#Burnout Recovery for Writers

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Preventing Chronic Stress and Burnout in Freelancing and Solopreneurship as Creative Writers

Cortisol Clarity Sample Chapter This is a free chapter for freelance writers and solopreneurs from the upcoming book Cortisol Clarity to be released on 1 January 2025 as New Year’s Present to the community Non-members can read this chapter for FREE here and also listen to a 25-minute interactive audio to reinforce these important insights. Thank you for sharing this piece with those who need…

[okamirayne]

Burnout Recovery

Meaning, something that burnout can ruthlessly steal from you. What returns it?

Thank you to every single blessed individual reviewer, reader and reacher who has ever reached out to me regarding my writing and shared your experience of my storytelling madness. I’m currently rereading every message and review I’ve ever been blessed to receive; to remind me how to answer the vital questions posed here that I have struggled with ever since burnout hit:

What is the gift you carry in your soul? What have you brought with you into the heart of the village?

I love and appreciate those who so kindly remind me of the meaning of what I do, which trumps all drill-sergeant self-talk, and forced modern-culture motivation mantras (the hustle shit) that only leads to further stress and illness. 🙏🏼

Modern Culture is fucked sideways and upside-down right now. Hello Clown World 🤡

Takeaways:

Cultivate your own myths and soul-medicines to find your meaning. If you can’t find joy in your old go-to pleasures right now, please find relief from any of your pressures.

If nothing seems to fill you right now, you may need to Empty Out rather than consume or try to fill what feels like a void. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether we’re truly empty inside, or too full of shit to feel.

It feels strange to share this, but as people have enquired (and are so sadly suffering similarly), I said I would do my best to offer my random and humble findings as I navigate my own way from the hellfire wasteland of burnout back to my writing worlds again.

I hope this helps someone. 🙏🏼 Even if it’s just to acknowledge their sadness.

For any other creatives going through burnout and are in the baby steps of recovery — or even if you’re sitting in the wreckage and not yet on recovery’s road just yet— I get you, I see you, I hear you, I feel for you, and I wish you so much grace in gently cradling and protecting the gifts you hold whilst your mind/body/spirit heals so you can return to your creative projects again and feel what the fires of burnout scorched and then extinguished in you.

Beauty CAN come out of Ashes.

And that beauty doesn’t have to be a phoenix. It can be a tiny, tiny spark — and even if the spark doesn’t catch just yet, stay with it, stay with it, please stay with it ✨

~ Rayne ☕️💜

Thank you BtB readers/reviewers for staying with me as I return to HHU to help me find my way back to my sparks once more ✨💖 Love and appreciate you 🙏🏼

[gl1tt3rgutz]

New Beginnings ☾ 12/03/2024

I wonder how much Tumblr loves poetry about gifted kid burnout and the internal battle between walking a straight path or carving your own story. Let's find out. - ☾

Tags: Themes of abuse/degredation, transphobia, mental health, and burnout

⇢

As a young child, I walked a straightforward path.

Keep looking forward, walk straight, keep on the line.

Whatever you do, don't fall behind.

There will be rewards if you can manage to get ahead.

Walking that straight path was always a challenge, even for tiny me.

I always found myself lagging behind, tripping over my own shoelaces that I still couldn't learn to tie properly.

Eyes wandering from the path ahead, glancing around my surroundings. Looking at the beautiful leaves as they fall.

Stuttering over my own words, when they were supposed to come out cleanly.

Getting stuck on math problems with too many words and graphs for me to understand.

Forcing myself to fit into labels I despised. To wear makeup and pretty dresses to make myself “less ugly.”

Time after time, I watched myself lag behind. Until I could no longer keep up.

I was praised for being so far ahead. Yet now, I lay crumbled in the dirt, watching everyone move on to the next stage without me.

No one offered a hand to lift me off the ground.

Only chanted words of degradation, that I should be ahead. Yet, did they ever lift a finger?

I was never meant to walk that straight path.

So when the time came for me to make a decision that would forever change the course of my life, standing at a fork in the road,

I clawed my way off my hands and knees and

altered my course.

A phoenix—the death of a girl, a rebirth of a man.

Like a semicolon, my story will not end here;

this is only the beginning of a new chapter.

◟

[eldrytchcryptid]

Imagine milking your kids creativity for results so obsessively that you cause trauma for every last coping mechanism that child tries to form to survive.

