Sweet, summer, dusty epiphanies

Oh hey, I'm back from my 'burnout' holiday & I learnt some things.

Homegrown apricots freckled with ripeness.

Last month I sat with my head on my desk, groaning because I had so much I had to do, so much I wanted to do, but my brain felt fried and frazzled like spent fireworks. It felt as if I had pushed my neurons too far and they'd fainted. As soon as I realised what was coming on was burn out, I scheduled in time off and took over two weeks off. From everything.

The rules were simple: no creating. No doing any kind of my creative work, no thinking about any kind of my creative work, no talking about any kind of ideas that could in any way, relate to writing or work or art. I was on the brink of total burn out not because of the work, but rather, because I never let myself rest. Every waking hour is an opportunity to rev my brain. I'm talking foot to the floor revving down a straight, hot desert highway. At some point, the endless engine of my brain was going to over heat. Smoke was going to billow out of my head. The red warning light was going to flash. And it did.

So I made a drastic choice (for me) and decided to ban myself from my work. I was going to force my head into rest. And not Netflix in bed rest. True rest. Screenless rest. Spreading out under the green tree in my backyard with absolutely nothing to do, or think of, but the life in front of me rest.

Hardly revolutionary, but for someone who is sickeningly obsessed with the creative path, with what I do – it was revolutionary for me.

Oh these dusted sunset colours of midsummer.

With writing & creation stripped from my life, I felt completely empty. The first two days I wandered around the house lost. Smooching the cat until she took off into the purple lounging garden outside to hide from me. Doing the dishes and watching two birds trying to have sex on the fairy lights out the window. There has to be a better place for that right? Tightrope sex is pretty gutsy for such tiny birds. Anyway, after a few days, the epiphanies came. Those sweet, summer dusty epiphanies that come when you do nothing but flop around in the grass. The kind of sunburnt realisations that linger long after the season is gone. They came waltzing in their dirt stained floral dresses, grinning like 4 year old me who used to drink out of the sprinkler. Crawling out of the flowerbed, whispering secrets I could hear this time. Simply because I came back to quiet. Because I came back.

So, I have stories to share. Thoughts to make known. And instead of plopping them together into chunks of text, I'm going to give them space to breathe in a few separate posts. So in the coming posts I'd like to bring you my grassy epiphanies like a handful of white paper daisies. A little dried from the sun, but a language, nonetheless.

P.S. I just wanted to take a moment before jumping back into regular posting to thank you for joining me on Substack – for supporting my work through your subscription. Imagine me screaming thank you & a waving like a madman from a rooftop. Yep. That much.