I sat in the staff toilet and stared at the floor tiles

Dear Delyara, I work in a care home, and today I took my break in the toilet because the staff room was too full of noise, complaints, phones, and people asking things from each other. So I locked the stall, sat down on the closed lid, and stared at the floor tiles like they held some answer I had missed. I had spent the morning lifting, cleaning, smiling, soothing, moving, helping, and keeping my face kind for residents who deserve kindness and families who deserve patience and colleagues who, frankly, don’t always deserve either. By lunchtime I felt scraped from the inside. The tiles were beige. Nothing profound happened. Still, those four minutes were the only part of the shift that belonged entirely to me. Sometimes I think people imagine burnout arrives with a dramatic breakdown. A lot of the time, it arrives in toilets, locked cars, stairwells, stock rooms, anywhere a woman can briefly become unavailable long enough to hear her own exhaustion.