Me neither, dude

[i-want-to-be-a-poet]

i am hungry. perhaps i will starve.

[galaxywhump]

Actually thought about the next SV-240 chapter today, #progress

[theatrum-tenebrarum]

An update, academic burnout and how I want to use social media

Hi everyone, long time no see. As some of you already know, I've been going through a lot of personal things, transformative things, weird things. I am currently in the long process of getting my degrees, which has been challenging to say the least. The whole process has now prolonged even more, as my life has had taken a completely different turn the last couple of months. I went through some very tough life events that were full of heavy emotions, but they were also deeply transformative. They marked a culmination of something that had been unraveling in me for a long time, something that began sometime when I was around my 3rd year of University.

That is the time when I reached peak academic burnout. Up until my 3d year of uni, I had been bathing in inspiration each day, as I got to learn about art and human culture and all the things that make me understand existence better and love life better. I was studying hard, my grades were amazing, but physically I was not doing good at all. Very soon my mental health started to decline as well and nothing was the same. My 3rd year of University was the time where I came around and realized that I was pushing myself way above my limits, so naturally my body and mind said no more. I love art, history and folklore with all my heart and I am so grateful for being able to study those topics at such a good University and for having such great experts teach me so many invaluable things. However, studying there was very hard, often unreasonably so, and many things have happened to me there, things that were very unfair, and that is to say the least. I realized I had been pushing myself in order to attain certain ideals and to fulfill certain expectations, which definitely weren't mine. That's the perfect formula to get to burnout, which is exactly what happened to me.

Staying up late in order to memorise each and every term perfectly, having 3 hours of sleep, having health issues in the morning, acing the exam then feeling numb. Rewriting sentences indefinitely just to get them "perfectly right", to create "the best essay/seminar ever" and to create something that's gonna be..different. Rinse and repeat.

This way of functioning translated over to other parts of my life as well, even into my lovely project/blog 'Theatrum Tenebrarum', which is supposed to be a safe space for myself and others. I envisioned Theatrum Tenebrarum as a place for me to share what I have learned, in the most simple and interesting way, to inspire others to look for deeper meaning behind the things we love in popular media, and frankly to just have a space for me to express myself. Without being aware of it, righr away I started to become very meticulous about my words, my sentences, my topics I'd like to write about. This habit of wanting to create "perfect" texts/"perfect" content had engulfed me, and I stopped posting altogether, because that is too much for me, and I don't want the safe online space I created to be another "University course" to me.

So from now on, 'Theatrum Tenebrarum' is going be what it is supposed to be, and that is a safe space for learning, for creativity. A space that celebrates the mystical, as well as the mundane, as they are intertwined. I will still be writing texts about the cool things that inspire me, but they won't be the only thing I post. Since my other passion is video making, I decided to open a YouTube channel where I plan on posting vlog-style videos and sharing the things I learn about. I'd also like to focus a bit more on slow, magical living, mindfulness and journaling, as those were of great help when I was figuring out how to heal from burnout. I'd also like to film about how I commonplace information about the things I learn about, while talking about folklore, art, mysteries, and all of those topics. If that is something you think you'd find interesting, be sure to subscribe to my channel :) (I'm putting the link below). This is my way of stepping into authenticity and sharing the things I want to be sharing, and how I want to be sharing them. Thank you for reading, if you've come this far, and thank you for being here.

My YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@theatrum_tenebrarum?si=zOv74vojhPbs9dxt

Here are some winter vibes from my hometown, house, local magical fairy hill, and a photo of my visit to one of the most magnificent gothic cathedrals in the world, the Chartres cathedral, that I visited in early spring.

-Heidi (@theatrum-tenebrarum) 🖤

[shiningstarr15]

Hello again tumblr!

I just wanted to let y’all know that I will probably be returning from my hiatus here very soon! I’m finally starting to recover from my burnout and slowly getting motivation back to write and even draw!

And if you’re at all curious, this partially has to do with the fact that White Widow (2023) comic just came out and, as one of the biggest mcu Yelena Belova fans, I have BIG feelings about this comic. But.. I need a whole post for that.

