I became a councillor to change people’s lives. It left me drained,

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…