As I mentioned last week, the conference came and went like a hurricane in my life. And, as with a hurricane, my body knew it was coming a week before and a week after. There was also a week of “cleanup” after it. It’s not done, of course, but I’m working at it.
All of this to say, I am still pretty deep in burnout territory. It’s hart to know if it’s autistic burnout borne of masking, hyperfocus, and excessive demand or if it’s just vanilla burnout which is created by similar conditions. I suspect it’s a mix of the two, to be entirely honest.
So what does that mean for me as a writer?
Well, there’s often a lot of pressure to constantly be pushing forward and keep writing. I knew someone who bragged that he wrote his 1,000 words a day no matter what happened. Even when his children were born. Even when extremely sick in a hospital bed. Even when someone in his family was dying. I respect his tenacity but the reality for most writers doesn’t look like that. I sometimes have months when I don’t write anything on my various fiction projects, and writing for my blog or newsletter feels like wringing words out of a dry sponge.
One of the most important lessons I have learned over the years is that we humans are not computers. While we are often driven by the world to perform like them, we absolutely are not them. Human creatives have dry spells. We have times when the inspiration just isn’t there. While I don’t sit around waiting for inspiration, you cannot draw water from a dry well. And trying to force it rarely results in writing worth keeping.
There are, of course, times to push through. There are moments that we need to pull our adult underpants up as high as they go and soldier on. Of course there are. But what’s missing in that conversation is the knowledge that there are just as many times when we need to rest and recognize that we are humans who need time to just be.
I’m not sure how much time like that I will have in coming days, weeks, and months given the schedule of activities I have going. If you can’t be a good example, be a terrible warning, I guess. Hi, I’m your air raid siren of “don’t do what E does”. However, I am aware of these things and do my best to build time in. Tracking my productivity using Centered or other apps helps. Encouraging flow states when I can get into them. Giving myself time to recuperate and rest between large activities. All of those things are extremely important.
Making myself do all that is an entirely different discussion, of course.
Maybe by next week I will have something more useful to say here. But this week, I’m Bilbo Baggins: “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