Anyway, hope y’all are doing well! I’m not fully back yet, but very very soon! So stay tuned, and thank you for the continued support ❤️

[serenityscribes]

Defective (2023)

I somehow feel like he’s still there But doesn’t know how to be I beyond get the need for space I too needed to block out all the sound Couldn’t breathe, think, or hear Over the roaring in my head Words the circled, stabbed, tore pieces An uncontrolled self flagellation Including the greatest hits of derision That had nothing to do with us And everything to do with my belief That I’d become completely Defective Tossed in a bin like we had at the store Amongst the scratched discs And dented dreams My plans, my goals, my being Wiped clean Mind being so kind as to rewind “I thought you were stronger than this” “How can you not be going back?” “I feel like you can’t do anything anymore” External voices that echoed The internal maelstrom of self derision He was there in spaces when I wasn’t Holding room for me to be Whatever I needed to be Finding ways to make me smile When I didn’t believe I had the right To even use those muscles I cause chasms and pauses Unforgivable and yet Time and again, He chose to meet me where I was Seeing the human behind the pieces The me I had always been

E. Ecker, January 2023

**for context I used to work at a video rental store, and we had a “defective bin” for all the product that could no longer be sold or rented out.

[ow-writing]

Once I factor recovery time from working all day, my creative hours are severely limited and that’s what fuels the dissatisfaction in my life

[okamirayne]

😅🫠

[aquestiontotheworld]

Needles

I have come out/been outed to my mother at least 4 times over the course of my life. I won't bore you with the details, but as anyone who knows me will not be shocked to find out, each one was suitably dramatic and tear-filled. Each time it happened, however, I left the interaction feeling embarrassed and ignored, mostly because she always had some reason for why she didn't think I was right about myself. I was just trying to fit in with a crowd, she didn't want me to label myself and close myself off from any future opportunities or experiences, she worried about how I would be treated by an unkind world, and so on, and, like a child who has been raised by a woman who told me things like "the only people you can ever trust in the world are me and you, baby", I listened to her, I took in her opinion as fact, and I folded myself up and neatly replaced myself back in the closet, identity to be examined at a later date. It's only been in recent years, and with a lot of therapy, that I can confidently say that her responses were never actually about me, she didn't actually say those things because she knew me better than I knew myself; she said those things because of her own discomfort. She hadn't planned for me to be my own complete, confident, separate person, and so she lashed out and tried to keep things the way she wanted. I can also see just how used to this treatment I was, too. Any time I did something that she didn't like, even if it wasn't something "bad", there were screaming arguments and silent treatment, inescapable rants about how betrayed she felt, how she had made sure I never endured the abuse she had as a child, so I needed to be grateful, and my actions now feel like a slap in the face or a knife in her back. In contrast, to me, my relationship with my mother has never felt like a knife in my back; there was never really a major betrayal or argument or incident that harmed me enough to make me reconsider our relationship. It was more like millions of little tattoo needles spread out over my whole life, each pinprick slowly colouring me and changing me until I looked down and realised that I didn't know who I was anymore. I have spent a decade now slowly discovering the depth of the colours and words she painted me with, working out what is salvageable and what I now want nothing to do with, until finally this year I told her that I didn't want her near me any longer. My skin is broken and battered and bruised from two and a half decades of being her daughter, and I just can't take it anymore. I look at myself now, especially since that conversation, and I see all the good, bad, messy, complicated bits of me that are undeniably shaped by her, the habits and patterns, the jokes I tell, the memories of her I have associated with the simplest of phrases, and I realise that, whether she likes it or not, I will always be the man that my mother raised.

Postscript: just in case anyone is wondering, I don't hate my mum. In fact I feel like now more than ever, I love her enough to understand so much of where she's coming from. But the problem is, I have spent a lifetime understanding who she is and why she does things, and I have never felt like that was reciprocated, so now I just do not have the energy to maintain such a one-sided relationship, where I am only loved as her child, and not as a person. I can't live my life in service of her anymore, with me putting myself last, or hiding parts of myself and ignoring the damage she has done to me so that she never has to see me as a "problem". I deserve better.

[i-want-to-be-a-poet]

i am finally feeling again.

[okamirayne]

How it feels returning to the writing path…😅 Just keep going….👣 Big love and solidarity to any and all artists healing from burnout or chronic crapfests.

[calltoamentor]

Creativity and Your Inner Child

Daily writing promptWhen you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up? View all responses For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a writer. And for almost as long, I have been told that things never come as naturally to me as they do to those around me, and that I would have to work an order of magnitude harder to achieve a fraction of the success in any field that someone…

[harrleyquins]

as soon as i figure out a sustainable writing process that’s both fun and productive I WILL BE UNSTOPPABLE!!!!!