Edel Coffey: I felt an affinity with Jacinda Ardern when she said sometimes it is time to stop

“I am human. We give as much as we can for as long as we can and then it’s time,” she said. 

“And for me, it’s time.” 

Ardern didn’t mention the word burnout, but it was hard not to think of the phenomenon as she described her feelings about the job of being prime minister. 

Working from home or home-schooling were test enough for many people during the pandemic. 

I can only imagine what it must have been like to be responsible for a country and try to protect its population from a pandemic, to have to deal with the fallout of terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

Ardern’s announcement came the same week as Senator Lynn Ruane spoke about how burnout had negatively affected her life over the past few years and how she found ways to combat it.

Both women’s revelations came the same week as I personally began to recover from weeks and weeks of protracted illness and some time off work. 

For the first time in living memory, I did not have any pressing deadlines and I was surprised but not shocked to discover that at the end of a period of enforced early nights, intuitive eating, and rest I was feeling more creative and energised than I had in years.

Now I’m not for a second comparing my life to that of a head of state, even though looking after a family with four children can sometimes feel like trying to get opposing warlords to negotiate with each other, but I did feel an affinity with Ardern when she said sometimes it is time to stop. 

Her resignation speech struck a chord because, like many people I think, I’ve been mired in the delta plain that I think of as post-Covid times for a while now. 

It’s a slow-moving body of water, a stagnant place where the burnt-out casualties of the pandemic years find ourselves with just enough energy to do the daily essentials and little momentum or energy to move forward.

I wondered how many of us had burned up our fuel reserves just getting through the last few years; how many of us now found ourselves stranded on the delta plain. 

Anecdotally, everywhere I turned in December and January, it felt like people were sick, convalescing or simply exhausted and hiding from the world. 

I suppose it’s why I found Ardern’s resignation speech so striking. 

It chimed with what everyone else in the world seemed to be going through in their own lives. 

And it was a million miles away from the usual bland political resignations; usually, it’s all about the next step on the political ladder, self-preservation: Thank you for the opportunity; I’ve learned so much in this position but it’s time for me to move on.

The fact that Ardern’s speech felt revolutionary is an indicator of how much we still see the expression of a personal limit as weakness, a risky admission, something that might even damage our career prospects. 

If you don’t believe that, just ask yourself can you imagine anyone else giving the same resignation speech? 

I can’t imagine Leo Varadkar saying it, or Christine Lagarde or Ursula von der Leyen for that matter. Why is that I wondered. 

Is it because we still see a personal response like I don’t have any energy left as a sign of failure?

I don’t think Ardern’s decision to resign has anything to do with her being a woman, despite the BBC’s dumb and misogynistic article that asked ‘Can women have it all?’ in the immediate aftermath of Ardern’s resignation (they later apologised and changed the headline). 

They never thought to question whether men could have it all after Boris Johnson announced his resignation, even though he has a total of seven children and three marriages. 

It seems men really can have it all and resign from office without judgment too.

Admitting that after six years of ‘Jacindamania’, she simply doesn’t have enough energy to keep going with the job felt brave and new because Ardern was speaking about the limits of being human in world where it increasingly feels like we are expected to be superhuman, whether you are the prime minister or the smallest cog in the smallest wheel. 

Ardern showed herself to be a person as well as a politician and the frenzied media response to her speech suggests that this is still a radical concept.

Ardern’s speech bore all of the hallmarks of honesty that defined her reign as prime minister. 

She ruled with an open and utterly human style so perhaps it’s fitting that she departed with the most open and vulnerable of explanations — “I am human”. 

And maybe it’s something worth thinking about if you happen to find yourself down here on the post-Covid delta plains without any wind in your sails. 

Our own humanity, the finite fuel we have in our tanks and how we might replenish them are all things worth our time and consideration.