Repost • @lonelyconservationists “Lying in my brother’s abandoned bed at 1am, I felt like a fragile shell of a human. The attributes of myself that my family tried to console me with the following day felt assigned to another Jessie, someone else, someone who was a whole egg complete with yolk and white, lodged warmly in the cloaca of a duck. I have never felt so worthless or hollow in my entire life and I was experiencing physical pains in my chest from the anxiousness I felt. Logically, my lived experiences haven’t been as bad as the abusive situations I was in earlier in my career, so by comparison they seemed to be endurable. But chest pains are scary and they led me to acknowledge that my mental and physical health was declining so rapidly that I could not continue my thin shell era any longer. It is embarrassing for me to admit, considering my position on avoiding burnout as a conservationist, but I soon realised that I was the most burnt out that I had ever been, yet I was trying to plow through my life as if I was healthy.”