How Do We Create a Life From Which We Don't Need to Escape?
Start with an honest assessment
It’s been one of those seasons. One of those years, really. The grind has gotten grindier. The demands have gotten demandier. The workload has hit that place of overwhelm and deep inside I know what it means, but damn if I don’t want to listen.
Transition seasons are tough. Especially when it seems that the past three years has been one big steaming pile of transitions.
Truth be told, I am in the thick of it. The pivot to teaching live online when the pandemic hit and then the subsequent opening of my teaching website the following year were my right next steps when I made them.
Each one of those pivots were hard learning curves. I knew nothing about tech, and cameras, and uploading/downloading/editing/filming/zoom/vimeo/web design/marketing, all the miscellaneous things I learned on the fly. All while going through an excruciating divorce, newly diagnosed with a disease that was at an aggressive stage and had a grim prognosis, and managing other ongoing personal family matters.
Hitting that place of burnout just over a year ago I would not have made it through if not for the funds so generously raised by good friends and my arty community. But I look back now and realize I haven’t made it all the way through. And I’ve had a harder and harder time managing it all.
But that is only part of the story. The part I’d been telling myself until recently, that is.
When those funds began running out, I felt this intense inner need to prove the investment everyone had made to support me had been worth it. That I was worth it. Putting on a happy face to prove the three months I was able to slow down did in fact restore me to full cognitive and functional health.
And yet it hadn’t.
Back in January, I could hardly string a coherent sentence together in front of the camera. I stopped hosting live conversations and the portions of my workshops where I spoke directly to the camera about the intuitive voice and the deeper connection to be found in the techniques of art making.
I’ve spent the majority of my time this year filming painfully long tutorial focused segments then chopping and editing and editing and editing some more to produce each course. Necessary cuts to remove all the dead air time where I paused searching for words and all the umms and uhhs along with a pretty liberal sprinkling of swears along the way.
Those classes deliver, receiving enough feedback from participants to know they were well satisfied with the end results. Mission accomplished.
But a pattern emerged, in which the filming and editing consumes my time and all the other things get pushed to the wayside. My writing schedule, gallery relationships, and the marketing of those classes I badly needed to make my sales goals, aka, keep a roof over my head, all suffered. Compounding it all was the loss of time doing what feeds me; hanging out with my grandkids, making art for no reason, exploring new mediums, dawdling on the beach.
With each turn of that cycle, I furiously dived back in to do it all over again.
Wash, rinse, repeat. Mask firmly in place, so as not to alarm anyone with my troubles.
My intuitive knowing, my own damned voice, was once again locked down deep inside, as I tried so desperately to hang on and keep doing the thing I’d always done. All the while the voice inside was screaming at me to stop.
It is hard to stop when the rent is coming due. It is hard to stop when you have to choose between food or meds or supplies necessary to film the next class.
And here I begin to grow twitchy. I itch to delete this entire post and put that mask back on and continue to pretend to have my shit together. Continue to beat myself up for not being able to do everything. Be everything. It is uncomfortable to speak of hard truths when our hard truths look so messy.
How do we create a life we don’t need to escape from in order to avoid burnout?
You may recognize the title of today’s post. It’s been the topic of discussion the past few months since restarting the live conversations in my Facebook group; How do we create a life we don’t need to escape from in order to avoid burnout?
Sparked by reading a preview of a post written by author
, this question hit me in a highlighted moment kind of way.When you lose your spark, those highlighted moments can strike like lightning bolts.
All those highlighted moments were lining up forcing me to acknowledge what I was so desperately trying to ignore—I can’t keep going like this. Daily wondering if I’ll manage to get enough done to pull in enough income to turn the tide on this thing.
You often feel tired,
not because you’ve
done so much,
but because you’ve
done too little of what
sparks a light in you.
~Alexander den Heijer, Nothing You Don’t Already Know
With my back against the proverbial wall, I had no choice. I started tuning my ears once again to listen to my deeper knowing. And what I heard is almost laughable in the retelling of it.
My life has become unmanageable. Well, fuck. Yeah. And duh.
In 12-step recovery programs, this is step one. Acknowledging it is the first step to sobriety, or out of codependence, or away from dysfunctional family behavioral patterns, or whatever your program happens to be.
It’s also an essential step to recovering our core wholehearted authentic self, by way of our intuitive knowing. The knowing that I am writing about, and teaching about, and so passionate about, and cannot help talking about whenever I’m in a room full of artists.
In layman’s terms, you can’t change what you can’t acknowledge.
Recovering from burnout isn’t a linear process, I am still living on the brink of it while kicking myself for feeling so incapable of managing my life. But I’ve also begun slowly awakening to the realization that my workload would equal 6 full time jobs, and I work long days trying to keep up with it all.
Always late. Always missing deadlines, never quite managing to give any of it my undivided attention; I equated not having enough (time, money, physical health, cognitive abilities) with not being enough.
The inner critic lurks in wait for times like these.
Martha Beck talks about how we circle around a problem we don’t know how to resolve until our backs are against the wall and none of those solutions are helping. At this point, something happens in our brain, something like a creative problem-solving portal opens.
