In this week’s book club episode, we talk with our friends about Becca Syme’s book, Dear Writer, Are You In Burnout? We discuss what methods we found useful in identifying burnout, avoiding burnout, and getting out of burnout.
Show Notes
I Give You My Body https://amzn.to/39PytLs
Dear Writer, Are You In Burnout https://amzn.to/38VVrRV
Transcript
Crys: Hello, friends. I’m back with the book club crew. And this time we are discussing, Dear Writer, Are You in Burnout? By Becca Syme. And this one was kind of a group suggestion, I forget who actually brought it up. But it’s one that I had sitting around for a while, and I was in the midst of burnout, and I read about one page, and I was like, nope, this is too much for right now, and I set it aside. And so as I’m coming out of burnout, it was a good time to read it. Okay. With me, I have Lon Varnadore, JP Rindfleisch, Marianne Hanson, and Janet Kitto.
So hot take on this book, thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs in the middle. How did y’all feel about it?
Lon: I liked it. I really enjoyed it. I thought it had actually some pretty great info, and we’ll get to that, but overall like really good.
Marianne: My question is if right now I’m in burnout, or if right now it’s just the trauma that’s going on all around that is also causing me to be in the bottom of the pit. I feel like there’s a mixture there, but I still think that getting out of that pit can be similar except when there’s trauma that we’re not in control of, I think you don’t know when it ends, and that can make it a little bit harder.
Crys: I think that does draw burnout out longer.
JP: Yeah. I think for me it was good. I first was like, this doesn’t apply to me because I’m not having writer burnout. And then the more you start thinking about it, it’s like no, this applies to other facets of your life.
And there are some things I am in burnout. I had to take a moment and then I realized that there are other ways you can have burnout, and I think I might have them.
Crys: That’s fair. Janet, hot take?
Janet: Hot take was that there was a lot of things I pushed back on in this book. I really thought it was going to be a simple read and I would enjoy all of it. And I just found myself fighting against a lot of the things that she was saying, because they were true.
Crys: What has everyone’s experience with burnout been? Have you had it? We’ve mentioned a little bit about being in it.
Marianne: I’ve been in it. And I didn’t realize it until reading this book and going back and going, Oh, those times when I was zoning out and reading books that didn’t help, fluff, so I could lose myself in their characters and I couldn’t stop reading those. And I look back now and I think, Oh, without even realizing it, I was trying to build a ladder out of the pit.
JP: I think I’ve had burnout with other facets of my life. Sometimes, whenever something occurs with jobs or I don’t get that opportunity of growth, I end up in a sort of a burnout phase, and then I end up moving to a different company. And I found that that whole phase really impacts my writing because it’s like, because I’m in burnout in regards to a job that I’m in, it just impacts everything else. And so I end up in those phases where I just sit in front of the computer and I stare for hours and I’m like, I don’t know what to write. So yeah, that’s my experience.
Lon: I know that I have definitely, not only just with everything going on as far as the world being on fire, but also with writing when I was trying to pump out a trilogy. I got the second book out and almost lost my mind in trying to get the third book. And it was just like, Nope, not going to, nope, can’t do it, can’t do it. I mean to the point where it’s January of the next year and I still haven’t even really touched it. So yeah.
Janet: Yeah, I was in burnout a couple of years ago. And it was the expectations that I had of myself once I gave up my mortgage, gave up my job, went on the road to travel, and here I had all of this time to enjoy everything that I wanted to do. I could be outdoors all the time. I could be creating all the time, and that was so interesting to me because it was all the expectations I had, all these shoulds that I had, now I should be doing this and getting away from everything that you would expect would put you in burnout. Doing a job you don’t want to do, having family responsibilities you don’t want to have, and leaving all that. And it was actually all of the expectations I had put on myself as a writer, that’s what kept me in the burnout.
Crys: Yeah. I often say that I have gone through three or four burnouts in the last three and a half years, but honestly it was probably more one long slip-slidey burnout from December 2017 until this year or end of 2020, when I really truly started to get actual energy back versus borrowed energy. And I would climb out and then throw myself right back into the same patterns that had burned me out in the first place, and then scramble my way back too early and then slide back in.
