I Burned Out. Slack at 11 PM From a Parking Lot. DevOps Is a Marathon.

I was replying to Slack at 11 PM from a parking lot while my wife was inside waiting. The alert wasn't even critical. That's when I knew something was broken - not in the infrastructure, in me. What burnout actually looks like when you're running enterprise infrastructure, how I confused availability with commitment, and the changes that made me a better engineer by working less. Always on-call. Always anxious. Context switching every 30 minutes. Coffee at 6 AM, last Slack message at midnight. The culture rewarded it - "he's always available, he fixes everything." Nobody talked about the cost of that. I stopped reading books. Stopped training. Started snapping at people for no reason. The anxiety didn't turn off even when I wasn't on-call. That's when you know you're past the line. What actually changed was practical, not motivational. I automated the things that kept paging me at night. Built proactive monitoring so problems surface before they become alerts. Drew actual boundaries - not "I'll try to disconnect" boundaries, but phone in a drawer after 8 PM. Said no to constant firefighting. Found engineers who understood the same struggle. It took months to accept that being…