Work in Progress #9: Burnout

There’s nothing that creatives fear more than things that make them stop creating.

I have a harsh fear of writer’s block. You know what it is: staring at a screen while your brain offers nothing but white noise. You have no idea what to write because everything feels dumb; it gets into your head that you’re talentless and probably not that bright. You begin to believe that you have no business even trying to write, and maybe you should have become a lawyer like your mom said while you were in high school. It builds and builds until the idea of looking at your desktop or touching your laptop for anything other than Netflix makes you break out in hives.

At least that’s how it works for me. Feel free to share your experiences in the comments.

Writer’s block is the most common thing that writers talk about, the inability to get started because of the lack of good ideas. However, recently I experienced something worse, something far more insidious because it doesn’t attack your beliefs in yourself or your talent, but your motivation.

I’m talking, my friends, about burnout.

Picture this: you have a mortgage, a family, and a full-time job. You try to commit some time to keeping yourself sane with some physical activity. You try to make meals to save money. You try to manage time for all the things you and your spouse want and need to do. And at the end of the day (or in the middle of the day) you carve out some time and energy to work on your project. Over time, things start to slip. Maybe one day, one thing becomes more pressing than another. You need to pick up an extra shift at work, or your spouse needs assistance in getting her car fixed. Or maybe you spent a long time stuck in traffic. And maybe, these little things happen frequently over time. You start to prioritize the things that must happen in a day and push out the stuff that can wait. One day, you sit down to write.

And find out that you just can’t.

You want to. You have ideas, you know exactly which words you want to use, and which order you want to put them in. You have imagery and metaphors in mind, and something resembling an ending. But you sit down to write, and you find you don’t want to do anything anymore. What then?

It’s hard to turn off the outside world. It’s sometimes challenging to manage everything you have to do in a day, everything you want to do in a day, without running yourself ragged. And the thing I learned is that you don’t have to run yourself ragged. There are things that it’s okay to let sit until tomorrow. Even if it’s your art.

Like writer’s block, burnout will get better with time. Take the time to rest, to have some water, to disconnect from some of the things that feel like they’re piling up. If that means taking a step back from your art, then do that. It’s what I did, and it worked wonders for me.