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‘I wasn’t myself’: Liam Martin details factors for WBZ departure in essay
“For months, I had been agonizing over the feeling that I couldn’t be the husband or father I wanted to be.”
Former WBZ anchor Liam Martin is sharing more about why he chose to leave his position at the station last month, penning an essay for Boston magazine in which he detailed how he arrived at the decision to depart from his “dream job.”
Martin, who recently announced that he is joining Boston public relations firm Newsmaker Marketing as partner and chief marketing officer, begins the piece by sharing that despite the success he had achieved professionally, he was suffering from “crippling anxiety and major depression” in recent years.
With his move to Newsmaker Marketing, Martin is teaming up with founder and CEO Jackie Bruno — a former news anchor herself — and partner and president Rachel Robbins. Bruno shared her own experience with burnout in a Boston magazine essay last year.
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In his own essay, Martin detailed a moment during the summer of 2022 when he knew he needed help, writing, “‘I wasn’t myself.”
“On some level, I knew the source of my tailspin,” he wrote. “For months, I had been agonizing over the feeling that I couldn’t be the husband or father I wanted to be. With an overnight schedule, I was gone by the time my kids woke up and often in bed before they went to sleep. And when I was present, I was too tired to be truly present. That came with guilt. And more anxiety. And more depression.”
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Martin pointed out that the challenge of balancing parenting priorities with career aspirations is one that working mothers have been “discussing publicly for years,” but added that there has also been a change in expectations for “what it means to be a good dad.”
It’s one that is long-overdue, he noted.
“We are expected to be more involved,” he wrote. “More hands-on. More sensitive and emotionally connected with our children. More vulnerable with our partners. More engaged with household chores. And that has meant men, too, are increasingly grappling with the serious question of work-life balance. Better put, work-family balance.”
But Martin said men are not speaking openly enough about the pressures faced to both provide and succeed professionally while being the dad or husband they want to be.
“Our inclination is to keep our emotional vulnerabilities secret,” he said.
Martin said with his own realization that he needed help, he turned to a therapist. Working with her, he said he questioned whether he could continue to bear the toll — the physical and mental impacts from his early hours and the conflict with how he wanted to be involved as a parent to his children — from the dream job he’d worked so hard to reach.
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Deciding to leave was difficult, he said.
“I loved my coworkers,” Martin wrote. “Truly loved them. And I felt very connected to the viewers, who often tell us it feels like we’re a part of their family. What an incredible honor. But I knew what I wanted my life to look like, and ultimately—for me—it couldn’t look that way while working in TV news.”
Read the full essay in Boston.
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