When Burnout Strikes
Hello! It’s been a while! Firstly, I want to say that if you’re spending your January feeling uninspired, in a funk, overtired, overwhelmed, then I’m here to tell you that you’re not alone! I don’t think that I’ve ever seen such a unified sentiment among some of my favorite creatives, with so many of us saying something along the lines of, “I just don’t have it in me right now.” Holidays can be hard. New Year’s can be hard. Doing all of it and keeping up with daily life, when we’re all having to retreat back into our homes and isolate again is HARD. The last 2 years have included waves of hope and disappointment and grief and our bodies go through phases when being in constant crisis management becomes less, well, manageable. I have found myself rather unable to muster up the energy to keep working on my home improvement projects. And that’s okay. If your body is telling you that you need a period of rest, TAKE IT. If your mind is telling you that you can’t show up in the ways that you usually do, either in person or on the internet, DON’T SHOW UP UNTIL YOU’RE READY. My dear friend keeps reminding me of the wisdom of the late, great Whitney Houston, “It’s not right, but it’s okay.”
Definitely vibing with this zombie doll these days
As a concept, we all know that self-care is critically important. In practice, it’s a lot harder. It’s also a buzzword, fueled by consumerism in a way that tells us that we can cure our burnout with a new bottle of nail polish or a bath fizz. But these types of “care” can often leave us feeling guilty for using our time or money in that way, and then don’t actually address the systems in our lives that we spend so much energy maintaining, which leave us feeling burned out in the first place. So I’m here to offer another approach. I’m going to share some of the things that I do when I’m not feeling like myself. These are the times when I find myself not enjoying what I usually enjoy, or not wanting to actually engage in activities even when I think they will cheer me up. Times when I stumble into a creative block that either leaves me totally devoid of ideas, or FILLED with ideas and with absolutely no ability to act on any of them. Times when I’m tapped out.
I read an article by psychologist Vienna Pharaon, which outlined a way to approach self-care that has stuck with me in the most sustainable way. She challenged readers to identify the core components of their personhood. These should be things that you cannot separate from yourself. Are you a runner? A writer? An artist? An athlete? An entertainer? She recommended focusing on the top 5 things, and asked if we had spent time in the last week supporting or cultivating any of those things. More than one thing? If not, then we were likely not properly caring for ourselves.
For me, this exercise didn’t magically fix my burnout, or even help me know what to do for self-care right away. But it did blow my notion of self-care right out of the water in the best way, a way that actually made sense to me. I spent a long time reflecting and rediscovering who I am and what core aspects of myself are inherent to my personhood. This was critical for me at a time when I didn’t even know what I wanted to do with “me time” when I could manage to scrape it together. I decided to dedicate my time to this rediscovering, until the point when I knew what things I could engage in that would be restorative rather than just exhausting or guilt-inducing. I reassess these aspects of myself every so often to make sure they still fit, and let go of things that no longer feel like a necessary part of me. My number one for quite some time is that I am a Creative. That’s a bit of a broad term, but for me it fits. My creative direction is broad too, and it fills my cup whether I’m painting or designing a new doll or coordinating fabrics. So now when I take time for my creative pursuits, I know that I’m caring for HER, The Creative, not just taking “time for myself.”
Which leads me to one of my favorite burnout outlets – the doodle. Have you ever gotten lost in a doodle? I know I did it a LOT as a kid, all the way through high school. My gel pens were like an extension of my hand. And in college? I used to write haiku and limericks and all manner of poems. I’m not talking about meaningful poems to shape someone’s perception of the world. I’m talking about a delightfully pointless series of haiku so that the hum of the projector in my night class approaching 10pm didn’t lull me into a drooling puddle of academic slumber. But how often do we let ourselves doodle as adults? To not think about how “good” it will turn out to be, to not try to monetize it, to not think of it as wasted time? To let ourselves just get into a zone of a pursuit that is both mindless and mindful?
This mural is taking 1000 years
Your adult version of the doodle doesn’t have to be the middle school gel pens on lined paper variety. In fact, mine rarely are. But for a couple weeks now, I’ve been committing to doodling in some form or another EVERY DAY, even if I don’t feel like it. It doesn’t have to be for a long time, though I find that once I hit my doodle sweet spot I can keep on doodling, and that’s the idea. I didn’t spend that time accomplishing any of my DIY projects, but that doesn’t make my doodles inherently unproductive. After a number of days I’m feeling more like myself. And THAT’s when my energy for other aspects of self-care kicks in. That’s when I start eating better, drinking more water, getting more sleep. That’s even when I decided I can paint the trim on that window in my bedroom after all. I can get back to working on that mural. And then I realized that the mural is its own kind of doodle, which helped it seem not so intimidating after all these months.
On that note I’m going to share some of my favorite doodling activities from the last few weeks!
1. Tempera Paint Sticks – this delightful art supply is so satisfying. It’s smooth and creamy to put to paper, has the ease of drawing with a crayon and the saturated color of painting. Plus, it dries in 90 seconds (or less!) so cleanup is a breeze and you don’t need all kinds of real estate dedicated to drying space.
2. Painting ceramics – maybe it’s just a $1 succulent planter from the dreaded zone at the front of a certain red and white store, but that adds to the “no pressure” vibes needed for a good doodle session.
3. Magazine page collage – this is something that I’d forgotten I used to do. I would spend hours combing through magazines as a kid, saving colors and patterns that I liked and making detailed collages. My doodle version is far less intenstive, but it was fun to remember that collage is something I used to gravitate toward, and in the spirit of doodling, it’s fun to just tear and stick and see what happens.
4. Random Line Drawing – close or avert your eyes and move your drawing utensil around on a piece of paper however your hand feels like moving. Swirl things around, let lines intersect and overlap over and over. Then take a look at what you’ve drawn. You can color in the individual areas/zones, or look to see if you can find a picture or shape somewhere within those lines. I’ve doodled anything from a turtle to a flower to a teapot, and it’s rather fun to see what I can find or what shape I like best if I find more than one.
Most of all, whatever you decide to do, try to just let it flow. It doesn’t really matter how it all turns out, and that’s become quite comforting for me when I sit down to do it. I’m feeling my creative juices flowing again, and I’ve even found some inspiration in the flow and ritual of the doodle. Aside from my doodling, I’ve been leaning on audio books over the paper kind, and I’ve been seeking out the absolute brightest things in my closet that are warm enough to wear right now. I hope that if you’re among the ranks of us going through something, that you start feeling more like yourself again soon. And know that you can always reach out if you need a friend, a shoulder, an ear, a doodling partner, or someone to encourage you to wear your most colorful winter outfit! Do you have any self-care staples that you follow for yourself? I’d love to hear about them in the comments. Take care out there <3
~Carly
