Begin Again

Confronting burnout and finding my way back to writing

“Interlude”, 2023, Lisa Kairos. 40x60 in, acrylic on paper mounted to panel

It’s been 7 months since I last published this newsletter. That’s 29 weeks, or 209 days, or 5,016 hours, or 300,960 minutes. I never really meant to stop writing the way that I stopped, suddenly and completely. I thought I only needed a short break… a pause… a moment to catch my breath. Turns out I needed a bit more than that. So here I am, after a long break, beginning again.

As my writing pause expanded into two weeks, then a month, and then another, I often thought about starting again and then hesitated because I had so thoroughly burned out, and I didn’t want to do that again and I didn’t feel that I had adequately sorted out why it even happened. So I spent the time I wasn’t writing here writing to myself instead, about all of the reasons I stopped writing here and what I needed to do to make this project sustainable: the internal shifts and external adjustments I needed, the changes in mindset, and a general sense of downshifting into a less aspirational and more real-life approach. 

Over the months, I thought a lot about my “why”--why I write, why I publish, and why anyone might care and take the time to read my writing when we are all pressed from every direction–online and off– with demands for our attention. Is my writing just more noise in a noisy world? What is the purpose of writing a newsletter like this one each week? On the personal side, I write to make sense of my experience.  On the public side, I publish to connect and be less alone in my art practice and because I want to make and offer workshops, communal spaces, and residencies. Connecting with like-minded artists and building a little community here is the first step in offering those things. I love to facilitate and learn alongside other artists. I’m choosing to believe that for anyone pausing and taking the time to read here, this is a signal to tune into, not noise; I might be writing from my particular perspective, but it ties in with an impulse to make art that we share. I’ve been leaning away from social media for some time, so this newsletter is an effort to forge a new way to connect. 

I also thought about what burnout felt like, why it happened, and how to avoid it if I started writing again. The way that it snuck up on me was unnerving; by the time I realized what had happened, I had already stopped writing. I mean, if I began writing again how could I trust myself to see it coming next time and respond quickly enough? So I read a lot about burnout and rest and nervous system reset. I let the facts and feelings sift through me again and again until I started to feel some solid ground beneath me. I realized that it mostly came down to two things: an awful sense of impostor syndrome and setting my bar too high. Unfortunately, these two things were tangled in a negative feedback loop, each feeding the other. So as I envision this project’s future I am challenging myself to strive less. To compare myself to other writers less. To show up consistently with what is going on in my creative life at that moment, to trust myself and my authentic writing voice, and to take breaks when I need them. Feels like a good way to start the year!

Here are the questions I’m sitting with, both in the studio and on the page, as I begin the year:

Can I stay flexible? Make adjustments fluidly? Shapeshift and iterate as needed?

What do I want to cultivate? What do I want to shed? 

How can I apply the qualities of perseverance, humility, and curiosity to writing and painting in this new year?

As for the logistics of this newsletter, I’ll continue writing each week, as I did before, but I will be publishing on Friday mornings instead of Mondays. My weekly posts will be more casual and blog-like, and I’ll publish additional longer topical essays as I finish them—probably one or two a month.

Thank you for letting me land in your inbox each week. I don’t take a single reader for granted! If you like what you read here, please share it with a friend 🙂

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Only press on: no feeling is final.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of Hours