On Burnout and a Quiet Season

Hilton Head Beach - not my children :)

Hello.

I know I’ve been a little quiet lately about this ongoing journey of recovering from burnout. I think this is because I haven’t quite had a way to articulate in blog post format what I’ve been doing and focusing on, but today, I’m going to try.

First, I haven’t been writing fiction. Let’s get that out of the way. I have been diligently, gratefully doing my morning pages. I just finished a second notebook this morning and have emptied six pens (yes, I’m keeping count!) Even on my vacation last week, I was the strange lady in the American Airlines lounge scribbling in a notebook.

The morning pages have been and are continuing to be enormously helpful. In fact, one thing they’ve made me realize is that I cannot rush this process. Burnout obliterated my foundation. Scorched earth was left behind. Rebuilding it brick by brick (pebble by pebble?) is going to take time. Time not just to get back to where I was but more than that.

I’ve talked about my craving to do better, to learn more, to elevate my writing craft. I think burnout burned up the “status quo” for me, and now my creative self wants new, different challenges.

So, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve been reading like a writer, watching movies and studying structure, that kind of thing. I’m also teaching my beginner romance writing class, which always brings me joy. But this week when I was binge-listening to Cal Newport’s podcast Deep Questions during plane rides, he gave me two better ways to articulate this process.

In one episode that Cal did with a comedian who was doing a 30-day digital detox, Cal said that one thing people can do while detoxing is focus on their craft—whatever their particular craft is. Cal wrote a book years ago called So Good They Can’t Ignore You, so he believes if you deeply focus on your craft, instead of spending time on things like social media, you’ll get so good that people will pay attention. So, all that to say, this reinforced for me what I’ve been doing lately—backing away from being so online, not stressing about marketing, and just honing my craft.

Then, in another episode, he talked about how he was in between writing projects. He said he was a little burnt out (even the Deep Work guy gets burnt out, lol) and so this was the time when he moved into his phase of “thinking and reading” to recover and to prepare for his future books. And all I could think was…

Thinking and reading and reading and thinking

That is exactly my jam right now—thinking and reading (and as a third component, focusing on my health, both physical and mental.) That is the season I am in.

And instead of thinking about this kind of inward, quiet season as I would’ve in the past—RED ALERT! YOU ARE NOT WRITING SELLABLE WORDS AND THEREFORE YOU ARE FAILING AT LIFE!—I’m embracing it as part of the process and cycle of cultivating a long, sustainable career. This IS part of the work. This is the job.

Of course, I recognize I am lucky that I can take a quiet season, lucky that I have other sources of income like teaching and backlist books (and a working spouse) to keep the pressure off, but even if I didn’t, I don’t think I could force words out. I’d have to take up a different line of work for a while.

So, that’s the update. It’s hard to report from the middle of something without hindsight to help, but so far, I can tell you I’m feeling better in my head and in my bones. I’m calmer and more focused. I’ve lost the urge to check social media. (I’m not off of it, but I check in sporadically, have taken Instagram off my phone, etc.) I’ve joined a gym and am giving myself that time without feeling guilty that I’m there and NOT WRITING. I’ve joined my library’s book club as a reader (I didn’t mention that I’m a writer and that was surprisingly delightful—to just be my reader self and nerd out over books.)

Most of all, I’m thinking a lot. Sometimes that’s via morning pages, sometimes it’s just in the freshly quiet spaces in my mind. For instance, I first drafted this post longhand the other night because I wasn’t scrolling my phone or distracting myself with something else and had these things on my mind.

I guess the best way to describe it is that I feel like I’ve stepped out of the tornado for a while. I know it’s still there. I’ll have to step back in at some point, but for now, I can see it as a thing separate from myself.

Last week, I went to the beach and was just…on vacation. No thoughts of work or how I was getting behind on a deadline or how I should really be working. The most I did was take notes of the scenery in my morning pages in case I one day wanted to describe those things in a novel. It was lovely.

So, all that to say, I still don’t have the answers. I can’t say, here’s a guaranteed way to get out of burnout and refill your creative well, but I can tell you that this feels like progress. I can feel myself unclenching. I feel unplugged without technically being unplugged. And that’s not nothing.

I’ll leave you with a quote that made me smile this week from Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments:

“It isn’t so much that geniuses make it look easy, it’s that they make it look fast.”