Issue #022 — What burnout taught me about creative range

Dear reader,

I burnt out, properly, in October two years ago. I have written around the edges of this in earlier letters. I want to write through the middle of it now, because something has settled and I think it is worth saying out loud.

The burnout itself is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what came back online afterward, and how unexpected it was.

When I came out of the worst of it — slowly, over about four months, with the help of a therapist, a doctor, two friends, and a long series of unspectacular days — I expected to return to the version of myself I had been before. Same energy, same outputs, same shape of work. I assumed the burnout had been a glitch and recovery meant restoration.

What actually happened was that my creative range expanded. Not because the burnout was a gift — please do not tell me burnout was a gift, ever — but because the version of me who returned could not work the way the previous version had, and the previous way had been narrower than I had realised.

The previous me had one mode: push. Push through the resistance. Push past the tired. Push the deadline. Most of my output had come from push, and I had mistaken push for a personality trait.

Burnout took push away from me, possibly permanently. I cannot push the way I used to. The cost is too high and the body knows it now and refuses. What replaced push, slowly, was a wider menu. Slow. Wait. Sleep on it. Walk. Talk to one specific person. Start in the middle, not the beginning. Do thirty minutes and stop. These had always been available. I had not used them, because push had always worked, until it stopped.

The work I am making now is different in ways I am not entirely able to name. There is more space in it. Less performance. It comes out more slowly and sometimes feels less impressive on the day, and over a year it accumulates into something I prefer to anything I made in the push years.

I am not recommending burnout. It is brutal and the recovery is not optional. I am saying: if you have been there, the version of you that returns is allowed to be different from the version that left, and the difference might be where the best work was hiding all along.

Yours,
Enova