Marianne: And I think that’s one of the great things about this book is that it explains it and tells you that you’re not the only one. And there are many times when I was just like on the couch reading when I knew I should be doing this or that, wondering what is wrong with me. And then in reading this book and realizing that nothing was wrong with me, that I was just going through a process, it made me feel so much better. And now that I’m going to read all eight books of the Bridgerton series, I feel even more better.
Crys: I think that giving myself permission to lie around and not have expectations on my time for a lot of this year was one of the most helpful things that I’ve done. And I did that because I knew that I was going through an emotionally tough time with the ending of my relationship.
Of course, then 2020 in all its glory kept coming in waves. And I just recognized that this was going to be a really hard time and it was okay to just lay around and let it happen because that was something I needed. And I think I didn’t give myself permission to do that before, when it was always my patterns that were causing me to slide back.
Also, my relationship was a highly stressful situation that I didn’t have full control over. But when that ended, that gave me something external that I could point to and be like, I’m recovering from that. And not everybody has a thing they can point at and say, Oh, that’s the thing that tipped me over the edge. Because it’s not the thing that tipped me over the edge in the beginning. That was just my patterns. And it wasn’t until I had an edge tipper, that I was able to say, Oh, I’m going to recover from that, and then I actually did the things to recover.
JP: I think too, one thing I took away from this, even though it wasn’t explicitly stated, was that burnout isn’t something that happens with just veteran authors, it just can happen. And so I think even with beginner authors it can happen because of the fact that, like for myself, I work a 40-hour week that sometimes turns into 80, 120, depending on what happens that week. And I still try to cram in that time for writing when there is no space for it. And that’s just the reality of things.
On certain days, there is just no space for writing. So the expectations that you have when you work a standard day job to when you’re overexerting yourself on one end, something has to give. And I think that this, especially the whole plate thing, which we can talk about in a little bit, definitely explained that and offered up that space to say, you may be a new writer, this may be like a brand-new thing for you. You can still have burnout. It just, it can happen.
Crys: Yeah. Why don’t you talk about the plate analogy now?
JP: Plate analogy is all have our own little plates. They have little lips on the ends of them, but they’re all different varying sizes.
She ranges them one through 10. And people with plates the size of 10 can take on more projects, more variation, whereas plates that are like the size of one, it may be one project or one thing that they can work on and focus on. And realistically, the ones and tens and twos and nines don’t really exist.
Everyone kind of fits in the middle somewhere, but If we’re not careful, we can try to idealize or make these ideas that we need to reflect someone who may or may not have a bigger plate than we have. And then we’ll try to aim for a goal that we just aren’t capable of reaching because we don’t have that ability to have that kind of multi-faceted plate thing.
Also, plate sizes vary. Depending on your life, what’s occurred in your life, and it can vary day to day, or it can be something that you can grow and change, just depending on what’s happened.
Crys: Yeah. I think one of the things she says is that a plate size isn’t going to grow that much. That kind of what you’re born with, you’re the perfect capacity of things on your plate. Things you have to do, things you want to do, is probably going to stay about the same range most of your life. And I don’t know what plate size I have, because I think I’ve been operating at like an eight or nine most of my life. And right now I’m probably at a four or five, and I’ve been at like a one or two most of the year.
And I don’t know if four or five is about where I’m supposed to be or if I’m a six, seven, or if I’m actually like an eight, nine. And it’s, do you get antsy when you don’t have enough on your plate? That’s what the big plates are good for. There’s nothing morally right or wrong about having the capacity to do more.
But some people are very comfortable having one or two things that are on their plate at any given time. And they focus on those, giving all their attention to those, and anything more than that deregulates them. While a person with a larger plate can get deregulated by not having enough on their plate. They have to make sure they keep enough on their plate while not overloading their plate.
Marianne: I can’t even imagine that. I can’t imagine needing more on my plate. I would like to meet someone like that.
