jovian Zayne, an executive coach and CEO based in Los Angeles, California, who was pregnant with her daughter and working hard, toiling away to finish a major project for a new client, showed signs of preeclampsia that landed her in the hospital. What she didn’t realize then was that it was the sign she was pushing herself beyond her limits and experiencing more stress than usual. She was burned out. “You know those moments when you overextend yourself in hopes of proving more, trying to be more, trying to convince the world that you’re still relevant,” Zayne told theGrio on Wednesday. The realization wouldn’t arrive until several months later, after she gave birth, and she found herself awake at 2:19 a.m., breastfeeding her newborn in the earliest days of the pandemic, separated from family and overwhelmed by just how hard everything felt. “I was just like, ‘Oh my God, this is so hard!’ And it wasn’t just the new entry into motherhood; it was compounded by the pandemic,” she said. “We hadn’t seen family. We were not going to see family. There was no projected timeline for when we would see family again,” the author continued. “And I just started to think, like, what kind of things do I need to be telling myself to get through this?” The answer eventually became “Soft Landings for Hard Days,” an upcoming book born from the journal entries, prayers, conversations, and notes of encouragement Zayne gathered during some of her own hardest moments. “I just thought back to how many hard days have I had, like other people,” she said. Six years in the making, the book arrives like a balm from the founder of the OnPurpose Movement, offering us the grace and freedom to be human in a world that often encourages us to push beyond our limits. “Soft Landings for Hard Days” is also arriving at a time when burnout has become something of an epidemic, plaguing nearly every industry and corner of life, particularly for Black women. Zayne spoke with theGrio about why so many of us are overwhelmed that we can’t even respond to text messages from friends, recognize when we’ve reached our limits, or know what it looks like to find a softer landing. The Q&A below has been edited and condensed for clarity. How do you define burnout, and what does burnout actually look and feel like? How can someone recognize when they’re experiencing it? I think our bodies give us lots of signals when we are preparing to enter burnout. We’re on the edge. I think it shows up psychosomatically and physically differently for everyone. But for me, my body started to show heavy signs of anxiety. I was carrying more worry than I was used to carrying. I was always catastrophizing. I felt myself pinwheeling. You know, when you look at your computer and your computer is clearly like, “You’ve given me too much”, and it just gives you that pinwheel. You can’t open any more windows because your computer’s telling you to stop. I just can’t compute anymore. Our bodies do the same thing. So, signs of burnout to me look like not being able to think clearly, physically, feeling my body tense, clenched fists, often even experiencing it in your chest, or just other feelings of overwhelm where you’re unable to process information that you were once able to consider really easily. Why does it seem like so many of us are burned out right now, especially Black people and Black women? We are living in a society that pushes us to burn out and then blames us when we are burnt out. We are so used to carrying so much for so long that when our backs finally break, we question ourselves and not the load. That’s been our rhythm. That’s been our experience. That’s what we’ve seen our parents do, our mothers do. I think specifically as Black women, there are so many of us who have seen our mothers take on so much without a lot of complaint. They have established that this is what strength looks like. This is the norm. They’ve raised multiple kids. They have had jobs for a long time that gave them a much shorter bandwidth to be able to make mistakes than what we even experience, and yet they seem to just carry it all. But there was a quiet and then very intense load that they were unloading, oftentimes in the bathroom at night, crying in the shower, not feeling the same kind of comfort with mental health services that our generation may experience, and so they just internalized a lot of things. You offer five “grounding invitations” in the book. What are they, and how can they help someone through a hard season? Be gentle with yourself. Feel your feelings. Believe you are worthy. Honor the seasons of our life, and the last invitation is to appreciate life’s goodness. So those invitations, each as a simple statement, can be calls to action. They can be gentle reminders of how we can engage in any moment that would push us beyond ourselves. Who did you have in mind when you were writing “Soft Landings for Hard Days?” Who is this book for? I wrote this for my daughter. There was a moment when I was writing. I was a year and a half in, and I was afraid that I wouldn’t finish. And when I recentered myself and said, “Well, I will write what I hope, so that if I don’t ever finish this book, my daughter will have what I’ve been able to give her, so she can have more soft landings for her hard days that I know will come, because that’s what life is. Life is a beautiful mess. So I wanted her to hear my voice always and to know it was with her. But the thing that is the truth is that my daughter, six and a half now, a little black girl growing up in America, she is also just a reflection of so many of us. So this book is for anyone who would identify themselves as a well-intentioned, hardworking, purpose-driven, loving person who wants to do good in the world. Who wants to do their good in the world, but finds that there are times when they are pushing beyond themselves. They don’t have the language they need to encourage their spirit. They forget often to take care of their own humanity and therefore the humanity of others. And this book is for the person who just wants the companion to remind them to take care. We can’t always remove the job, the caregiving, the bills, or just life in general. What can we actually do to prevent burnout or begin recovering from it while life is still happening? I think there’s something that we have to notice, which is we are living in a society right now where oftentimes we are harder on ourselves than we are on the systems that have failed us so I actually think we have to flip it. We have to be harder on those systems and softer on ourselves, and that looks like examining every system that we operate through in our lives to see is that honoring my humanity or not. And if it’s not, what meaningful steps can I take to negotiate my humanity in my space to hold it? Because my humanity is not something that I need to overcome, but I really have to live within and honor. What do you want the lasting takeaway to be for anyone who picks up this book? I want the readers of “Soft Landings for Hard Days” to remember that they are worthy. They are worthy of savoring, of honoring, of protecting, of loving, of enjoying. This book is meant to walk with you. It is a companion for your life’s journey, not something you have to rush through or push through to read, but it’s something you return to, just like you return home to yourself. “Soft Landings for Hard Days” arrives on shelves Oct. 27.