I became a councillor to change people’s lives. It left me drained, bewildered and burned out | Kimberly McIntosh

I hadn’t planned to quit being a councillor with an unceremonious, expletive-laden WhatsApp message to my ward colleagues. But after months of stress, the drunk version of me had forced my hand, and I couldn’t take it back.

It didn’t start that way. When I was elected as a Labour councillor in Southwark in south London in 2022, it was the culmination of a lifelong dream. I had always been interested in politics. I was the teenager who watched BBC Parliament for fun, and in my leavers’ yearbook, alongside my ambitions to marry a wealthy man and own a pair of Christian Louboutin heels (it was the late 2000s), I wrote about a desire to sit in the Houses of Parliament. I was genuinely fascinated by our political system and knew its power to change lives in the way it had changed my own.

But after finally getting my foot in the door, I was shocked by the realities of the job – starting with the selection process. A gruelling schedule of door-knocking to drum up local support for candidates was encouraged, and the campaigning expectations completely took over my life. My hours were tracked mercilessly in an app by the local campaigning team that fed them back to the regional bosses. In the run-up to an election, you are expected to complete five two-hour sessions a week, with an extra weekend session every fortnight on top, alongside your day job. If you don’t make your hours, you face the chop.

It was just to win the election, I told myself. It would let up once we had won. And we did win. At first, I loved the work. I helped support low-income residents during the cost of living crisis. I helped someone get into social housing. I would spend hours on the phone with residents to let them vent or because I thought they might be lonely. I was introduced to so many services that I didn’t know existed and the inspiring people who ran them. Community groups for pensioners. Holiday clubs with free meals for children. All the ingredients were there to make a difference to people’s lives.

The real issues started when I had to go back to my day job. Being a councillor is not a full-time role, and it was one for which I took home less than £13,000 a year, despite my rent alone being £11,000. And so I started having to juggle my politics work with my office job, doing policy and campaigning on the Windrush scandal, which comes with its own emotional toll. It became completely unmanageable. A typical day would involve using my lunch break to join a council meeting on my phone and then after work, picking up a sandwich for dinner on the way to a three-hour evening meeting that would often overrun. The next evening or weekend would be more campaigning, meeting a local group or holding my ward surgery.

As the cost of living crisis became more entrenched, residents’ desperation intensified. Our community surgeries were filled with frustrated people caught up in the cogs of bureaucracy, as they tried and failed to navigate labyrinthine systems for emergency housing support or to complain to the noise team about their neighbour.

People would come to us to complain (rightly) about bin collections, but we would also hear from people with suicidal ideation, trying to escape domestic violence, facing homelessness, being threatened by a private landlord with eviction, or children getting sick from the damp invading the ceilings of flats in disrepair. Often, residents were angry with us – and understandably so.

A decade of austerity has not been kind to councils. During the 2010s in the most deprived 10% of councils, funding fell by 35% a person, compared with 15% in the least-deprived areas. Demand for services increased but there was less in real terms to spend on them. Some, most famously Birmingham city council, had to declare de facto bankruptcy. This has severely limited what councils can deliver but this was of little comfort to the people sitting in front of us. The help I could offer was limited too.

I didn’t want my compassion for people to give way to coldness, a frosty veneer built to protect me against the conveyor belt of people in pain entering the ward surgery. I had been warned of this inevitable creep of hopelessness by friends, doctors and nurses who had changed careers or moved to Australia to avoid similar feelings of despair. So I started avoiding my email inbox. I felt completely burned out.

The campaigning expectations did not cease either – this time for other candidates. Weekends alternated between door-knocking in another area and holding ward surgery. When I was eventually signed off work with exhaustion, the mental health practitioner told me I needed to spend more time with my friends and family. But when? She gave me a list for local free yoga classes and an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I realised it wasn’t my drinking or stress management that were the problems – they were the symptoms of a situation that had become completely unmanageable. I knew I had to quit.

It took me another year to work up the courage to leave. Why did I choose to stick with something that was ruining my mental health? The simple answer is: I felt indebted. To the people who had helped get me elected; to the black community who would tell me how great it was to see a young black woman in local politics. I didn’t want to let them down, or feel as if I was giving up on them.

But ultimately, I realised that staying in politics wasn’t doing anyone any good. When I quit, I left behind lots of amazing people who will stay the course, and had the resilience to do so despite what it demands of them because of their profound care for other people.

My colleagues were gracious enough to ignore my message in the group chat. I met them and started the process of standing down in a much more civilised manner – crying over coffee.

And even though I came to realise that my dream career in politics wasn’t meant to be, I also learned that I could give back in other ways. From community groups, holiday sports clubs, gardening projects, choirs and creches, being a councillor showed me just how many ways there are to make a difference. Quitting wasn’t just what was best for me. It was the best thing for the people I was elected to serve.