“You seem so prolific. Do you ever experience burnout?” — C.d.C.
One can be both! I am, and always have been, prolific. Note: That doesn’t mean what I generate is all that good. I value my revision skills over my ability to write a lot, thankfully.
Yes, burnout happens all the time. It’s inevitable! I’ve gone through periods of it my whole life.
- Last semester of college, I had walking pneumonia through finals.
- Working for a publishing house in the early 1990s led me to several periods of burnout that led to walking pneumonia before I quit and began working for myself.
- After September 11, 2001, I experienced insomnia for weeks which showed up in early 2002 as—again—walking pneumonia. Along with that (and unbeknownst to me), I experienced an MS flare.
- In early 2004, my Margin fiction editor and I were “hired” by Oprah to write a boatload of content for their Book Club (featuring One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez). I use “hired” loosely because they never paid for hard work that led to my familiar nemesis… walking pneumonia.
- I broke the cycle of walking pneumonia in 2013 when, while working, raising two teenage daughters, and over-volunteering my time while going back to school to study polysomnography, I went through a series of flares that led to my MS diagnosis.
- Between 2021 and 2022, I began to feel the seeds of burnout again while working for hire for multiple clients as a patient advocate, healthcare columnist, multiple sclerosis “influencer,” and multimedia sleep health educator. At that time I was also trying to market my first book during a pandemic, which was extremely difficult because bookstores weren’t open, which forced me to manufacture my own book tour. Not a great time for mental health for me.
- In 2023, I went through several smaller periods of burnout that followed on the heels of each writing workshop I took. I fortunately did not get anything close to an MS flare or other health predicament, but I definitely slept a lot more (napping and Epsom salt baths are great remedies for burnout).
- Post-election 2024, and I’m feeling it coming again. Not burnout as a writer so much as burnout from book marketing.
What do I do about any of it? It has been a journey to figure out how to best respond because, in some cases, you just can’t walk away, at least not without losing your paycheck.
Now that I’m retired and devoted to writing, podcasting, and filmmaking, it’s about leveraging my creative energy with my social energy.
The writing, itself, is not a source of burnout… neither is the revision. The same can be said for the podcasting and filmmaking.
It’s the marketing that is frustrating, time consuming, and vampiric of my energy. The marketplace itself does not make it easy for creatives, besides. Even with money to throw at my marketing plan, I still find it a demoralizing and exhausting space.
The added demands on my social energy give me what I call “social hangover,” as well. (In fact, I am having one today.) This is something I know about myself: I endure social events cyclically: for a while, I want to see people and do “all the things”; following that, I tend to want to just hunker down with family and a few close friends; following that, I need alone time: retreats, sabbaticals, vacations, even day trips in my car just for the recharge.
It especially sucks to feel burned out on both the exterior and interior level. My response is to protect and nurture the interior richness of my creative soul while shielding against the toxic mudslide the outer world has shoved up against my front door.
So my next trick is to step back, take notice of what serves me, what doesn’t, and where my energy wants to go. And that means I’m probably going to hide out like a hermit for a while.
With the collectively low post-US election morale tainting the prevailing winds, I’m even more inspired to hunker down, as I am not someone who tolerates a lot of doom and gloom from people who seem stuck in frozen mode. That just frustrates me and leads to distraction, which leads to less focus on my writing projects. You can bet that, while the changing times swirl around outside my little fort of words, my head is going to be down, focused on the things I can do, all of it fueled by my own post-election emotional landscape (a lot of anger and frustration and disappointment, mostly).