What Happens When We Burn Out?
A conversation about the signs, and lessons, of creative burnout with writer Emma Gannon.
Trays are back in stock! // For all of you lovers of the moon: 2025 lunar calendars are 50% off // The 100 Day Project starts on Sunday, anyone taking part? Just like every year, I’ll start and we’ll see what happens…
Hello friends,
As the days get longer and lighter and midwinter shifts to late winter, my own creative energy begins to feel a little different. It is nice to swap out some of the winter lethargy, but I’m always hesitant of thawing out from the creative winter state too quickly.
Last week I got home after a week away, and at my Tuesday morning dip I realized, “oh, it’s 7am and not pitch black out anymore.” This is a reliable seasonal change that comes year after year, and yet somehow it always manages to be a surprise. One moment you are in the midst of deep winter and the next there are tiny little hints that spring is coming.
These past few years, I’ve come to enjoy and appreciate winter in a new way—the darkness, the slowness. It’s quiet and introspective. Maybe it’s just something that comes with age (or I don’t know, *gestures wildly* the current state of affairs) but I feel like I need this state more and more. Which means that coming out of it always leaves me feeling a bit weird.
Creatively, this is a season unto itself. Not quite winter, not quite spring, something a little uncomfortably in between the two. We aren’t craving the same sense of deep hibernation, but we weren’t ready to unfurl quite yet either.
It’s not that this little micro-season is uncomfortable. Rather, it’s itchy. Like a layer you’re wearing and want to remove but are having a difficult time pulling off.
I am thinking about this in particular this year, knowing that the outside world is demanding an enormous amount of attention and energy. In a time when everything feels uncertain, I feel like I have to double down on my creative practice and profession. Everything else might be on fire and falling apart, but I want to be sure I can come to my own work as a secure landing place. Which means paying extra attention to how all these little shifts feel, and abiding by what they require.
Because I know what the alternative is: pushing through and burning out. And this really does not feel like the year to burn out.
Other artists have written on their own process with burnout and finding their way back, like Lindsay Stripling and Bridgette Meinhold. In all honestly, even the word “burnout” makes me start to feel a little bit of that itchiness. I get fidgety thinking about it. The word itself carries a lot of baggage, and while it feels like the one thing we’re all trying to avoid, I know that my creative process—which feeds off of intense bursts—always functions with it at an arm’s length.
What happens when we do burnout? I finally started reading the book that everyone else already seems to have read, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. It has me thinking a lot about how stress shows up in our everyday lives, what we do with it, and how capable we are of listening to what our body tells us it needs. As sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski write,
“Most of us have spent our whole lives being taught to believe everyone else's opinions about our bodies, rather than to believe what our own bodies are trying to tell us. For some of us, it's been so long since we listened to our bodies, we hardly know how to start understanding what they're trying to tell us, much less how to trust and believe what they're saying. To make matters worse, the more exhausted we are, the noisier the signal is, and the harder it is to hear the message.”
I also wanted to hear from someone who had gone through the burnout tunnel and could report from the other side, so I turned to
. The author of several books (including Olive, which I’ve recommended to many friends), Emma and I met last fall at a writing retreat. She has written generously about her experience with burnout in her newsletter, and I wanted to feature an interview with her here. So that’s what you get today!After connecting with Emma, I left thinking a similar thing that reading the book has pointed at: there’s not really a way around this stuff, only through.
Working as a creative in the current model of capitalism, the dark cloud of burnout always lurks in the corner—you get used to living with the threat of a storm. The storm protection is learning how to listen to our own personal cues.
I hope that this conversation helps you to do just that.
-Anna
Anna Brones: Let’s start with your own personal seasons of creativity. When do you feel like you’re in creative modes of production versus introspection, hibernation, and gathering?
Emma Gannon: I’m still learning and I don’t have anything set in stone. My working life is always changing and evolving. I check in with myself day by day, week by week and see what my basic needs are rather than necessarily cornering off entire chunks of the year for certain things. I would say my own personal seasons run parallel with where my big projects sit in the calendar year. My new novel Table For One is coming out in April and therefore I will be very ‘out there’ during spring (which feels very on-brand seasonally!) and then I’ll be able to go inwards again for autumn/winter and work on my next book and hibernate/hide from the world again.
It’s definitely important to be aware of the yin and yang of promotion vs creation. These are two very different parts of the process and require different skillsets. I don’t know many creative people that can do both at the same time. There is a time to plant, and a time to reap what you’ve planted.
What does the winter season look like for your creative work?
Again it depends what projects I have on, but in general the winter is usually more of an inward reflection time. I like getting to the end of the year and feeling like I have gathered so much data to look back on. I love to do lots of journalling, planning and joining dots, making sense of what has happened in my life, the good, the bad, the indifferent etc. I rarely use the winter season to ‘gear up’ or rev my engine—it’s all about unwinding and slowing down. I did once have a book come out once during winter (January 2022).
Never again, if I can help it. It felt at odds with what my body wanted to do.
You’ve written a lot about your journey with burnout. When did you first start feeling the inklings of it? What were the signs?