Refined by Fire: Burnout, Chronic Illness and Learning to be Vulnerable
Alhana
A lot has happened for Alhana since the last time she was on Chip Lunch five years ago…
A management role that burnt her out, eighteen months largely absent from the community she loved, a string of health diagnoses, and a pivot to social work that she still can't quite believe happened the way it did. Through all of it, Alhana's faith has been tested, stretched, and as she puts it, refined.
She's still a little bit on fire, she says. But she's coming through.
The Shiny New Thing
A while ago, she took a coordinator role at JB Hi-Fi's Bondi Junction store, one of the busiest in the company, which was a significant step up for a twenty-two-year-old who had only been full-time for a few months. There was a lot of encouragement from people around her, the opportunity was real, and the appeal of the challenge was hard to resist.
Looking back, she knows she went for it too early. The role demanded a lot, and she gave it everything, including the parts of herself that weren't really hers to give. She worked Saturday afternoons and evenings consistently, which meant that for around eighteen months, she wasn't at church on Saturday nights. She was doing ministry on Sunday mornings at Yarrawarrah, helping out with kids ministry. She told herself that was enough.
It wasn't, quite. But she didn't fully see that yet.
When the twelve-month contract on her management role came to an end, a conversation with her area manager and store manager gave her the opening she needed. She still doesn't know exactly what that conversation was going to be. What she knows is that she got there first to say, “I don't think this is for me”. The relief she felt saying it out loud told her everything she needed to know.
A Month of Monday to Friday
What changed everything was a month of ordinary weekday shifts, with weekends free. She was sent to a different store to help with a refit and for the first time in a year and a half, she was at church on Saturday nights. It hit her all at once: how much she had missed it, how important the community was, how much she had been running on ministry output without the community input that made it sustainable.
She describes it as a switch flipping. She had been in protective mode. Once you're in protective mode, it's very easy to stay there. She had told herself the story that it was fine. And part of what made that story so easy to believe was that she had slipped quietly enough that not many people had noticed, or at least not many had said anything.
The Wrong Table and the Right Friendship
When Alhana came back to Saturday nights, was apprehensive. She had missed a year and a half of changes. There were new people everywhere she didn't know. Every time someone came up and said, “we've missed you” or “how are you going?”, she had to have the same conversation again. She was still processing a professional situation she felt some shame about, which made those conversations harder than they should have been.
What helped, unexpectedly, was finding someone who didn't know any of that.
Megan had recently started coming to Soul Revival, and she didn't know Alhana's history. She didn't know she had been away. She didn't know about the management role or the burnout or any of it. She was just someone new sitting at a table, and Alhana, who had been part of this community for years, was the person who needed to make her feel welcome.
That shift in orientation made all the difference. Suddenly Alhana wasn't the person coming back in, trying to fit back in, waiting for people to ask her how she'd been. She was the person bringing someone else in. This is my church, she thought. This is my community. The sense of ownership was exactly what she needed to actually feel like she belonged again.
The friendship that grew from those early, awkward conversations about books and hobbies became one of the most important in her life. She reflects on it with the kind of wonder that comes from seeing God's timing in something only in hindsight. The month of weekday shifts. The return to Saturday nights. Megan arriving at just that moment. None of it felt orchestrated at the time. All of it clearly was.
The Old Person's Disease
Not long after returning to the community, Alhana's health started to unravel.
She had been managing fatigue and a range of symptoms for a while without fully understanding what they were. In 2024 she was diagnosed with PMOS — formerly known as PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome — along with PMDD, a hormonal condition that intensifies in the week before her cycle in ways that go well beyond ordinary PMS. Three out of four weeks of her month, she says, she's in some sort of pain.
Then, around May last year, she went to the GP for something unrelated and mentioned an extra thing. Her GP looked at it and immediately stepped back. It was shingles, and not a mild case at that.
Shingles is caused by the reactivation of the chickenpox virus. It typically affects older people or those with compromised immune systems. Alhana was twenty-five. Her mum's first response was: “isn't that an old person's disease?”.
The nerve pain following the shingles outbreak didn't resolve the way it should have. After a couple of months, her GP confirmed what Alhana had suspected: she had developed post-herpetic neuralgia, a chronic nerve pain condition. It joined the growing list of things her body was doing that she hadn't asked it to do.
Giving Up Control
The pride that Alhana names as a thread running through all of this: the work ethic that shades into overextension, the inability to switch off, the reluctance to delegate or ask for help, is something she's still untangling. She connects it directly to her faith. A good thing taken too far becomes a way of keeping control. Control, she's learning, is not hers to keep.
The Sabbath, she reflects, is not just a rule about rest, it's a recognition that God has it under control, and you don't need to. Every time she stops, she is saying, in a practical, embodied way: I am not God. He is. That's enough.
The chronic pain has, in its own brutal way, reinforced the same lesson. There are weeks where she simply cannot do what she wants to do. The drive all over South Sydney to buy things for youth camp left her in bed the following day. She knows, in theory, she should have seen that coming. She's working on the gap between knowing it and actually stopping.
But she's also careful not to lose the joy in doing things for others. The work ethic comes from a good place. The love for people is real. She doesn't want to flatten those things in the process of learning to rest. The goal, she says, is to work on the pride, not to stop caring.
Social Work on a Whim
In early 2024, with the JB management chapter firmly behind her and her health presenting new challenges, Alhana started thinking about what came next. She had considered multiple degrees, started several, and left all of them within six months when they stopped fitting. Physics. Exercise science. Secondary maths education. None of them stuck.
She had done a couple of social work subjects years earlier and enjoyed them, but dismissed the degree at the time, not enough hands-on problem solving, she had thought. Then she started seeing the threads differently. The work with customers at JB, finding solutions that actually served them rather than just selling the most expensive option. The management of team members going through difficult personal circumstances. The youth girls with chaotic life situations she had walked alongside for years, finding deep meaning in that kind of care.
She sent an inquiry to TAFE about a community services certificate. They put her on a waitlist. She decided on a whim to put in a late application to the University of Wollongong for a Bachelor of Social Work. Four days later, she had an offer.
She is now in her third year, studying part-time to manage her health. And six months in, for the first time in any degree, she wasn't sick of it.
Be Vulnerable
When Joel asks Alhana what she'd tell her younger Christian self, she takes a long pause.
Alhana says that she had always valued helping others, always been oriented outward, but she had been very guarded about what she let in, what she shared, who she let see the hard things. The assumption underneath it was that vulnerability was a risk, that sharing her own struggles while caring for others was somehow inappropriate or unhelpful.
What she has discovered, particularly through the health challenges of the last couple of years, is the opposite. When she is honest about her nerve pain on a Friday night at youth, one of the seventeen-year-old boys checks in before giving her a fist bump. When she admits she's struggling, other people feel permission to do the same. The openness she has grown into has made her more able to care for people, not less, because they trust her more, and because she is no longer spending energy maintaining a version of herself that isn't entirely true.
The vulnerability with people, she says, has also changed her vulnerability with God. The moments of raw frustration: God, what is going on? Why is my body doing this? They have been some of the closest she has felt to him. Not because the pain went away, but because she stopped pretending it wasn't there.
She says: be vulnerable. With God. With people.
She's still coming through the fire. But she's coming through.
Listen to the full conversation with Alhana on Episode 220 of the Chip Lunch podcast, available wherever you listen to podcasts.
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