I’m trying to get WordPress to let me embed my launch video, but it’s not cooperating. So, here’s a link to the virtual book launch.
Aside from celebrating all of the friends and family who joined and participated in the event, there’s a chapter timestamped where I speak for 15 minutes about the story behind the book and what led to its creation.
Below is an excerpt of the transcript.
Ecotherapy and Linda Buzzell
KIM: Before we get started with Alicia, I did want to take a moment and recognize you, Linda. Linda Buzzell wrote the forward to the book. She is a psychotherapist specializing in ecotherapy and nature therapy. She’s the founder of the International Association for Ecotherapy… Linda, I was hoping that you could give us just a little nugget to help us to understand or get a the concept of of of ecopsychology…
LINDA: Well, that’s what I part of what I love about this book that Alicia’s done is how ecopsychology is really about healing the relationship between humans and the Earth. And this is absolutely all the way through the book, there’s beautiful examples. And, of course, the use of her metaphor of fire…and water and all the elements. I mean, it’s really perfect the way you’ve woven it all together. So I really appreciate that, and this is definitely eco therapy as far as I’m concerned.
KIM: That’s great. Boy, Linda, you sure do have a lot of job security given the state of affairs in our world. Linda got into a good field, everybody, if we need to heal our relationship with the Earth. It makes a lot of sense then that you would write the forward for this book. It is kind of in your wheelhouse. Do you have anything for the topic itself, burnout recovery. Why do you feel like that’s an important book right now?
LINDA: Well, I think all of us, as Alicia explains in the book, are in some stage of burnout, whether you go all the way out to, you know, how we’re all dealing with the environment. And where I live, we also have wildfires and mudflows and all of that. But I can’t think of many places on the planet where people are not feeling this kind of pressure now. That’s what I love about the analogy that you made, Alicia, that burnout is everywhere, and we really need a lot of the insights that you’ve mentioned in the book as to how are we going to deal with this.
The Story Behind the Book
For the little spiel that I’ve been practicing, I did not want to actually do a reading. The reason I didn’t wanna do reading is because frankly, I’m a better storyteller than I am a reader. And really what I wanted to talk about is the piece of the introduction where I talk about how this book came to be. So much of the book is exercises and workbooks and rituals and things to do. There isn’t a solid place to just do a reading from the middle.
It’s much easier for me to explain kind of where it came from and what the genesis of this book was. And it really did start around ten years ago, and Kim mentioned that we used to sit in the same cube farm. In February 2016, so ten years ago almost to the month, I wrote in my journal that work was “soul-killing,” that it was killing me to go to work every day, that I was starting to feel that depersonalization, that despair, that overwhelm. I was getting way too much work and not enough meaning out of it, and it was super overwhelmed at the time.
In 2016, I was working essentially the equivalent of about four people’s full time jobs in my one job. That overwork was originally tied to great deep personal meaning. I felt like I was doing something useful and good. Over time, that kind of drained out. I’m good at it, and I guess I should just keep doing it. I’m making decent money. But it wasn’t actually anything that was fulfilling to me.
In January 2017, right after a year of basically being burned out and overworked, I was going through the process of making a presentation for the C-suite for why I needed one more person on my team. I just needed one more person. I just needed one more person’s worth of help, and it got declined. The next day, the stress levels were so high that I woke up in a complete psoriatic arthritis flare. I had been managing the psoriatic arthritis with diet and exercise for years, and the stress was so overwhelming that the next day, I literally couldn’t put clothes on. I texted my boss: I can’t get dressed. I can’t come to work. I ended up collapsing.
It takes eight months for you to actually get to the point where you’re having medication work on that kind of autoimmune illness. I had about half of a year of just laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, questioning everything…And I also started working from home. And the upshot of working from home was that I realized that my little autistic brain was way happier not having fluorescent overhead lights and constant interruptions and people walking around me in the cube from all the time. I was way better at home. That actually helped me to understand that maybe I was autistic. It started me down the road of diagnosis.
I didn’t get actually diagnosed until 2020, but I was cycling in and out of professional burnout, autistic burnout, all of these things all at the same time. And my decision as a chronic overachiever, and this will make about half of the room laugh, my decision of what to do with all of this angst and stress was to just enroll in grad school because that’s what you do…
That’s what you do. Right? You just enroll in grad school and pursue a passion project.
Well, it had all the meaning behind it, but now I’m going to grad school and working full time and having chronic illness and figuring out autism all at the same time, which was a little silly.
While I was enrolled in grad school and traveling out to California, there was the Thomas Fire in Carpinteria outside of Santa Barbara while we were traveling back and forth. We actually had to go to Zoom classes because of the mudslides, and we had this fire scar that was visible up in the mountain every time we would go back to school. It was actually then and there that I came up with this metaphor for my own burnout and my own burnout recovery looking at how this fire scar was coming back.
Let’s speed through all of 2020 and the autism diagnosis and everything else that was going on. I moved to New Mexico in 2021. It was a complete leap of faith. I worked out of a hotel room for two months, and then I bought my house. I closed on my house in December 2021. In April 2021, four months after I closed on this house, and two months after I finished this library, which is the beating heart of this house. Four months in, New Mexico suffered the largest wildfire in the state’s history, over 500,000 acres burned. That particular wildfire came within a mile and a half of my new house.
We had to evacuate. We evacuated for ten days right around Mother’s Day 2022. I learned a lot more about wildfire than just seeing a fire scar up in the distance. I learned about what it looks like on a daily basis, what it looked like when the animals were all fleeing into my yard, what it looked like when we’re watching multiple fires around the state happen at the same time. My friend, MJ, who is here, was running a Twitter roll call every single day, making sure people were safe and that they had a place to go.
