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A New Way to Recover From Creative Burnout
The underappreciated — and often feminized — labor that undergirds everyday life is essential to true creativity
When I crossed the 100,000-word mark in a draft of my first book, I paused to briefly mosh in the kitchen while brewing more coffee.
I had 13 days left to go, and I was riding the kind of stress-high I hadn’t experienced since my days as a student. The wave of feeling cresting in that moment was just as I remembered it: a frenzied sense of smug purpose so familiar it was almost soothing.
As the deadline neared, I felt crazy, but in a good way. Anticipatory excitement, restlessness, and the powerful fear of fucking up combined to form a kind of natural Adderall. Working in those final days gave me the electric good-girl charge I used to get in high school, college, and graduate school, when the minutes bled into hours, when day became night became day again, as I sat surrounded by a dozen books lying open, spine-down and underlined.
As the texture of my days changed, morphing from ultra-productivity back into normalcy, I felt useless, unmoored, and lazy.
