The Creative Process #33 - Burn Out Time Out

Welcome to the new digs at Ghost.io! For the most part it's pretty much the same, just with a better barman, as per the Nazi bar story. You used to be able to read the original story on Twitter, but... well... you know. I was inspired to do this by people like The Reframe, but it's a shame it took me so long.

The eventual move off of Substack was enabled by a month off of work. I've been working for a time longer than I care to acknowledge, but at least it gives me long service leave. In recent years I've used it to take a few weeks off to dedicate myself to creative projects.

This time is a little bit different.

While the original intent was the same, the specifics were much more different. During January-February I ran a workshop at work for five weeks, assisted by many, but I was the core logistics guy. It required me to be a lot more extroverted than I usually am, which is no big deal, but it was draining. I followed these five weeks up by having a week of very, very early morning video conferences on some hard maths I am attempting to engage with.

The workshop timing meant that I got some time off over Christmas, but I didn't take any extra time. I also like to use January as a time to clear my workbench, prepare for the year ahead and also experiment a little before the usual cadence of work returns. I didn't get any of that this year.

I had originally planned to take three weeks off, which sounded very decadent. Especially given the current state of *gestures at everything*. But a friend of mine had mentioned: "Brett, however much leave you're taking, add a week to it."

"Ha ha!" I said. I was fine, I didn't need to take extra time off!

But I did take time off. And I did need it.

This is a story of dealing with some very minor burnout. Nothing as devastating as many other people's stories, but still worth discussing.

Recognising burnout

It seems weird that one of the primary problems with burnout is actually noticing and acknowledging it. You'd think it'd be obvious, but often it's actually not. Maybe I'm just a little tired. Maybe I'm just a little grumpy because of reasons. It'll all just blow over next week.

When my friend had exhorted me to take extra leave, I dismissed the idea but hadn't yet put in the application. Later I had found myself in a discussion with someone who quite likes bullish, sometimes pedantic discussions, often about politics or governance. He had said something like, "Australia has a King". I had responded, "No it doesn't" with some vague pedantic argument in my head, in the spirit of these discussions. And yet, dear reader, Australia does have a King in the pedantic and non-pedantic senses. I knew that. But I kept digging in for some reason. A voice in the back of my head was flabbergasted that I had dug my heels in. What the hell was I doing? What was to be gained?

And then, after a breath and accepting that I was wrong, I applied for my leave. With an extra week tacked on.

I've had other friends complaining of having an eye twitch and other physical manifestations, and bemoaning they hadn't taken time off, and it was very clear to everyone else: Take some time off!

Even in recognising it, you have to accept it. Accept that work will move on without you (and in many cases, it also won't so don't think you're chasing a train).

What to do when recovering

I'm not going to be prescriptive about this, but talk about a few options that I ran through. Usually you need time and space away from whatever was setting you on fire. Whether that means the content, the people, or the location, it doesn't matter. Changing the context is important.

Do nothing

An easy way to get back energy and focus is to do nothing. For myself, I spent a good portion of the first week playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Great game, a true triple-A embarrassment of riches. I clocked Nazis with many items at-hand, and explored spooky tombs.

I also caught up on Netflix I had missed (Three Body Problem, specifically). I could watch Benedict Wong being a grizzled detective forever.

Some afternoons I grabbed a cup of tea, sat on my deck without any devices and just watched the clouds amble overhead.

The purpose of these activities is to allow your stretched resources some time to elastically return. Renormalise proper sleep times. Hydrate. Part of getting back to normal is just being normal with nothing else in the way.

A funny little caveat to this stage of my leave: I recently bought a Steam Deck and love it to bits. This relaxation time gave me more time to play with it. I found a new game that seemed ideal for both the Deck and my leave: Wanderstop. It's a cozy game about an elite warrior who burns out and flees to the forest to try to find a way to get back on top. She instead finds herself at a magic tea house and uses the time to recuperate and realign. Strangely, the game was both too close to home and too far from the truth for me. Andrew Plotkin has an introspective review that captures it better than I can in a paragraph, but the meditations in the game are good, but the core problem isn't really one that I'm grappling with. I'm just settling for making things, not the best things or be the best at something. Alta's drive is understandable, but not mine.