The creative new solution for me isn’t a brand-new revelation, but a reminder of one that I’m sure many of you can relate to—that we are not alone, that hiding behind a stoic façade and not troubling others with our own need is counter to how we are wired as humans. So simply put, I told a friend what was going on.
The result of that act of desperation—the simple act of opening my mouth and acknowledging my life has become unmanageable to a friend, brought weekly brainstorming. I was challenged to let myself dream, to say out loud the things I wanted for my life, my goals, my purpose, my passions, not just the things that I thought would bring relief for my immediate need, but to create a life that I didn’t need to escape from to avoid burn out.
A life that fits both my capacity and my dreams.
It created the opening my creative brain needed to begin considering what I actually do want and what it would take to get there.
I began to consider important questions, beyond who am I and what do I want my life to look like. Questions like, what am I good at, What are my passions, what do I actually like to do, and how does that fit my ultimate dreams/goals?
Recently I listened in on a live creative conversation with one of my favorite authors,
she spoke about the doubts we encounter in our creative practices. Sharing some stories about her own life and what she encounters as a writer that really hit home. It reminded me of how important our teachers and mentors are.August was the eighth anniversary of the publication of my first book, The Art of Expressive Collage; Techniques for creating with paper and glue. My working title was The Art of Intuitive Collage, (the publisher didn’t believe it would sell as well). It is a tutorial focused book that afforded me the opportunity to write about the intuitive voice in the introduction sections to each chapter.
Last year I committed in earnest to writing the second book, Recovering Your Intuitive Voice: An Artist’s Guide to Silencing the Inner Critic and Living a Deeper More Meaningful Life, affectionately dubbed as “my book without pictures” when I wrote that first book nearly ten years ago now.
Listening to that conversation with Katherine May, it struck me that the authors I consider mentors and guides share from the perspective of one who is walking through it, not one who has overcome it all.
In survival mode, I pretend everything is fine while barely holding it together behind the scenes.
In the honest assessment of it all, I’ve disconnected from my core authentic self. Forgotten the thing I’m truly good at, passionate about. The thing that has brought me overwhelmingly positive responses from participants in my courses and workshops, readers of my writing, peers in my community. The thing that has helped so many of you is what brings the spark into my own life. The deeper connection.
A sense of purpose, fulfillment, meaning will come when we let ourselves identify what our own heart wants most.
Life doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Everything we hold dear comes from staying connected to our core intuitive self and to each other. Without these connections, regardless of the number of years practiced, life becomes unmanageable and the spark begins to fade.
It took all those highlighted moments to remind me. But it wasn’t until I was in the midst of editing the Recovering Your Intuitive Voice video series that I felt my heart leap. The thing my own longing was leading me towards.
During a live Zoom conversation I hosted at the beginning of the week, I pitched a program that I know in my heart is my next right thing. Yet almost immediately I knew I was announcing it prematurely. I was so excited to begin this next step in my own art journey, that I wanted to start immediately.
Within a few hours, I put the whole thing on pause and disconnected the registration link I’d shared to allow that slow down time to listen and clarify what it will be. I’ve already started sensing that it’ll start with a month long workshop in January. Stay tuned.
So how do we create a life we don’t need to escape from? I’ll leave you with a few steps for your own journey back:
Acknowledge your truths to yourself first— write it all down. The good, the bad, the ugly. Where are you at this point in your life? Do you feel that deeper longing, do you close your ears from hearing it?
Feel it—emotions are not our enemy. Let yourself grieve if you need to. Find support if you’re stuck.
Be curious—build in essential time to play, explore, create, roam. The brain and the body need this downtime to repair and refill. It’s like releasing a pressure valve to unlock some of the answers you haven’t been able to receive.
Speak—tell someone what you’re going through. Acknowledge that you are a human being. We all are. We all are.
Listen—let your own inner voice and that place of longing inside inform you of the next right thing.
Ask—for what you need. In a culture that equates giving as good and receiving as bad, it feels vulnerable. It feels risky. It is necessary. And bonus, it is permission giving to others who are in the same orbit as you.
You are not weak. You are a trailblazer.Be patient—acknowledging is a step. It is essential. There are plenty more steps to take in our journey back to wholehearted deeper connection.
Breathe. Be patient with yourself.Remember—you are worth it. You are worthy. You are enough. You matter. Say it out loud while you look yourself straight in the eye in front of a mirror.
With love and gratitude to you all.
One of the most honest, raw and beautiful pieces I’ve read from an artist in a while! Thank you for sharing and being real in a virtual world filled with inauthenticity. In this second act of life I felt this and know I’m not alone. 🙏🏾💙🙏🏾
Crystal I truly appreciate your authentic honesty and unbelievable generosity in everything you do. I find the community/tribe in your classes and writing that consistently remind me I am not alone in my sensibilities, longings and understanding of the world and the way I choose to live. Early in a 12 step program I learned I am never alone and asking for help holds no shame, I just need to recognize when I’ve wound myself into a knot and remember I’ve learned how to navigate starting with self care and friends. So thanks for who you are, I’m rooting for all of us.