Amidst the Chaos: A Creative Burnout Journey Part 2
Photo by Gwendal Cottin on Unsplash
THE DAY JOB...
I was so shocked and surprised to find, despite my personal life being exactly what I dreamed of, I was consistently depressed. Like I stated in the first part, I couldn't understand why but I began to figure it out and the main reason I was depressed and couldn't seem to reconcile my creative burnout was because of my fucking day job. At this point (late summer 2019) I'd been working for this company over 6 years, smoothly, and happily, producing work that was fun and that was always well received and even praised by my coworkers and clients. My yearly reviews were solid. I worked a normal work week and still had energy to work on my personal creative projects when I got home. It was a good job. Not too demanding, fun work, low stress. Ideal.
Then my team got a new boss and suddenly things started to go downhill.
There's no shortage of stories in the design world about overbearing bosses, corporate demands of designer's time and life, and pressures from above, and this really is similar to those. Suffice to say our new team leader had drastically different ideas of what was demanded of the team and chose to communicate that to us by demeaning us in front of each other, constantly criticizing our work, and dragging us off into these private "one on one" meetings where she'd question our "passion" and "devotion" to the company if we ever questioned project directives. I was made to feel, after 6 years of devotion to this company, that my contributions were no longer valued and that I'd have to put in even more work and hours just to get to their level of even "bare minimum."
It crushed me. Every day was a struggle with the boss and everyday I dreaded going to work. It was completely impacting my life, personally, professionally, and creatively, and I kept believing it would get better.
It didn't.
I involved HR and even my department head and there was very little concern or even reciprocation on their part.
During my holiday break, after they demanded I work a day of it on-call, I decided enough was enough and started to prepare my resume and portfolio to find a new job. When 2020 started I was ready to quit. I'd had some interviews and some feedback but nothing stuck. I was trapped in this mindset that I needed this job to afford the life I'd worked so hard to get. It was becoming a vicious cycle of "fool me once, fool me twice, fool me three fucking times..." and all the while I was feeling miserable and NOT creating any personal work, which is something I've always been able to do.
Then the Covid-19 came and the design team was the first to be furloughed and I that was the last punch to make me realize how little I was valued by this company. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why I would want to go back there and bust my ass off for them when they clearly don't even care about what I do for them and have done for them over the past now almost seven years. I took stock of my values and and goals and with some help and research I began to find my way back to creativity and my passion and excitement was starting to be rejuvenated by other creatives and other ideas about creative work that ran counter to that of my boss and day job. I'll be diving into all that in the next part of this series.
METAL MOMENT:
Extreme metal is full of highly praised and championed comeback/rejuvenating albums and one of my favorite examples of this is Immortal's 2018 album Northern Chaos Gods.
After the band imploded following their 2009 album All Shall Fall and got embroiled in some legal and trademark battle, main dude Abbath went on to start doing his solo career and finally, original member Demonaz returned to the band and released Gods an album that had very little reason to be good but returned them to previous Immortal glory and blew Abbath's solo stuff clear out of the water.