The first symptoms of burnout emerged during the release of
Saturn, she says, a tumultuous time both for her career and personal life. “I’d been dealing with insomnia and going and going for such a long time, and one day I was getting up to go for a run and I just couldn’t move my legs. And quite quickly, my body began to deteriorate.” She told herself to push through the rest of her tour, but by the end of it, she felt even worse. The way she describes her symptoms makes me think of a family member who has
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome – I tell her this, and she pauses again. “I actually have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I was saying burnout because… I’m not sure. This is the first time I’ve really spoken about it to anyone who’s not my friends or my family. I find it really difficult to explain because I don’t think a lot of people understand what it is.”
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, also called myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), is an incredibly complex condition that is still not fully understood by the medical community. Diagnosis often requires months of tests and frustrating dead ends, and there are no approved medications or therapies to help treat it. “You go to the doctor and they do their best to find out what’s wrong with you, but all your tests come back and say you’re fine, so you go away feeling like you’re crazy,” Nao says. She hopes that a silver lining of the coronavirus pandemic will be a better understanding of CFS, given how similar the symptoms are to those of long Covid. “Hopefully there’ll be some more answers soon.”
