Are you Burned Out? Or Just Tired?

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between mental, emotional, and physical states, and I’ve found this to be particularly true of poets. If we let ourselves go too long without sleep, or we (ahem) have been suffering from some kind of upper respiratory crap for a month or so, or we’ve just been pushing ourselves too hard – book tour, caretaking, job responsibilities –it can be hard to find that call to send out your work, apply for a grant, or write anything that feels (key word, feels) worthwhile.

Fall – and September in particular – is usually my energetic, submitting-full, writing-y zone – but this year, I’ve just been staring blankly, evening after evening, at my Excel spreadsheet. I know that usually this time of year I’m excited to get back to sending out work. But – maybe do to the fact that coughing spasms have been waking me up in the middle of the night, several times a night, for oh, five weeks, sometimes requiring an inhaler – I just feel “blah” about the whole thing. And I haven’t been writing much really, either. Reading, I can handle – this summer I’ve caught up on all the fiction reading I didn’t do the rest of the year, plus some non-fiction.

Someone was telling me that there is an energy of fall around change, a decrease in sunlight, in the length of days, and sometimes, a fall in mood and energy, too. Change of seasons, change in mood, change of creativity, too.

I think a little self-care (appropriate bedtimes, good nutrition, maybe a vitamin – in my case, resting as per doctor’s orders) can go a long way towards determining whether you’re going through a temporary confluence of sleep-deprivation, energy lowering and maybe a lot of recent rejections, or whether you are seriously feeling burned out, in a way that means you need to look again at your reasons for writing and trying to publish, maybe try to talk to people that help encourage you, and give yourself a break for a little while. Like me, maybe you need some time to rest and read, give yourself space to breathe and not always “produce.” Diane Lockward has a good post about downtime, and discusses Louise Gluck’s discoveries about downtime in her recent P&W interview. (It’s worth it to go pick up a copy of Poets & Writers in print!) I’m also really enjoying a new book of essays by women writers over 50 called A Story Larger Than My Own, including pieces by Alicia Ostriker, Maxine Kumin, and Margaret Atwood. There was a great piece in there too about writerly ambition – like I was talking about a few weeks ago – by Linda Pastan.

Tomorrow I’m off to my “experimental” first shot of Xolair, to see if it will help the asthma/allergies/inflammation issues, without debilitating side effects, hopefully! Wish me luck!