I haven't finished Wanderstop yet, but that's okay. It's a game you can let steep for a while.

Do chores

I daresay for many people this "nothing time" is great, for a while. Too much and things feel flabby and aimless. You might not yet be regenerated enough to take something on, but you can't just stagnate. If you do, you might find yourself at the other end of the spectrum from too much energy — having too little energy.

My week of nothing slowly waltzed into a week of chores. I had expected to spend a lot of my recovery time in my home office, so I tried to tidy that. Our family's clothes had begun to pile up, so I fed the washing machine for days. Moving the newsletter over to Ghost was another little chore. It had some thinking involved, but not much.

This is all operational thinking. I also wanted to re-engage on a meaningful level, but without having to kick into high gear. I began a sad and thorough audit of all the regular, periodic payments of support I pay to people of the Internet. The sum total per month was significant. I was not in a sentimental frame of mind, so it made it easier to make the hard decisions. Plus, most of the people I support will still be there later if things change, and I can return to the previous arrangement.

The audit was cathartic. As was ripping out rogue blue passion flower vine with my bare hands. Turns out there was more vine than my allocation of chores time, but I made a decisive dent in its existence.

Do something new and succeed

With a little more wind in my sails, I picked up some new experiences that I did okay at. The goal here was to bolster spirits even more for harder tasks later on.

When I was at university I lived at a residential college. I was terrible at binge drinking, so I had a bunch of spare time to myself. I don't know when or how, but I started to teach myself piano, using the one in the chapel. This might have been before YouTube was invented, so I have no idea how I had any resources. I taught myself a chunk of the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata through sheer bloody-mindedness. I knew no music theory through accidents of my primary schooling. But I remember a woman from the next door residential college coming in to say it sounded lovely, which was very gratifying.

I didn't keep up with the piano over the years, but with the rest of my house taking up the violin, I felt it was time to return to the ivories. I haven't quite figured out how to integrate it into my regular week, so my next best thing was to find an app, Simply Piano. I quickly made progress through the very beginner content, which was encouraging. Trying anything substantial – like find real sheet music and play it – was maybe a bit too far for my state of mind and body, but being able to bang some keys that sounded like Billy Joel's Uptown Girl was as refreshing as a shot of ginger.

I'm not a gym guy, but I do gym training and that hit some new milestones. My first triple digit deadlift. I'm still not a gym guy, but I enjoyed taking time out to really focus on some basic stuff that wasn't for work, or for an audience. Just a bit of rargh, technique, and trying tricks like visualising the move. Real back-to-basic stuff.

One of my sources of burnout was doing the extrovert thing, but one important little new social thing I did was meet with the IFTF Grants Administration Committee, which I'm now helping out with. I had a Slack video call with some of them, and they are lovely, invigorating people. This was a nice way to tiptoe back into doing things with humans, rather than apps, games or IDEs.

Do something new and fail

It's one thing to have the emotional, spiritual reserve to do things that happily succeed, but it's another where you have to reckon with failure. As we tell our daughter, failure is okay; it's what you do with it that matters. If you have the energy, then it's okay to do something that fails.

Piano practice had micro versions of that, but that didn't matter. I had two little experiments that more-or-less failed. And that's okay.

One experiment was doing a Youtube video. I sometimes daydream of being a guest on a podcast that I like, or doing informational video series on YouTube. But I've never done anything like that, so I thought it might be nice to try something. My wading-in-the-shallows attempt was to do a Let's Play of my own interactive fiction game, One True Love. I set up OBS Studio, wrote an intro script, and went for it.

