Expectations and Burnout
Yo.
For anyone unaware, this article is the annual piece I put out on the anniversary of Demon Healer Naberius: Volume One’s release, and like its predecessors, it will focus on lessons or topics that interest me regarding writing. This one will be a bit different as it covers something that can be applied to most other aspects of life, but if you were only checking for an update on my next novel, I’ll give you the quick forecast.
I apologize, but the novel will likely be released in July instead of June. I had a couple rough months thanks to my job and one of my dogs developing a rare condition, but the train only slowed, never stopped. I very much look forward to sharing more once we get closer to the finish line, but I’m sorry that I must ask you to please wait just a little longer.
Now, in regards to this article, I want to talk about—as you assuredly surmised from the title—expectations and burnout. These are both factors affecting your motivation in all things, and I have learned a lot about how I interact with them over the past year. We’ll begin by talking about expectations.
Expectations
By the time you’ve gained self-awareness, your brain has already awakened as a pattern-seeking device, and that curses you to a life of attempting foresight. Expectations are what they say on the tin: it’s what you expect to happen given the information you’re presented with, and I’d like to discuss the expectations you hold for yourself.
Personally, I have a tendency to underestimate my own abilities, yet I also believe I’m capable of achieving anything if I have the will and ability to invest the resources necessary to do so. When I was younger, I never had any desire to excel at anything, but then I met a certain woman who knew exactly how to push my buttons, and now I’ve got bugs in my brain that won’t let me have my serotonin unless I pass arbitrary goalposts.
However, this is often a double-edged sword. I’ll set a goal like “finish writing this chapter before the weekend is over” but then write several pages through to the following chapter by Sunday afternoon, which my mind will interpret as my new standard. Come next weekend, I’ll expect as much if not more out of myself, so then when I barely manage to grind out four pages, I’m less than thrilled. You’d think I would then compromise to more reasonable standards, but no—it takes several occasions of missing lofty goals for me to reset my expectations. I’ve become very aware of this and rarely let it affect me now, usually by reciting this mantra:
Don’t let your best days set the pace for your everyday.
The fact is when you do something well, you expect yourself to be able to repeat it. In fighting games, landing a difficult combo or having a dominant match over a strong opponent can mislead you into thinking that’s your norm, so it can be confusing and discouraging when you fail to repeat those results. A month ago, I was on the verge of hitting Master Rank in Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising, only to get slammed four rungs back down the ladder, and I almost convinced myself that I had only climbed so high in the first place through sheer luck. Maybe it was, but it could have also been bad luck that I ran into just the wrong opponents afterwards, and so I tried again after taking a break (during which they also patched the game and nerfed my beloved Versusia).
I achieved Master Rank a week ago. I had plenty of bad matches, but I felt I could reach the peak, and so I focused on using each fight to improve until I was finally there.
That’s probably the hardest lesson to learn when it comes to expectations: failure is a steppingstone to success. Humans are instinctively loss averse, so setbacks hit us harder than forward progress and are liable to make us give up entirely if the prospective rewards aren’t enticing enough. I try to remind myself that it’s only wholly a failure if you didn’t learn anything from it; writing an outline for a story you ultimately decide is garbage isn’t a waste if it helps you avoid making similar mistakes with your next one.
I should also mention that having a friend who can give you an outside perspective is invaluable. Sometimes, what you need is someone who sympathizes with the struggle but doesn’t feel it; strange as it is, hearing a less affected opinion can help you keep a realistic mindset.
Another aspect of having sane expectations is to understand that no plan survives contact with the enemy, and your enemy is often life itself. You may have kept your evening clear so you could hammer out the opening for your next book, but your job has decided that those extra orders really need to get sorted, or your neighbor thinks the new album they bought is so good that the whole district needs to hear it. Forgive yourself if you have to forfeit your creative time or just can’t focus well enough to do satisfactory work on your project—there’s more than one important thing in your life, and you shouldn’t sentence yourself to an existence based solely on how productive you can be.
Adjacently, try to find contentment in making just a small amount of progress. If you can only spare fifteen minutes for your project, that’s still better than nothing. Sometimes you break a boulder, sometimes you only smash a pebble, but eventually the mountain will fall.
There are also times I’ve been making regular progress but just feel like playing a game or doing something besides writing for a night. These can be tricky; rest and relaxation are important, and I don’t like the idea of forcing myself to write when I’m not in the mood, but even when reasonably excused, I might not feel great about skipping a night. In situations like that, I try to ask myself how tomorrow’s Peter would feel if I faffed about instead of writing, and if it seems like he would be upset, I push myself to at least give writing a shot. Oftentimes, the hardest part is just opening the document, and if I can get past that hurdle, editing and creating just flow naturally.