JP: I think I settle around like the five or six range for plate size. And I actually found it interesting when I had a couple of weeks off for the holidays this past year, just because I’ve been really ramping up the author side of my life.
And I realized that because I had all this open space from work, like I immediately filled it with a naturally plate-sized helping of writing. And it was fantastic. Unfortunately, I had to rearrange my plate now, but I just found it really interesting that I really do think I’d fit in that five or six range.
And even if I can take something off, like I need to throw stuff back on that plate because otherwise I just don’t feel that satisfaction.
Janet: She talks about the largest determination of your plate size is personality. And that was really important for me. I don’t have a big plate size. I think I’m more like a three or a four. And the book tells you about finding your level, not your range with everybody else, just respecting what your level is.
You can’t change your personality, so you can’t really change your plate size. It will decrease with burnout, but you can’t go from a two to a 10.
Crys: It’s one of the things that I like to focus on when I talk about success, because a lot of people when they think of success, they think of in comparison to other people or a monetary amount, when I think that success is actually extremely personal. It has to do with our time, how we want to spend our time, how we want to spend our days. And that may have a monetary amount linked to it for our particular goals. But that should be particular to you for most people and not some arbitrary goal of a hundred thousand dollars a year equals success.
It can equal success for you, but it’s because a hundred dollars a year means something very specific to you. Not just because it’s a hundred thousand dollars a year.
Marianne: Once you get there, then it’s like $500,000 a year.
Crys: You’re always going to amp up your expectations if you’re not very aware of why you choose your metrics of success.
And our metrics of success should change as we move through life because we’re going to need different things and want different things.
I found one of the most useful things was comparing the two different types of getting out of burnout people. I forget what the first one was because I was like, yeah, not me. I think it may have been the people who jump into doing too much from the start. And that has been me in the past, but it wasn’t me this time.
The other one was the people who are afraid to reload because they don’t know if they’re ready yet. And that has been a process I’ve been stepping through the last half of 2020. Like I really want to do these things. Podcast, The Author Success Mastermind, creating videos for TikTok, and other things.
I am, or have been in the past, the kind of person who throws myself 110% at every new shiny thing that comes across my path. And I have learned that’s not ideal for me. What I did in response to that was focus too intensely on only doing a few things that I was doing really well. And while that has brought me a lot of the success I have seen, it was part of my burnout pattern.
And so I have needed to add new things to keep me excited and energized, but I’ve had to be very cautious about adding them on slowly. At least slowly for me.
Marianne: It’s interesting because as I was thinking about this too, I was thinking about, as a new writer, when I was starting out, I tried everything. The Facebook ads, the Amazon ads, the posting on Facebook, and getting street team.
And it was so overwhelming and so much, and I just pulled all the way back and just stopped and then thought about, what do I really want to do? And I thought about this too, with my kids, because raising kids, I always felt that they had to have the cookies, and they had to have the costumes, and they had to do this, and they had to do that, and I had to take them here, and they had to be involved in that. And now that they’re all teenagers, I’m just like, you guys got to figure this all out. Now I can give you your advice, and I can tell you what I’m going to do, but there are no more cookies.
Crys: One of the other central metaphors that she uses is the idea of energy pennies, and for people who are familiar with spoon theory, it’s similar to that. But energy pennies are just this idea that you have so much energy throughout the day, and you can spend them with your pennies.
So deciding to do your laundry might take five pennies. And actually doing the laundry five pennies, and you only have so many pennies to get through the day. And once they’re spent, then you are tired. Hopefully you’re at the end of your day by the time you do that, but too many of us spend more pennies than we are earning. And we earn pennies by sleep, healthy food, recreation, enjoyment, and we build our energy up by different ways. It depends on the person. And one of the questions I had for everybody was, do you know what builds your energy pennies particularly?
JP: Yes.
Crys: Do you want to share with the class?