So I have this lived experience of wildfire, this seven years of burnout. And at this point, I was still doing this job. I only had meaning in so much as I was feeling like I could be a good manager or I could train people. As long as I wasn’t in the spreadsheets every day, I was doing okay, but I was still super burned out. I really didn’t love it anymore. It didn’t have that juice for me anymore.
In early spring 2023, I went to a retreat with an author who’s another North Atlantic Books author, Loraine Van Tuyl. I went on her retreat, and in the midst of it, we were working with all of the elements, and she brought up fire. I felt like fire was really dead in me. Then Loraine said “No. No. Fire’s your anger. Fire’s where you’re angry. Where are you angry? Where are you passionate? And my anger came up, and I realized I’m angry at these people who are always booking over my work blocks when I’m trying to get my freaking dissertation done! I had this moment of anger about that, and I was really able to get in touch with it. By the end of the retreat, I had gone through and declined all the meetings that were over my work blocks with so much rage. I also was able to really see that I needed to get out. And so I set a date. I set a date right then and there. In September-October 2023, I’m leaving. I worked toward that date.
In October 2023, I quit my job, and…I didn’t really know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I took myself to the museum. Do I want to be a museum curator? I don’t know. I was just wandering around where the world trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.
But I knew me, and my autism. I know my need for routine and work. I needed to show up to myself every day and do a job. So the job that I did every day was to write this book. I poured everything into it from learning through seven years of burnout, learning through grad school and ecopsychology and depth psychology and having the idea of a metaphor that guides us through a big life change. I used the lived experience of being so close to this giant wildfire. I used the lived experience of coming out of all of this burnout, and I just basically wrote the book that I wish I had ten years ago.
The Stages of Burnout
I’ve read a bunch of these books, and they all start they all talk about the fire stage. I have a four stage cycle that I talk about in the book.
They all talk about the fire stage, but none of them talk about the rest of it. I can get you to dig the trenches and get yourself out of fire. But then what?
When I talk about the fire cycle, almost all of the psychological cycle models that are out there only focus on the anger and hopelessness. The World Health Organization talks about depersonalization and stress and despair and this idea of cynicism and jadedness. This is where quiet quitting and all of that stuff comes in. The thing about fire is that it is empowering because anger is empowering. Anger as an emotion is rocket fuel for change. Your anger is actually enough energy to change something that’s violating you. If you’re being violated by this thing that you’re angry about, then you have motivation and anger and forward momentum.
Once you actually get the fire out, the thing that that actually ends wildfire out in nature is rain. And that rain that falls is actually what ends the anger and the hopelessness, but that rain is the flood. The flood stage is grieving the person that you were and what got you to this state. So anybody who knows me, and there’s some people in here who’ve known me since I was four years old, a lot of folks here have known me for twenty, thirty years. You all know I’m type A. I’m an overachiever. I’ve always got a bajillion irons in the fire. I’m a perfectionist. Well, that was who I was that created the burnout… I had to let go of a lot of that. I had to let go of that and take a nap in the middle of the day. I had to let go of the working full time. I work maybe five hours a day now. The things that had to change to get me out of burnout were letting go of these massive pieces of myself. When we let go of pieces of our identity, we have to grieve them. But grief doesn’t feel empowering. Grief is sad. Grief is depressing. Grief is pulling into a blanket fort.
Nobody wants to do that when you have access to the power of anger. So most of us just cycle right back into fire because that’s so much more energizing. At least you feel like you have some control there. That’s why I cycled in and out of burnout for seven years because every time I’d hit the flood stage, I’d nope back out in the fire.
Eventually if you get through the grief, you get into regrowth. Regrowth is around hope and curiosity. The initial image that came to me around the wildfire concept was one of my canopy had already burned. The big trees that were holding up the sky in my forest of digital marketing and content strategy, those things were gone. Those trees were decimated. They were beyond coming back. So then what has to grow back? What has to come back in the into the world? It’s lots of little things. You’re not gonna grow a giant tree overnight. You’re gonna grow tiny little plants.
You’re gonna grow mullein. You’re gonna grow little weird stuff, and you’re gonna grow it because birds bring it in and insects bring it in. It’s lots of little things, but it there’s a lot of hope and curiosity of discovering it. Maybe some of those things are new trees.
Here in New Mexico, the pine forests will go away, but then hardwoods will actually grow in their place. Where you see groves of oaks or elms, it’s actually because a wildfire has gone through there. But you get different trees. You still might get trees, but it’s still going to take twenty or thirty years for those trees to develop a full canopy.
And then finally, you end up into resilience and awareness. Once you start to regrow your forest, what you end up with is I preventing future wildfires in my life. Here in New Mexico right now, we are in fire season, and we are in deep fire prevention. We’ve got all the signs up everywhere of, don’t run a car on dry grass. All of these things talking about how do we prevent a spark from happening here. That’s the same thing with burnout.
We know once we’ve gone through this cycle, first of all, that we have the ability to prevent it from happening again, but second of all, that we have the responsibility to prevent it from happening again. That’s where it’s super important for us to think about the idea of wildfire prevention in our own minds and hearts. Like Linda was saying, we’re all at some point in the wildfire cycle, but a lot of us might be in prevention. What I’m talking about with wildfire prevention when it comes to burnout is stuff… if you know that you’ve got a busy season coming up. When I worked for publicly traded companies, it was always the last week before the shareholder meeting. At the end of every quarter, it was always hell.
If you know you’re busy that one week each quarter, maybe don’t ever put a dentist appointment on that week. Maybe do some meal prep so that you’ve got some food in the freezer before that week so you don’t have to think about it. Maybe what you do is make sure that you’ve got the rest of your workload finished in advance or pushed out deadlines after that week so that you’re not also juggling day to day work and client meetings in the midst of that shareholder push. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about with work with the wildfire prevention.