And in the event I’ve got the manuscript open but my eyes are still wandering, then it’s time to boot up Granblue. Tomorrow’s Peter is just gonna have to understand that last night’s Peter really preferred to run some Anila sets.
On the topic of resting away from creative ventures, every person is different. I’m the type who prefers to dedicate at least an hour a night every night, but some people like to designate a ‘cheat’ day that they’ll always spare from using for personal projects. Find what works best for you, especially if your creative work isn’t your source of income, because time away from your work can be more important than actually working on it (more on this in a bit).
Lastly, don’t abuse your health, physically or mentally. I’ve seen people starve and punish themselves for not meeting their own expectations, and it’s as sad in theory as it is in practice. One argument I’ve heard is that they do so to prove their dedication to their craft, and my counterpoint is that that’s stupid. If you truly love your craft, you will acknowledge and respect how important eating, sleeping, and caring for yourself are—the destruction of your body and soul will not render better results. All it will do is turn your work into your epitaph, and that’s not as romantic as you’d hope.
Of course, I can’t claim to always practice what I preach. I’ve done—and still do—stupid shit too, but I do my best to learn from it, which is why I then turn around and try to share these lessons. Countless others have come to the same conclusions, often more eloquently, but the reason everyone repeats them is that we all hope to spare others from needless, self-induced torture.
Art is the expression of the human soul. To render it without pain is conceited; to render it with nothing but is cruel.
Now, let’s imagine a world where you take care of yourself, keep your expectations in check, and continually make appreciable progress on your project. You get some books out, you meet people who appreciate your work—everything seems to be going well.
Unfortunately, you are still susceptible to burnout.
Burnout
In terms of creative work, burnout is the state of being unable to progress in any meaningful way. Think of it like creative block at its worst: not only is your imagination failing you, but you can’t even work up the drive to open your manuscript/sketch/whatever. You feel exhausted every time you think about your creative work—you might even feel put off or disgusted, and that makes you feel even worse. You loved your project, so why does the idea of working on it feel so bad?
The simple answer is you’re burned out, and escaping that state is a puzzle box unique to you.
I’ve personally encountered burnout in two forms, the first being the sort you encounter when you’ve simply been working on your craft for too long. This burnout most often occurs in adulthood after you’ve spent several years focused on a craft, typically as a result of work/life balance, and it’s just your mind experiencing a lack of novelty. You can test an aspect of this right now: stare at any object for as long as you can and watch as your peripheral vision starts to muddy. Your brain was designed to avoid stagnation so while it’s depressing to think of it as such, working on the same project for multiple years can unintentionally condition you to avoid it.
In my case, I typically mitigate this by following a practice I’ve mentioned before where I would take a month off between finishing a story’s first draft and beginning the redrafting process. Again, rest is important, and stepping away from your project can help not only see it from new perspectives but never tire of it.
Should you fall into that ditch, however, my best advice is to simply avoid your craft altogether for the foreseeable future. Telling yourself you can’t work on something pulls a trick on your brain that makes you want to do it, and you’ll find yourself yearning to return to your work sooner or later. This is best paired with trying out another art form or purely consuming art instead; the former will tickle your creative urges while letting you enjoy a lack of expectations, and the latter may spark new ideas that will soon roar for you to commit them to craft.
I just don’t recommend trying to push through the block. This isn’t an anime—trying to break your limits will more likely break you instead.
The other form of burnout I’ve encountered is the one I wanted to write this article about and was also referenced in my prior article. It’s better recognized as depression, and it’s what I mean by how life is often your enemy.
To summarize what happened, my dog Isabella suddenly turned violent towards our other dog, likely though unconfirmed to have been because of tumors in her brain. That whole situation was ridiculously stressful, and it ended with us having to surrender Izzy to a dog shelter where they held her for ten days before putting her down. Having to have her put down under such circumstances was awful, but what made it so much worse was knowing my nervous little friend was stuck in an unfamiliar kennel for a week and a half, surrounded by other panicked dogs without any of her family in sight.
Just recounting it now makes my heart ache. But I digress; that horrible month put me into a depressive tailspin, and while I did my best to keep working on my next book, it just wasn’t happening.
For about three months, I would write for maybe an hour or two a week, spending most of my evenings doing anything else and hating myself for it the next morning. Obviously, that’s not healthy or reasonable, but I didn’t have anyone to help me see otherwise at the time. I was traumatized by the death of my beloved dog, yet my craft wasn’t there to save me—I was miserable, and I stayed that way until my dear friend Steven told me to just give up on writing entirely.