JP: I suppose. So for myself, I haven’t done it in a really long time, which I need to, but walking in nature. Alone, preferably. I don’t know why. I think I’m a little bit of an introvert, but I definitely really like it whenever I’m like in the middle of the woods and I just have my dog with me and we’re just walking the trails.
I think that I just regain a ton of energy from that. Other than that, occasionally it’s writing. It’s a lot of solitary practice or just time where I have my mind to myself. But then I don’t know if I’m like partially an extrovert or what, but there are occasions, like having this conversation in this book club, that does give me energy because it’s really fun to bounce off ideas with other people. So those are my refill vaults.
Janet: I love this question because I don’t think we could guess what everyone else’s means of energy pennies would be. It’s important that we know ourselves, that we don’t look to our friends and our family and think, fill my vault here.
So I’m the same where I like to be outside. I like walking and biking. I have a motorcycle. I like going out anywhere that I have a helmet on, because it gives me my little bubble and a little introvert bubble. I love that. And I was talking about this with Chris on another occasion. There’s this umbrella of grace that makes me feel good, that serving others, being kind, having love for others, and acceptance, like that really does make me feel good.
And those things that go into my writing. That’s how I recharge.
Marianne: I think it’s changing a little bit, because I think it used to be being able to spend some time alone, and I’m not alone anymore. And so I’ve had to switch it into taking a lot of baths, boiling hot baths, and locking the bathroom. And even the dog when I’m taking a bath, knows not to come near me, it’s the most wonderful thing.
And then a lot of 2020 I was hiking. I’m getting back into that and getting back into doing things in nature. A lot of the things that I used to do have had to change this year, and I think that’s what made this year so much harder.
Lon: I’m an introvert, but unlike the rest of y’all, I want to stay inside and away from everybody. Nature’s great. That’s great. I’ll go and see it once and again, that’s fine. I want to stay inside. Just give me a book, give me a pad of paper, I’ll be fine. I’ll entertain myself. Or, like I also have animals. Just sitting and actually just cuddling with them for a few minutes is great.
I say that I hate people and I do. It’s also the idea of, once and again, like the weekly meetings that we have, where we see each other, some of us here for an hour and we’ll talk about stuff and that is something that does recharge the vault, even though it is ungodly early for me. But everyone has their own thing.
Mine is just being away from everyone. And I know for a fact I’ve had time where I’ve been with people for days, have hung out with them for a week or a weekend or something like that, and then I have to go home, and I need to be on my own to recharge.
Crys: I’m very similar. Just this little crowd of introverts, in that when I don’t have plenty of alone time, then I need to grab it. The way my life is built right now, I do get quite a bit of it and it’s delightful. But last week was a very social week, with a meeting with this person here, meeting with that person here, with a bunch of people that I just loved. It was delightful.
And we had the long conversation with gender, with Jeff Elkins and crew, which was really good, but that tipped me over the edge of, Oh, I’ve had too much people this week. And I think I basically disappeared off the face of the planet for about three or four days with minimal conversation, when normally my online life is extremely active. And I have 10 to 20 good conversations ongoing on WhatsApp on any given day, like real conversations. And I don’t doubt that I’m an introvert, but I’m very sociable introvert, and refilling with people I know is very important to me as well.
People I don’t yet know are absolutely exhausting every time, even if it is still a very exciting conversation and I really enjoy it, it’s still exhausting. The other ways that I’ve really refilled the well this year have been bingeing TV, which I don’t watch a lot of TV. I say that, and then I realized that when I do watch TV, I’ve binged entire television shows in very short periods of time and do nothing else.
So I’ve binged Discovery, Mandalorian, Picard, The Good Place. And that was probably, that was 2020. Those are the ones I remember. And I probably watched more last year than I had in the previous three years combined.
Marianne: I bought a convertible Mini Cooper on a whim because it was dirt cheap. And that was probably the best thing that I’ve done all year. The bigger problem is that I live in Montana. And so now I did drive it, not convertible, and barely made it up a hill. But over the summer, every time I drove it, I was so happy.
Crys: I miss my convertible, they are happiness machines if it works for you.
