[UPDATE] I haven't burned out, I swear

But I’m well on my way to getting there.

What I want this update to be, more than anything, is a confession. Not just privately to myself but to my audience because that way, I don’t get to brush it off again and hide it under the rug.

If you’re worried that this means a hiatus or a break, don’t be. In fact, I’m hoping to write more, not less, but there are some important things I need to discuss first.

Writing has been my job for just a bit over a year at this point. I do love it. I do enjoy it. But it's hard. And this is something I haven’t been able to admit to myself.

My last job was in manual labor. I made statues for a living. And this is a business I’ve been in for a long time, helping out even back when I was a kid. To me, this job has always been a benchmark for how difficult something is to do. Because it's a line of work I’ve hinged a lot of pride on, I kept elevating it in my mind as a difficult, demanding thing to do. Which it is. But writing is harder.

The thing about manual labor is that once you’re done, you’re done. You pack your shit up, go home, eat, take a shower, and the rest of the day is yours. You don’t have to think about work. There is nothing left to think about. Your body does the work while your mind does whatever it pleases (as long as you don’t endanger yourself, of course.)

When you write, you work 24/7.

When you wake up, you think of your story. When you do chores, you think of your story. When you shower, you think of your story. When you walk, you think of your story.

When you’re with a friend or a relative, and the conversation is boring? You doze off and think of your story, probably uninterested because you aren’t talking about writing.

This has been my life for the last year. But now, it seems that the juice has run out. I don’t think about my story, actually—which is a problem since I then have to sit down and deploy my creativity manually.

You see, for the longest time, I’ve been beating myself up for not working hard enough. In my own eyes, I only really worked when I was actively working—because that’s how it's always been. Only concrete work is actually the productivity part. So I’ve been forcing myself. Again and again and again and again, day after day after day after day, it’s always the same story—a deadline is coming up, and I have to finish my work.

I’m just going to be 100% honest for a brief moment. I am just very tired. I feel as if I’m on the brink of coming down with a cold almost all the time. My back hurts. My head hurts. My stomach hurts. I’m tired. I’m so exhausted, and I just don’t want to be.

I’m simply not taking care of myself the way I should be. I’m not materialistic; I don’t care much about money past the fact that it keeps my life stable and my wife and I fed. The only thing that really kept me going this long was the constant rush of external validation and the fact that I was truly enjoying myself. Now, I’m not. And I don’t get external validation. Not any I truly care about enough, while I hyper-focus on anything even vaguely negative about my work.

What I need to do now is a change of pace. This is my job. Not just my life or just something I do all the fucking time, but my job. JOB. I think it's time to treat it like one.

What does this mean for my schedule? In the short term? I honestly have no goddamn clue. I hope to do more, like I said, but I will need to seriously change the way I treat my writing.

And I need to start living my life again.

Again, this is no doomposting. I had to get it out of my system. And this is just to make sure you guys are up to date with everything since my schedule might become a bit weird. Let’s hope it’s in a good way.

Cheers, everyone.

Have a wonderful day.