So, you know how it’s advised to not work yourself to the point of exhaustion? Or how it’s imperative to trade in your keyboard for a game controller or anxiety for a scented candle? 

Well, it’s confession time yet again.

I’ve been spinning the wheel with a tad too much aggression, inadvertently sending myself overboard once again. I took some time off at the start of the month. I’d realised that I hadn’t taken a week’s holiday for the best part of two years up until that point. Considering I was starting to feel a touch exhausted, not to mention the realisation that I had nine days of annual leave which I had to take, I figured it wise to use them as a means to have an extended lie down.

While I certainly started off with the best of intentions – attending concerts, losing myself in video games, catching up with old pals, and actually reading books (a radical concept for a writer, I know) – the attempt started to falter as the week progressed.

Truth be told, I managed to do a pretty fine job of dialling back the productivity for the first half of my week off. I was doing really well, in actual fact! I was a relaxed, fully functioning person who didn’t measure her worth solely on word counts or podcast publications. I shut myself off from all of that, indulging in the joy of having fun. But come the latter half of that week, the silence started to become a little too loud for my liking. That familiar, pesky little whisper of doubt started seeping through the (metaphorical) cracks of my skull, flaring up my anxiety like a rash to the brain. 

“You need to be doing something,” whispered my inner goblin. “You’re getting lazy. You’ll form bad habits. The longer you sit back holding a gamepad, the sooner your dream will die.” 

Panic soon replaced the anxiety. At which point, I dashed to my computer like a woman possessed, eager to “catch up” on all the hours I’d sensibly spent calming my frazzled mind. 

At first, it felt electric. I was back making art, baby, and I was loving it! I churned out a whole heap of words for Synthetic Empires. I entered that elusive flow state, losing myself within Michelle and Quinn’s world. It felt genuinely great getting to spend a weekday thinking about nothing else but my book’s protagonists. I was making breakthroughs, smashing through creative obstacles, and actually making visible progress. 

“See,” muttered that nefarious goblin hunched up in the deepest depths of my mind, “this is what happens when you apply yourself!”

Then came the podcast prep.

I’ve always been known to be a bit of a workhorse when it comes to my work on Ctrl Alt Critique. I like to over-prepare even on a chilled day. That way, if a gag falls flat or an argument doesn’t form as intended, I have alternative topics to fall back on. Yet because I was vibrating with that menacing “productive panic”, I ended up going completely overboard.

We were covering the 1987 Amblin classic, Batteries not Included for the upcoming episode. It was intended to be a fun frolic of an episode where I introduced my co-hosts to a childhood favourite. Instead, I found myself drowning in research, penning an entire novella’s worth of notes for our recording session. While I am proud of how the episode turned out in the end, I somehow turned a heartwarming film about tiny adorable alien spaceships into a doctoral thesis. 

To say I went overboard would be something of a dramatic understatement. It’s not the first time I’ve done something like this, of course, but the intensity this time around was considerably dizzying. I was losing myself amidst the various projects and ideas occupying my mind, trying to outrun the guilt of having taken a break in the first place.

Then, it was time to return to the day job. Despite the mountain of emails, unfinished tasks, and responsibilities waiting for me at the office door, come Monday morning, I couldn’t quite curb my creative workflow. I continued to give it my all, burning the candle at more ends than I think is usually possible. The podcast episode indeed up being a 90-minute monolith, I continued ploughing through my novel, and several short story concepts which had been waiting in the wings of my mind suddenly entered the development stage. 

Of course, the streak wasn’t to be an eternal one. Eventually, the inevitable happened, as it usually does. I hit a brick wall at 100 miles per hour. 

I crashed. The second case of burnout in the space of two months. 

Whoops.

I’m happy to report that the rubble has since settled on that particular fiasco. Since then, I’ve made myself take a couple of days off from writing and editing, as tough as it has been to do so. I needed to step back and have another stern word with myself. I had hoped my prior epiphanies about why I worked so hard would allow me to control it better, yet it appears I needed to tell myself once again.

I’ve spoken before about the “Lost Decade,” also known as my twenties. A huge part of me constantly feels like I’m making up for that time period. All those years getting excessively tipsy and partying did not make room for much writing or recording. Now that I’ve made it my universe to create, I’m trying to cram ten years’ worth of output into a couple of calendar years. Normally, when I become conscious of patterns of a negative nature, I’m pretty good at giving myself a gentle tap on the wrists. I know it’s naughty to go overboard, so I can give myself a brief telling off and correct course.

In the midst of my holiday, however, I managed to fail myself, despite knowing better. I did the right thing initially by resting, only to then go and scold myself for doing so. So I went into overdrive and crashed once again. I shouldn’t have let it get quite so far. I should have spotted the goblin’s whispers long before I found myself weeping in front of a word-saturated computer screen. 

I know I’m somewhat insecure about my creative endeavour. I know I want to atone for the years in which I’ve divorced myself from art. I know that I want to complete Synthetic Empires as soon as I can. I even know that it’s incredible that I contain such a powerhouse of a drive. All of these things are okay, but I must be kinder to myself. I cannot write myself into the soil. I need to be sensible about this. I need to ease off the brakes from time-to-time. It’s okay to pop my feet up or attend a couple of concerts when rest comes calling.

 It’s okay to take time away. Doing so will not end my streak. I’m not in my 20s anymore. I won’t be taking any more ten-year sabbaticals like I did back then. A week away will not undo the progress I’ve been making.

I just need to really get into the habit of practicing that which I’m currently preaching.