What's the worst burn out ever?

@QueenofBabyLoon Queen Of BabyLoon
Fri, 22 Feb 2019 16:12:56 +0000

@QueenofBabyLoon wrote:

The type caused by external circumstances.

You want to draw/write. You have ideas. However, urgent things pile up. Your graduation capstone. Your professional responsibilities. Your shifts at the hospital. Problems at home. Personal problems. You don't have time to sleep, let alone to continue an ongoing artistic project. Art always takes the backseat.

But the ideas are still there. They torture you. They develop in your head. They evolve, live, gnaw at you. Tire you down. Your own ideas tire you down, pull you down.

And when you finally have the time to write, so much has accumulated in your brain, it has not be organized in a way that makes it easy for you to externalize it. You sit in front of your computer. You just look at the screen. You feel that mass settling in your stomach. You are tired from the external world, from your real-life responsibilities. And you not being able to just take up where you left off, you needing to reboot the system, wait for it to warm up and somehow start from scratch to get into your rythme makes you panic. That is when the hands start shaking, the breath gets caught in your throat. You feel nauseous and inadequate and you are sure you will never again experience that creative epiphany. You start crying.

You are demotivated.

This is what kills a project. Not lack of ideas. Not lack of desire to develop your work. But the fact that the artist in you lives in parallel with the social individual in you (social as in member of society). They are not the same person. They are two individuals. And at times, at antipodes.

This is how burnouts work with me. Obviously, other people experience it differently.