Hi friends,
I don’t think I’m going to say anything surprising here, anything that no one else in any of our lives is saying: I’m burnt out.
Do I really need to count the ways and reasons? There’s been a pandemic happening around us, impacting almost every decision. That’s enough to exhaust anyone.
My thoughts seem disconnected minute to minute, I’m grumpy, I’m feeling hopeless, I’m exhausted, and I’m annoyed that I feel all those ways.
It may be a little strange, but I also think there’s something a little beautiful about reaching this point. It’s beautiful the way a dying flower is, I think. When a flower dies, it’s gone, sure—but it also makes room for the next flowers. In decay there’s rebirth.
From my trip to Monet’s garden in Giverny.
I think some people think that getting to the burn out stage is necessarily bad. I mean, it feels terrible, so I used to agree with them. I think some version of Millenial spiritual-capitalism taught us that if you’re burnt out it’s because you didn’t rest soon enough, you didn’t take a break when you were supposed to. You didn’t avoid this feeling, so you failed somehow. I think that’s wrong.
Burn out is inevitable.
In my head, I’ve been likening it to a fire that razes a forest. There’s lots of evidence that a controlled burn is actually the best thing that could happen to a natural habitat. It’s only because we humans keep getting in the way of a natural process—with our destruction of natural habitats, with our own habitats, with our climate change, with our own lives—that the fire becomes dangerous.
I don’t think it’s a linguistic coincidence that we link this feeling to fire.
Responding to burn out requires a clearing out, a purge of things. Some people accomplish it with a week vacation to a resort—great! What is a resort stay but a clearing out of your daily annoyances like doing dishes and sweeping the floor and answering emails?
Getting rid of the dead bits, the parts that don’t work anymore, is a healthy process.
Feeling burnt out is a sign that that process has already begun. We have already outgrown the container, our bloom has already faded, the weeds are starting to choke out the rest of the garden. (How many more gardening/nature analogies can I come up with before you get really annoyed? Don’t worry, there’s more coming.) Ignoring it doesn’t make the problem go away. And dealing with it sooner sort of works—it’s better to pull a weed before the roots can establish too deeply, right? But if all you do is pull the weeds, that doesn’t stop the rest of the natural processes that are happening around it. We still outgrow our containers, the flowers still die, the dirt runs out of nutrients. Our lives still need other tending.
This point forces us to address what parts need to go. Maybe it’s a job, maybe it’s a relationship, maybe it’s a bad habit or a gym routine. It gets us to ask what can make us feel better, and what hasn’t worked in the past. Going out with your friends might feel good for the night, for instance, but it might not cure the day to day tedium of a job that we feel doesn’t value us. If going out with your friends is a normal watering, a new job is the fertilizer we need. Water isn’t everything, life is more complicated.
So feeling burnt out doesn’t feel good, but it has gotten me to take a bird’s eye view of my life and start thinking about comes next. What is the water, what is the fertilizer, and where are the weeds that need to be pulled?
Because a week at a resort isn’t going to cure this. I just spent three days in the woods with no phone service, and while that was lovely, it didn’t change that there are things in my life that just aren’t working right now and I need to figure out what to do about them.
In farming, there’s a period where you let a field lay fallow. Basically, a fallow season is when you let a plot of land that normally produces crops just sit there without anything growing on it for a while—it fucking rests. It is no surprise to me that writers have so completely stolen this phrase that if you google “fallow period,” the first definition is actually related to writing, and you have to clarify that you want the agricultural definition. Because for a population group that is famously often withdrawn and solitary, writers do have to constantly produce things for everyone else’s consumption. That’s rather the point, in fact.
In the past I’ve accidentally had fallow periods where I didn’t write anything for anyone. But I always felt guilty during them, like I was failing at what I was supposed to be doing. I kept trying to force myself to get back into it, which only made me produce work that sucked and also made me feel worse.
But starting later this week, I’m deliberately taking some time off of the internet. I’ll be mostly offline for at least 6 weeks—my plan, right now, is to be back sometime in mid-September. During that period, I’ll be checking email and I’ll still have to go to work because I don’t make enough money to take 6 weeks of complete vacation. But I’ve already promised myself that for at least 4 of those weeks I won’t write anything.
Things will be different when I come back. I’m not sure how yet, which is part of why this is going to be such a long break. But I’m excited for whatever comes next. I’m excited for this stage of this process. It felt scary and dangerous, at first, like this would ruin my social media presence or people would forget who I am. But at this point I feel good about it. It feels beautifully full of potential, the moment when the fire extinguishes and the ground cools off and the seeds for whatever comes next start to wiggle in the ground, sprouting roots for plants we won’t see for a while. There’s beauty in waiting, in wondering, in crossing your fingers and hoping.
This is the free edition of Collected Rejections. If you liked it, click that little heart at the bottom to tell me so! Go ahead share it with your friends too.
Was this email forwarded to you? Cool! Subscribe for more right here: