Dear conservationist, a lifetime of striving is corroding my organs. I hope you’re okay.

Dear conservationist,

I found myself in debilitating pain on Monday, unable to sit and barely able to stand. It was a 9 out of 10 on the pain scale and it was excruciating. You have heard of burnout, but have you considered that your body, in a last act of control against your stress, may burn a hole through the lining of your stomach? It turns out that a stomach ulcer is exactly what needs to happen to make me lie down and chill out a bit. My body is a harsh but fair mistress.

I have thought over the past couple of days about what is going on with my mind and body and I have come to the conclusion that I have a striving addiction brought about by a lifetime in the conservation industry. You see, sustaining my career and passions in this field has been reliant on my ability to continuously strive for more. I have strived for more financial stability, escaping abusive workplaces, more positive change for our planet and for people to value my skills more. I have strived so much and for so long that my brain and body don’t know how to access my settings and turn the striving off.

It is also important to note that my striving never feels passive, it always feels urgent. I always feel as if I need to be succeeding, like, yesterday due to the state of the world we live in. Climate change can’t wait until tomorrow to be fixed- it needed to be halted in the 50’s. In the same respect, I have often urgently needed to get out of toxic workplace situations, increase my income or find new opportunities to continue on my mission.

This year, I endeavoured to focus on being joyful as my priority- but alas, the striving has not ceased. It turns out that you can’t just turn off a lifelong mindset and choose to replace it with another. I, unfortunately, am not a game console that can eject a hustling card and replace it with a fun card on a whim. As a result, I have been in a tug-o-war with myself, between fun and striving, between rest and hustling, between slowing down and ramping up. One is what I want, the other is what I am programmed to do. Maybe the rope being yanked forwards and backwards was enough in itself to burn that hole in my stomach.

Initially, the striving started in pursuit of becoming the change I wanted to see in the world. When I was 5 years old, I asked my mum how I could save the orangutans, and when she didn’t have an answer, I strived to be the adult who would care and who would do something about deforestation. Most conservationists start off this way after discovering the state of the natural world, and they strive to keep it or restore it to a better condition. Unfortunately for us, rarely do we see the ecosystems, plants or animals in exactly the condition we want to see them in, so there is always more to strive towards. Even if you do have a conservation success story, there is always more to do for other species and habitats. This is an industry where there will most likely, always be something to strive for.

So many of us, upon finding our passion for conservation, strive to know more through books, documentaries, scientific papers or presentations. Some of us take an academic route, and some of us are self-taught. Impostor syndrome encourages our striving in this regard, as there is always more to know and more that we think we should know. Knowing comes from doing, so many, if not all of us, are used to seeking opportunities wherever we can, to get hands-on experience. Whether you have maintained longevity within a single volunteer opportunity or have jumped from one to another, to another, conservationists are used to striving to have the most positive impact on our natural world whilst learning the most that we can.

With all this striving for the planet, we are also balancing our striving for ourselves. We strive to be able to have financial security to support ourselves and our families and we strive to be valued for our skills and our knowledge. With each opportunity that comes our way, we could always be paid more or given more responsibility and autonomy, so there is always a new position to strive for. I didn’t land a full-time job in the industry until I was 30, so I experienced 25 years of endurance-level learning, volunteering, working and striving to be valued in the industry.

If balancing all of these ways that we are striving for isn’t enough, there is also the striving that we do to have a social life, hobbies, relationships and fun. We may feel so focused on our careers that we may at some point endeavour to become more of a well-rounded person who is more than a conservationist, you know, a friend, partner, parent or relative- whatever floats your boat. You may strive to get your health back on track, reclaim time for your hobbies or boost your confidence in social settings. I know I treat myself as a human project to an unnatural extent, but surely we all have attributes about ourselves that we strive to improve. In a callback to my other blog on exhaustion, no wonder we are all exhausted. We are striving for so many things always all the time.

I have been grappling with the penultimate question recently- the one that goes like this:

“Am I still striving because I need to be, or am I striving out of habit?”

Recently, I have been noticing all the ways that my body is not used to having a permanent job, even after a year. I still have a rampant fear that I could be let go at any time that sits unsettlingly inside of me, as does the fear of being in another toxic management situation. Sometimes I can identify that my thoughts and feelings don’t make sense in relation to my current situation, but to my body- it is just doing what it is used to with its old game card deeply lodged inside. I am still flighty and still prepped for insecurity at any moment.

I am also grappling with how to help conservationists. Every week I have at least one meeting with someone, somewhere in the world, trying to find leads on who can help us and how. I am still learning, growing, fighting, producing and introducing. After 6 years, I feel hardly any closer to a solution than I did when I started. Possibly I feel more against a wall, as my initial hope and wonder from the early years starts to wear away. I don’t want to accept the reality of what it means to be a conservationist, but with every “me too” that echoes through the community, I am deeply saddened at how so many passionate individuals have been burnt by the conservation industry.

Since grappling with the demise of my body this week, I have come to see how the elements of my life that I thought would help, maybe aren’t anymore. Maybe there is more regimen than joy in the resilience measures I have put in place and maybe my flight or fight instincts are stopping me from asking for the help that I need from others. I have decided to strip my life down back to basics and to acknowledge and try to stop the unnecessary striving for more. Imagine how much I could do, or how happy I could be if I wasn’t constantly stressed and panicked about where my life is going to go. Maybe I can’t help conservationists single-handedly, but that’s okay- I can keep doing what I do and maybe that is enough for now. I never really acknowledged how intense it has been doing the equivalent of two full-time jobs and caring for my partner as well. I don’t really think the industry will be much better off if I become the Swiss cheese of people, corroding away in the acid of my own stress- so I will endeavour to take some of the pressure off of myself. If your body is also tight with pressure, I give you permission to let it go too.

I am now going to start, and I hope you can start with me, to slow down in the times when I feel like I need to ramp up. I am going to start asking myself if I really need to start my whole life from scratch- Jason Bourne style, or if I can realistically get help to navigate a situation. I also want to start being intentional with less, rather than being reactive about more. These all sound like challenging things to do, so know that if you try to break your striving addiction, I am right there with you and you’re not alone.

Dear conservationist, none of us deserve to corrode away in our pursuit of making positive planetary change. We would not accept the corrosion of a coral reef or a redwood and we would try to have any man who tried to corrode a bear arrested. In keeping with the theme of this quiet corner of the internet, as conservationists, we really need to get better at caring for ourselves. I hope that by acknowledging our striving addictions and the state of our bodies, we can start to fill in the Swiss holes and over time, become a more robust cheese- like a strong aged cheddar. Yum.

Jessie