As an experiment, I think it failed. I'm naturally a writer far more than a speaker. I'm naturally an associative, connect-distant-dots sort of thinker rather than leading someone stepwise through an experience. And interactive fiction is terrible for YouTube unless you want your face on there (I don't) or put in a lot of time assembling images or videos (I didn't).

I did the whole thing as a roughly thirty minute single take, when you really should have multiple takes and multiple voices and assemble it into an experience, rather than me just reading stuff out.

But it's okay. Having this failure gave me something to critique and dissect. I might revisit the idea later with better ideas and techniques. And I chose to do it at roughly a time where the setback didn't ruin me, so that was lucky.

My other experiment was more technical, by design. I wanted to spend some of my creative time off doing technical work. Deep maths was too much at that time. However I had a little idea that led me down a technical rabbit hole.

Conway's Game of Life is a simple automata that takes a grid of squares and with very simple rules, evolves that grid of squares into another grid of squares. With the right configuration of living cells you can make things that pulsate, shoot out little gliders or even more incredible things:

My primary focus of creative work at the moment is my interactive fiction piece Anne of Green Cables, a cyberpunk reimagining of Anne of Green Gables. Philosophically I'm playing with some ideas and I thought a neat cyberpunk expression of that would be to have a weird digital picture accompanying each chapter. The picture would be the next evolution in a Game of Life sequence, and in the very final picture, it would resolve to a pixel art picture of Anne.

I loved the idea as a stylistic flourish. It's also pretty technically challenging. You can't easily reverse a Game of Life step as two different situations can evolve to the same step, so there isn't a mathematical formula for reversing time. You could try guessing initial configurations, but the amount of initial options quickly exceeds the computational power of the universe. But I reinvented a technique that others have used - you set up a single step from an unknown configuration to a known one as a logic problem and get a solver to try to figure it out. If I could do it once, I could do it many times, thus getting pixel art for every chapter that would turn into some Anne pixel art at the end.

This approach was a bit of a failure. I did get something working, but the technical requirements started getting a bit much like work. Also my desired goal pixel art of Anne seemingly produced configurations that had no previous Game of Life state. That is, you couldn't make something that stepped to my image. Resolving this was both a technical and artistic challenge, and quickly started requiring more energy than I was willing to give it.

Generously, it was a successful failure. The technical path was validated to an extent, but to satisfy all the goals was too onerous.

Doing something you've returned to

One of the last steps in recovery is being able to return to a sizable problem that you've been to already. You know the technical and emotional steepness of the task, and you feel ready for it.

The small version I did of this was returning to One True Love. As part of making a YouTube video of it, I returned to the source code and fixed a few outstanding bugs and omissions. It had been almost a year since writing it, and the code had some mild complexity to it. I got it working and updated on itch.io.

The bigger task and focus of my leave was returning to Anne of Green Cables, my numero uno work-in-progress. I had been working around it for a while – doing research and thinking about parts. But I hadn't updated my notes. I hadn't decided on certain characters. I hadn't looked at the source code.

I am glad to say that I had rebuilt myself enough over the weeks of leave to dive into the code I wrote before and fixed bugs. I assembled all the technical scaffolding for the game. I wrote an entire detailed chapter-by-chapter plan for the piece, including highlighting the interactive choices per chapter, and their impact on the story later on. My previous version of this blueprint had a lot of "character stuff happens here".

I even got a large part of the first chapter written. It's difficult writing – L.M. Montgomery has an amazing, nuanced style, and trying to ape that whilst simultaneously weaving in cyberpunk elements is really challenging for me. Now that I have scenes for the rest of the piece, the path ahead is slightly daunting, but it's mapped out. It's one foot in front of the other.

Returning to civilization

Tomorrow I return to work where I can't just wear sports gear all day. Where I can't just collapse on a couch and listen to kookaburras laughing to each other. Where tasks are waiting for me. But it's okay. I think I've rebuilt myself, and the creative process can push on.

I'd love to hear your tips on dealing with burnout, especially for far more serious cases.

I'll see you again next month. Same bat-time but on this new bat-channel.