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Normal service resumes next week
This isn’t a full Well. Done. newsletter, because last weekend I picked up food poisoning and this week has been a disaster, both from a work and creativity POV. (I did, however, manage to watch The Fall Guy, which involves Ryan Gosling tumbling out of a wide range of moving vehicles, and was exactly the trash watch I needed.)
I learned a lot back in 2022, when I was writing my second non-fiction book, Be Bad, Better: How Not Trying So Hard Will Set You Free, and one of the big things which really stuck with me was about burnout. Burnout can happen fast – I burned out in the early 2010s, when I worked six or seven days a week, worked on a TV show every Sunday morning, got a bit too skinny and was navigating IVF. That was the quicker version, and when it happened, it took me by surprise. I thought I was invincible, and forgot that I needed my friends, my family and a more than very occasional day off. (Somewhat ridiculously, it ultimately led to my first non-fiction book, SOLO: How To Work Alone And Not Lose Your Mind. But: writing a book is absolutely not a good treatment for burnout.)
The slow version is more insidious and it can happen when you’re trying to please everybody, all the time, doing your job while also attempting to be a friend/parent/partner/daughter/decent human. I’m a classic people pleaser – I bend and bend until I break (or lose my ever-loving sh*t and hurt people’s feelings). One of the reasons I was nervous about starting a newsletter was the commitment. I knew that if I started one, it had to be regular, both for the readers and because if I decided to send it without a set deadline, it would never be sent at all. But I also thought that once I’d made a promise, I absolutely had to keep it, and never miss a week. On top of all that, I also know myself and so I knew that even if I had all the time in the world – and I don’t – my brain is absolutely not the sort which would agree to spend a week writing back-up newsletters, for future me to send in busy/complicated/difficult weeks. And I worried about what that pressure would feel like.
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