A Writer's Retrospective: November 2021
I’ve been preoccupied…with everything but writing, it seems. Is this what writing burn-out looks like?
Photo by Jorge Caetano on Unsplash
I was preoccupied with a number of things, not the least of which of was getting settled in a new place. I'd spent four months ignoring the way my voice and footsteps echoed every time I came or went. Every time someone came to visit, I grew a little more tired of reciting my “just moved” spiel, tired of wondering where guests would sit, tired of being “about to” furnish the place. So I dedicated November to fixing it. To ensure that I wouldn't back down, I also invited my friends to a future housewarming party. If only there was a way to apply that sort of deadline-driven pressure to my own writing…
Even though I'd agreed with myself to stop writing, I didn't stop thinking about it. In middle of browsing Craigslist, I'd wonder, "why don't I devote this much effort to my writing?" I felt like I was taking the easy way out of managing my time and priorities to do both things. I felt like I'd lost my grit, my willingness to do anything hard. Still, the challenge of finding suitable secondhand furniture—in lieu of waiting months for new furniture to become available—compelled me. Every morning would find me perched at my multi-monitor setup, browsing Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and Nextdoor Finds, among other sites.
But shopping wasn't the only thing to demand my attention. If furnishing the house had become distracting, dating then became all-consuming. I was more than happy to invest the time.
The problems with taking a month off vary, however. It only takes a month to build a habit, and now that habit is not writing. I wasn't exactly burned out, either, so I have no wellspring of renewed motivation from which to draw.
At the beginning of this month, my lifting routine was on life support. I decided to restart 5/3/1—the lifting program I've stuck to longer than any other. It has evolved significantly in the past few years. I never miss an opportunity to play with spreadsheets, so I dove in. Instead of doing my usual thing of refusing to lift until I perfected the spreadsheet, I settled for doing a bit more manual documentation than I'm used to doing. The parallel approach worked well: I got my record-keeping fix and got some lifting done.
Unlike the very minimal volume I had been doing, this program proved to be pretty hard. Still, I began to look forward to each session. I felt good about completing my workouts every week. I felt less trepidation about getting AWS-certified, or any other tasks that I found daunting (not including writing, of course).
I can say with some certainty that the time off was well-spent, burn out or not. For now, at least, I have rediscovered the value of doing hard things. I don't know if that'll translate into anything useful as far as my writing goes, but I'm looking forward to trying again.