Where your mental background is half-melted snow piles and dead grass. The bitter cold wind that whispers bitter lies, and that all your ideas are best left in the permafrost.
Whether it’s work or creative life being affected, burnout can be devastating when it hits. For me, it manifests as split focus and staring at my notebook page for what feels like hours. Literally doing nothing– laying on the floor, sitting under the stream of my shower head hoping a droplet can spark my flint and restore my fleeting flame of passion. In a word, burnout is space.
I feel adrift. I can’t convince my mind to hold onto anything at all. Passion becomes a star rushing past my mind. Something too distant for me to be warmed by. The distance between what I want and the act of making it seems too great to overcome.
Burnout — the one thing many of us experience — is so isolating in space. We’re all just floating through our orbits, passing each other for seconds or hours at a time. In the deepest of my burnouts I feel like I will never return home to my projects. That the ability to write that sparked in me during high school can so quickly be extinguished in a place like space, where oxygen is fleeting.
I am, of course, wrong in these moments. I am just at the furthest part of my elips, waiting for gravity to take effect and pull me back to my star project. I will hurtle through space towards home like a comet, and try to remember why we burnout. That sometimes we need to take a break and refocus. That burnout is our body’s way of telling us we need to relax and recover.
Still, while you’re waiting to return home, it’s hard to hear that burnout doesn’t last forever. You’re still stuck in a rocketship on the edge of space.
Until I’m back home, where creativity burns at the hearth and warms my soul, I’ll supplement. Read and watch the beautiful creations of others that fill me up with kindling. Find stories that spark and vibrate with contagious energy.
Most of all, I will remember the woman with sleepy eyes, staying up late to write out a few more lines on The Book before bed. I will hold onto the image of her and the passion she holds, and emulate that until my space craft makes it back home.
Time will pass, as it tends to, and in a few days or weeks I will wake up, ready to create again. The gravity of my projects will pull me back home, and when I pause for coffee on a good writing day, I’ll wonder what I was thinking all those days ago when I was deep out in space. How could I ever be afraid of losing my writing? That future version of myself will wonder what burnout feels like with a distant kind of curiosity.
But until that time…