As I sit down to write this, it’s raining after a weekend of good weather. The good weather has been sporadic in these early days of spring. During one of these rare bursts of sunlight a few weeks ago, I went for a walk at the park near my flat, and got a phone call from Donna - they asked how I was doing after we had to cancel an event, and I talked about how busy I was, and the work I had lined up. They rightly called me out on this, especially because it was coming in the throes of what I’ve ended up calling burnout; while it might not be the perfect term, it’s the most accurate one available to me, the one that comes closest to describing the strange tension that’s been in the back of my mind over the month of April.
I don’t get burnt out very often, something I’ve always considered to be a very fortunate trait. Sure, there are times when I’ve spread myself a little thin - writing and staging plays while doing my MSt thesis; trying to write two books simultaneously simply because I always miss whatever kind of art isn’t directly in front of me like a workaholic golden retriever. But the more I think about it, the clearer it is that my ability to avoid burnout has been a product of my ability to avoid stillness.
2024 was another year in which I tried and failed to get sent over to Venice for the Biennale. Going as a freelancer is, unsurprisingly, an uphill climb; one edited said that everything was being done in-house, another said that they’d be putting together a pre-Biennale supplement written entirely by staffers; a third asked me to review a show there on the assumption that I’d simply be in the neighbourhood. This isn’t a surprise; there’s a ton of interesting shows, in a wonderful city at a nice time of year - if I was writing or editing for a publication, I’d wanna go there too. But the strange thing about it is that the combination of so much work, and so many editors, all going there at the same time leads to a real lack of freelance work available for a stretch of time. And that was the first time in a while where I had, essentially, nothing on. It was a strange feeling; the kind that leads to someone saying it’s quiet… too quiet in a horror film, and something about the lack of distraction and immediate motivation of encroaching deadlines meant that I went from 100 to 0 immediately, in that sharp skidding to a stop, ended up crashing, burning out, to borrow from Hemmingway, very slowly and then all that once.
If there’s one thing I’m bad at, it’s having nothing to do. Earlier this year, I ended up with food poisoning which rendered me functionally useless for a couple of days, and the thing I mostly took away from it was that I found it to be a strange, dulling experience. Time became weird and slow, my days lacked definitions as I sat around on the couch drinking a lot of water and watching Seinfeld. The feeling of burnout was similar to this but, I suppose, more all-encompasing. Almost more violent, I felt it somewhere deep, like I was being pulled down into a mire, or into quicksand.
Some of this, I’m sure, is a product of freelancing. There’s a need to constantly be On, to be available to turn around quick and good copy so that editors a) remember you exist and b) decide to keep hiring you. When I came back from California in the fall of 2023, I spent a long time just emailing editors to remind them of my presence, telling them I was ready, willing, and able to take on work. When I went to Paris and Rome that same year, I woke up an hour or so before my partner so that I could work (reviewing and writing around a new season of Demon Slayer). This didn’t burn me out, presumably because after working I would go to Colosseum, the Catacombs, or Disneyland; I was able to keep outrunning this thing that was breathing down my neck (something I have plenty of experience with by now).
Emerging from the wreckage of burnout, I’m trying to pin down exactly what the root cause of it was; in reality the simple - and probably correct - answer is working too much and not giving myself the time to rest, or even engaging with things I love outside of the prism of work. It’s difficult to watch a new movie, go to an exhibition, or read for pleasure without that feeling of somehow not being Productive. It’s got me thinking about the way I relate to time and energy, and my failed experiment of being incredibly regimented with my schedule at the end of 2023 (so one assumes there’s a Goldilocks style approach that will keep me working at a good pace but not to the point where I’m burning out). Even now, I’m struggling to motivate myself to book a ticket for an afternoon screening of Godzilla out of anxiety of what it means to do something like that during the work day. At the Divine, reading at the launch for the new Sticky Fingers publication Get Rid of Meaning, I talked about the things I was thinking about in the wake of my lost month; the spectre of a PhD application, and of course, this newsletter. I continue to underrate the freedom it offeers me, thinking of it still as some extension to freelancing (and as much as I’d love for it to generate income, treating it too much like Work is a mistake).
I’ve thought, talked, and written a lot about the strange, double-edged sword of freelancing: the freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want to existing in tension with that need to constantly be On. Inevitably, this kind of thing reveals a lot about me - I’ve made it no secret to friends that one of the ways in which I sort of define myself - and one of the things that I think defines my worth - is my relationship to work; my ability to do a lot quickly and well, to juggle multiple projects, even if they come at the expense of mental health (case in point: writing and staging a play while doing an MSt thesis). I’m not quite sure what to do with this information, but I’m glad that I have it. In trying to sit with it, understand it, talk through it, its bringing to mind my convalescing from food poisoning, even the act of being burnt out itself: because so much of it seems defined by slowness, quiet, all the things that an overactive - maybe even at times self-destructive - work ethic is designed to keep at bay. I’d never thought of myself before as someone who really burns out, until of course, I became one; and I think for now all I can do is rest with that fact, let it rest in me.
As I finish writing this, the sun is creeping out from behind the clouds, bringing some light into the living room of the flat. It’s tempting to ascribe meaning to this change in the weather as I meander my way to the end of this narrative. But I don’t think I’ll do that; instead, I’ll just sit in the light.