Marianne: Well, and the mini, you can park it anywhere. I can parallel park a mini like nobody’s business, a car bigger than that…?
Crys: So we may have already covered your most useful piece of information, your best tidbit from this book. But what was the most useful thing for each of you from this book?
Marianne: I’m not the only one.
JP: I’m going to go broad here, but it’s the factors that she used throughout the process of what that looks like using multiple mental conversations that you would have with yourself. It just gave a perspective and you could relate to at least one of them. And you could determine whether or not you may be in that phase.
Lon: I would almost say that the idea of the plate and like the different sizes. And I think I might be like four, four to six, or I think I am. And the energy penny thing, which I’ve heard before in different terminology, but it’s still a good one.
Janet: I had to learn to love this. It was her idea of the Phantom plate. It pushed my button right away. I’m like, no, that’s not me. No, I don’t need help for anything.
Crys: Can you describe the Phantom plate?
Janet: Sure. It’s everything that you think you should be doing. And it goes on this Phantom plate. So it’s in addition to everything that you are doing, it’s all those additional things that you should be doing, but you’re not.
So you feel all this pressure, and the bigger that your Phantom plate gets with all this unfinished work, that’s how more likely you are to hit the burnout. And so just allowing myself to read that section again and digest it all and go, yeah, I have to be willing to let go of more because it’s just going to keep going on that Phantom plate.
Crys: Yeah, that Phantom plate is nasty. I think my most useful one was that in coming out of the burnout that I’m doing it the smart way, that is least likely to throw me back at burnout, being slightly afraid to add things back, but doing it anyways and doing it slowly.
And yeah, I feel like I have a lot of energy. I do get frustrated that I’m not back to max capacity as my brain sees it, but I don’t legitimately know if that’s my true max capacity or if that’s my overcapacity functioning on fumes level. And it’ll be interesting to see where I end up over the next couple of years because I think it will still take me a while to shake off the stink of the pit of burnout.
Marianne: I’m not sure I’m out of a pit. I think I am on like rung number two. I don’t even think I’m building a ladder right now to get out of it. I think I’m just building a ladder, like a step stool, and then it’ll give me maybe a new perspective and then maybe I can do something else. I’m like, let’s think about this ladder.
Crys: Peering over the neighbor’s fence line?
Marianne: Wilson from home improvement. That’s what I’m aiming for.
JP: She brushes the topic, but I do want to just reiterate that this isn’t a substitute to take care of one’s mental health. It is really important that it is great to identify the pit. It’s great to figure out ways to get out of that pit, that when we start talking about energy pennies, if you’re in a state where you aren’t able to get out of bed at the start of the day, it takes you hours to do that. Or if your days are so spent that you just don’t have the energy to do it, that maybe seeking professional help through therapy, it’s not a sign of weakness to do that. And it can be a way to help you out of this pit.
I do know she brushes that topic quite a bit throughout this, but I do think it’s important to just state that mental health is not a sign of weakness. And that therapy is a valuable tool that one can use to help get out of things like burnout.
Crys: And they’re not necessarily separate, like JP was saying they’re tools to use.
They may be combined with burnout. It may happen separate from burnout. A lot of the symptoms of depression, anxiety, and burnout are similar. Sometimes they overlap, very important. So our book next month, because it is February, is going to be a book on writing sex and it is called I Give You My Body by Diana Gabaldon who wrote the Outlander series, which is now an HBO show as well, I believe it’s HBO, and the subtitle is “how I write sex scenes.” It’s a very short book. Should be a very easy read. If you’re not familiar with her work, she does use a lot of examples from her books. She does her best to frame them so you can know what’s going on and you can talk about the writing skills and techniques used without knowing what the book is.
But sometimes I did feel a little lost and that’s okay. I still got the point. Let me just look at the calendar.
JP: May I suggest that when we meet for this book club, we meet with red wine if we partake in libations?
Crys: I am sure that Marianne can find some bubbly red grape juice and chocolate. Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do it. That will be February 3rd that we’ll be recording that.
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