Surviving Winter: Writing Through Creative Burnout

Sometimes I am a bad poet. I skip morning pages. I write cliches. I cheat on poetry with knitting and painting. I put off reading new chapbooks so I can watch episode after episode of “Law & Order: SVU.” My love for poetry is still somewhere deep inside, bound to my understanding of the world. Sometimes, however, I love poetry more than I like it.

I have been warned often about creative burnout. As a young writer, I would hit speed bumps, like writer’s block or laziness, but there would always be words to reinspire—a place for my feet to land when I shook the dust off my brain. I couldn’t yet identify with the process I saw fellow writers go through. Poets I admired, whose incredible work once flowed effortlessly, would abruptly take an absence from local readings. They’d fall into hiatus, absorbing themselves in other projects and processing a new relationship with poetry reached through distance. 

Sometimes this pause is brief and impactful, lasting long enough for a writer to take a brisk breath and return to the act of composing unscathed; other times, a writer grapples with resentment, requiring them to deconstruct why they write and why it no longer feels the same as it once did. Writers have worried about forgetting how to write, becoming aware of formulaic, artificial poems written in the wake of the mind’s tap running empty. 

Being a human today—much less being a writer—often feels overwhelming. There’s a dance that writers must perform between using poetry as a form of processing the world and understanding where creation overlaps production. In our consumerist age, the battle between personal and marketable work often ignites a creative dissonance among writers. When one’s work is formed with the pressure of sharing and being understood, feeding the minds of others, there is a mental toll paid. When it came time for me to pay this toll, my writing dwindled into a cold, dark period of winter.

Entering grad school, burnout seemed like a distant, groundless threat. I hit a stride where I concluded writing would always feel easy, and I would always be so enchanted with the page. I wrote every day, created a routine around poetry, and navigated the world in dedication to my craft. I remembered the words that instructors passed down, reminding my cohort and I that grad school granted us time to write that we may never get again. There was freedom in that time, and I felt inspired to use as much of it as possible. I wanted to know that I used it well, so I sought to live by writing. Meanwhile, there was an invisible thumb of pressure introducing itself to my back, squashing into me harder and harder as time went on.

Time was a gift, but I began to feel that I was drowning beneath the expectations that came with it. Semesters came and went, and I became more obsessed with the writer I should be rather than enamored with my craft. The pressure wore on me and ate at the cracks in my poetic discipline. The more I tried to fight the fatigue away, the harder it pressed back in each poem I churned out. This evolved into writing with an audience in mind. Before a poem could emerge, I heard the thoughts of fellow poets in workshop and imagined the rejection email from literary journals that wouldn’t publish the poem, all before the words left my brain. I thought about what sounded smart, what would qualify as a good poem, rather than opening my mouth and releasing the words like a swarm of moths – those unpolished, grimy words. Lines would get mangled in a filter that translated my poetry into an offering, a plea to finally have written something excellent. But these words felt distant, and I worked them too much to salvage lines into something that was mine.

But in the deconstructed jaws of burnout, what was mine? The shards of poems, fragmented lines, didn’t feel like mine. They felt like a simulation of words I’d once written, a desperate clawing at images that once drew my eye. I wrote poem after poem about bones and guts and flowers, feeling a twinge of frustration each time the imagery surfaced. I had lived within this voice for so long; it felt so foreign to write dissociated from it, hacking through words that I had outgrown. I was furious at myself, trying ham-fisted to fit words together. However, it took every hour spent regurgitating empty writing, every abandoned draft of writing that said nothing of value, to understand that this burnout was a cry for growth. It seeped poison into my love for poetry, but it also killed parts of my writing that I no longer needed, and yet couldn’t have otherwise let go of.

Burnout is made of hard truths, but it can also be kind. Burnout makes the kitchen stink, not to antagonize, but as a reminder to take care of the dishes. Burnout makes my stomach rumble, but only as a sign for me to crawl out of bed and microwave soup. It can be the flu, striking me to the ground because I’ve been running on fumes—it is my body telling me to rest. It slams on the brakes, but I now know that it’s not out of malice. It only asks me those horribly necessary questions: who am I writing for? Is this really me? Am I the same poet I was last year?

So, from the bottom of burnout’s well, I allow myself to abandon broken lines. I close my despised journal and leave it under a stack of books. I give it dirty glances when I pass by my bookshelf. I surrender myself to lost time, and I know that this isn’t the end of poetry.

Instead of throwing the journal away, I hang on. I do human things, and I wait, and I make peace with the well’s cold, barren floor as it slowly refills with emotion and life, drop by drop. I write lines in the notes app on my phone. I watch even more “Law & Order: SVU.” I shower and I paint and I write poetic thank you notes to my friends and I read poems with ease, one at a time. I slow down and allow anger and resentment to dissolve. I wade through the temporary winter and enjoy the act of gradual finding, lavishing in time instead of sprinting through it.

Poets can’t write when they are given no air. Humans can’t think when they are carrying the weight of a million eyes, staring down words that have not yet reached the page. Time is only a gift when it is spent with pleasure and curiosity. As I reach an end to this stretch of growing pains, I seek out renewed inspiration. My voice shifts, and I find it in new images and words that were once stifled. Creative burnout is not the end of writing, but rather the end of a poor relationship with creation. I rediscover poetry with fondness. It comes to me in a new form, regrown and breathing a little easier.