The Burnout Diaries: Chapter 1

Who am I if I’m not making?

I have been a bit quiet lately, on social media, and not being at my normal markets.

So, what’s going on?

If you’re new here, my name is Siobhan and I am a potter, artist + illustrator with a little online shop that appears a couple times a month as a face-to-face market. I love having a small business, and I love having one in this day and age where I can also talk to all of you, online. Even if you’re not buying anything from my shop, just by being here, reading this and watching my YouTube videos, you’re supporting my creative career.

Despite being a business owner for almost 10 years, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve realised lately that I focus so much on the making that I neglect the other half of being a business. The selling. So I’m hoping a business course in marketing is going to help with that. I want to reevaluate how I am spending the hours each day in order to make the most of my time and creative resources. The whole work smarter not harder thing, because lately it’s all felt just a bit too hard.

Which brings us to the other thing I’ve been neglecting, myself, and I feel a lot of us are probably doing exactly that right now. I generally work 7 days a week, no work life balance, and while I love what I do, it is still work.

Lately I worked too much. Too hard. For too long.

And now I have “overload burnout”.

Here are some things I’ve been experiencing as burnout:

• Fatigue, headache, stomach ache and flu like symptoms,

• an inability to concentrate, making decisions even about small things can be overwhelming and leave me shaky and nearly crying,

• I have next to no appetite, my sleep schedule has completely changed,

• my thoughts are very circular now, full of doubt and uncertainty but not having the mental resources to come up with solutions.

What is weird is my inability to care about things I know I actually care about. I don’t want to be productive, I don’t want to work, I just want to give up. I love what I do, my creative business is a big part of my identity, always in my thoughts, but at the moment I don’t care about carrying through with any actual business tasks.

Because when I was working, it wasn’t at a hobby level, it was at a full time production level. I can’t look at a cup and think of just making one, two, maybe three in a sitting. I think of making 30, 40, maybe 50 that day. And I did. I made and I made from a bit after waking to nighttime when I was forced to stop solely because the day ended.

You might be thinking well she seems fine, she’s writing and making videos.

I don’t have creative burnout. My mind is still whirring and buzzing with ideas and possibilities, if only on a very shallow plane with no actual thought about how to carry anything out. My voice is still here, I can still convey how I’m feeling and how I’m struggling. This is a skill I have honed over several years and so is second nature to me, it doesn’t take much effort. I am doing Youtube as a way of letting everything out, a public way of journaling if you will.

I have also become quite resilient over the last decade or so. Which means emotionally, I’m kind of ok? A bit anxious at times, a bit lost at the moment, but I can carry on. I want to carry on.

How is burnout different to depression/anxiety?

Without getting too into depth with the ins and outs of mental health, depression or anxiety diagnoses generally come with a depressive or anxious episode. Symptoms are at such a clinical level that they are impacting your everyday life. Unlike what many people think, depressive episodes are not only about sadness but a loss, or depression, of emotion. A nothingness. A lack of caring about life in general, not just a topic or task. I definitely don’t have that. Nor do I have the crushing anxiety of an elephant sitting on my chest, or panic attacks feeling like a heart attack, or an inability to sleep due to night sweats and stomach butterflies. My sleep schedule has slunk back to its old midnight to 8am routine, but I am sleeping.

How is burnout different to exhaustion?

Exhaustion is something I have felt many times. I have had bouts of working where I have ended up in bed for 3 - 5 days at a time, hardly able to move, just sleeping day in and day out. Like now, I was mentally fine, able to generate ideas and generally coherent thoughts, but physically I was a wreck. However, after a few days, I could get out of bed and go back to things as they were before.

Burnout isn’t that simple. I am not bed-bound, but it has also been just over a week and decisions are no easier to make, the overwhelm is always in the background, waiting to come forward when it hears its name. Sleep alone won’t help.

At the moment, I can read a book for hours but I can’t easily read the course outcomes of a new business course I’ve stupidly recently started. Exhaustion would mean I couldn’t do either, whereas burnout means I can’t do the task that has expectation and response attached to it, although I can easily read a novel because I find that relaxing with no attached expectations.

All this to say, it’s not simply a physical, or simply a mental issue to deal with. It’s a messy combination of both.

And I actually want to deal with it, properly. How? I don’t know yet. Starting a business marketing course is definitely not the right thing to do, so I’ll have to deal with that too, and the rest I will have to figure out as I go along.

Want to join me?

I’m going to keep writing blog posts, keep making YouTube videos. As an ex-therapist, there is a certain novel curiosity I have about this whole thing, a chance for scientific experimentation on a single case study. Thats me, hi. I’m my own case study.

I’m going to keep being a creative person with a creative business (that’s a basic need for me), but the presentation of my creativity may be different. More storytelling, less clay.

So if this is the first chapter, what’s the rest of the story going to be?

I guess we need to find out.

x Siobhan