That may seem cold, but it genuinely was what I needed to hear. By just accepting that I had burned out, I stopped despising myself for playing games or reading books instead of writing, and my heart began to heal. It wasn’t a quick process, of course, but it put me on the path to getting my feet under me again.
Once I felt the urge to write return to me, I started slow and with very low expectations. I told myself that working on my book a few hours a week would be acceptable, and every time I exceeded that goal, I felt elation that drove me to try a little harder, though I was mindful of never demanding too much from myself. A couple of hours a week became daily hours once again, and now I’m back to my old way of reviewing the prior night’s work during my day job’s breaks and writing new passages that evening.
Curiously, I find I’m actually more efficient than ever now. Before, my average pace would result in about a page an hour, but now I’m hitting at least double that. I had experienced something similar with Granblue Versus, and it’s what I’m referring to when I say rest can be even more important than regular work on a project.
Maybe this is a personal quick, but returning to something after taking a break after a long period of continuous practice seems to elevate my skill even further. I typically take breaks from Granblue between updates and battle passes, and when I come back to it, I find myself executing combos more consistently and having much better reads on my opponents. I believe this is because distancing myself causes me to shake off expectations that were causing me to make poor decisions, like I had grown so familiar with matchups and common strategies that they became ingrained in me. Stepping away not only lets me excuse mistakes by saying I’m rusty, but it also shifts my perspective and helps me engage with the game from a more objective stance.
I think the same has now occurred with my writing. After leaving my keyboard behind for months, I feel like I can see my own prose with fresher eyes, and I’m not so concerned with following preordained signatures as I am with writing something I’m happy with. That makes me more enthusiastic when I sit down to write, and thus I feel I’m both more productive and producing better writing in general.
Yet we’re talking about burnout from depression here, and if you’re experiencing something similar, you’re probably hoping for some advice. The first thing I would tell you is what Steven said: put your creative projects aside for now. Just like with normal burnout, you need to put some distance between you and your work, and you’ll know when you’re ready to come back. Focus on dealing with or accepting what’s causing your depression.
Along with that, please be gentle and forgive yourself. It can feel like you’re betraying yourself or those who enjoy your work when you step away, but no one worth listening to wants you to destroy yourself just to get them a book or drawing a little quicker. Again, if you’re serious about providing quality art, you will shower yourself with love and care.
In relevance to my opening admission about DHN Vol. 10 being later than planned, I should mention that I ran into a situation that made me cautious about falling back into my depressive spiral after I thought I had escaped it. My dog Paprika developed EPI, a condition where her pancreas doesn’t produce digestive enzymes anymore, and the process of diagnosing her was as arduous as it was expensive. She lost over twenty pounds before we could begin the necessary treatment, and the fear that I was going to lose her too made me tone down my writing ventures because I was convinced I would burn out again if I tried to push through the stress.
Maybe that was the right call, since I still feel my drive to write. I lost a couple months of progress by my estimations, but I’m not burned out and Paprika is fat again, so I’m willing to say delaying my work was the smarter move.
It’s certainly what I should have done after I lost Izzy.
As for how to deal with depression itself, I can’t tell you. Everyone handles stress and depression differently, and there’s not much I can tell you beyond the usual advice of take your time, try to avoid further stressors, and don’t turn to drugs unless you’ve consulted a doctor. The mantra I favor is change your perspective or change your situation, as that usually encourages me to look at my circumstances more logically or fight to resolve them, but I know life doesn’t always allow those options. In the end, take things day by day and follow what feels right—the rest will follow.
Upon reviewing this article, I realized the whole fucking thing could be summarized as “don’t overwork yourself”, yet that reveals the sad truth that that’s something we all need to be told every now and again. The world, particularly in western culture, is obsessed with productivity and achievement, and pursuing such things can lead us to self-destructive acts. People who wish to create tend to be particularly vulnerable to this as well; there are far too many examples of beautiful, funny, compassionate souls smothered by unseen misery to the point they make decisions they can’t undo, so I want to share how I’ve dealt with my struggles on the off chance it helps someone, even a little.
After all, I’m a well-known know-it-all, and I can’t help but wish to mimic the other creatives who saved me with their well-wishes.
Anyhow, this concludes this year’s article, and if you’ve read this far, I hope I said something that meant anything to you. I’m going to continue my carefree path of careful consistency, and unless my other dog suddenly explodes, I believe I’ll be sharing more about Demon Healer Naberius: Volume Ten within a month. Please look forward to it—I finally got to write about a couple characters I conceptualized years ago.
Until then, please take care of yourself, and if you need it, take a break from whatever you’re working on. Who knows—maybe you’ll come back stronger, maybe even strong enough to beat my Versusia.
…Probably. I’m kinda ass at Granblue Versus, to be honest.
