Amidst the Chaos: A Creative Burnout Journey Part 3

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash

BURNING OUT THE BURN OUT

Is it possible to get burnt out of being burned out?

I feel a bit guilty talking about a massive positive outcome in my life during this time on this planet when there's so much turmoil being experience but it would be disingenuous of me to not share at least my bright side of things.

It took a worldwide pandemic for me to get through my creative burnout and find my desire and excitement for making art again.

And I tried for fucking months. Oh how I tried.

It started at the beginning of 2019 when I thought productivity was my problem. I delved into all these books about the creative process and scoured YouTube for productivity experts telling me how to take full advantage of my time and how best to organize it so I can maximize my productivity. I found some insight there but to be honest most of that productivity and "hustle" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It turns out, productivity wasn't really my problem. Sure, we can all be better organized, but I wasted a lot of time trying to figure that shit out like it was some sort of secret. Like some sort of hereto undiscovered app or process would change my creative output epically.

They don't. And they won't.

My problem was l that I was starting to lose my passion for creativity in general. It wasn't until later in the year when my new boss started that it was completely and utterly crushed. 

Oddly enough, it was my boss that was also the impetus for my overcoming my creative burnout.

THE FUCKING WAY OUT

My boss thought it was totally acceptable to mine my outside interests and to try and leverage all my creative endeavors to use for even more work at my day job, which is a graphic design, interactive design job. I could go on about this forever, and might in another post, but suffice to say, they knew I was comic illustrator outside of work and they wanted to leverage my skills as that to do hand lettering for logo work. Because I still wanted to keep my job and not fight I agreed and since I didn't really know shit about hand lettering I started with some research to see who was doing it and what the trends were and blah blah blabbity fucking blah, but in doing so that shit opened me up to a whole new world of creativity that I'd not really examined before...

Independent and freelance designers and illustrators doing their own work and people paying them for that, and making a living, and, I repeat, making the art they wanted to make.

Not being beholden to a fucking boss.

And amazing artists, doing amazing work. Completely not comic book related at all, which is what I'd been accustomed to doing for the better part of the past 15 years.

I found artist like Aaron Draplin, Jessica Hische, Austin Kleon, Lisa Congdon, Andy Pizza, Chris Piascik, Lauren Hom, Martina Flor, Meg Lewis, Scotty Russell, Jessica Abel, and more, may of which are titans in their industry, but I was just discovering them. I bought the books, I listened to the interviews, took the Skillshare courses and started to think about my creativity in a whole new way.

However it didn't go quickly. It took about a year for me to finally start making work again. While I was being empowered by all this new creative insight and discoveries I was becoming hooked on that. I was reading book after book about creativity and design and hand lettering and watching so many Skillshare classes and just taking so much in that I felt like I was overcoming my burnout but I wasn't actually doing anything about it.

Then Covid came and I was furloughed and I decided that I was going to use this time to reclaim my creativity from my day job. That I was going to use this time to start establishing a freelance business and make the kind of work I wanted to make. That I was going to delve into some personal projects.

And it fucking started to work.

I started to come through it and I was happy again.

All it took was to be trapped inside, with no boss demanding my life, and a well stocked arsenal of creative inspiration.

Next time I'll share the specifics of what I found.

METAL MOMENT:

Power metal is all about soaring, majestic, and most importantly to me, uplifting songs about coming through the storm triumphantly and screaming to the world that you've prospered and few songs capture that energy like "Weather the Storm" by Wuthering Heights.