My longest creative burnout happened right after I finished editing my feature film Anna & Modern Day Slavery.
I spent years working on that project and majority of those years I worked alone, trying to push myself harder and not really believing that there were limits to what I could do.
What I didn’t realise at the time was that toxic productivity quietly and slowly was chipping away at my creativity.
Because for years I was in the mode of doing, there was no time for me to stop and think, ask questions, or ponder how I felt and whether I was able to carry on in the never-ending cycle of constant work. Not allowing myself the breathing space to rest, or time to recoup my energy and heal my creativity had massive consequences, which in the long run shaped my creative art practice:
Some of the negative results were:
- Lack of long-term focus, thinking and planning,
- Fear and anxiety related to stopping work,
- Inability to look at my creative work holistically,
- Inability to fully relax,
- Inability to connect to creativity and my creative self,
- Absence of reflective practices,
- Inability to implement constructive criticism in my creative art practice,
- Inability to ask for help,
- Performative creativity, which resulted in half-baked projects as I felt pressured to share projects,
- Total and complete creative burnout.
Once I finished editing Anna & Modern Day Slavery (2015), creative burnout took over my life. It lasted for years, and I only started coming out of it when I went back to higher education in 2021.
Being in higher education reintroduced me to conversation, reflection, learning and community. After spending so many years working largely on my own, I found the experience intellectually stimulating and creatively energising.
Two years in higher education made me feel wonderfully stimulated but at the same very anxious to take a break from everything I was doing. Taking time off right after my final exhibition was the beginning of introducing slow creativity in my creative art practice.
Slowing down allowed me:
- Space to think and breathe,
- Enjoy the creative process instead of simply striving towards an end goal,
- Look at my creative art practice holistically and see how different aspects of it connect,
- To step away and observe,
- Implement reflective and contemplative practices,
- Ability to course-correct quickly when I go off in the wrong direction,
- Curiosity to experiment,
- A willingness to follow creativity and the creative process without fear that I wasn’t doing enough.
Looking at all these creative gains now, I can see that many of them are the opposite of what constant doing had taken away from me.
Where there was once anxiety, there is more trust.
Where there was once pressure to produce, there is more room to explore.
Where there was once constant movement, there is now space to think and reflect.
Learning how to slow down in my creative art practice, while embracing reflective practices is a process, one that is hardly straightforward. I still have to remind myself not to engage with toxic productivity or performative creativity.
Accepting that slowing down is a process rather than a final destination has allowed me to experiment with mediums and creative practices that only a few years ago I would have dismissed as too slow, too tedious or too unproductive.
Perhaps the biggest change is that slowing down didn’t make me less creative. It simply helped me reconnect with creativity.
I would love to hear how you embrace slow creativity and slowing down in your own practice. Do you struggle with it, or does the process come easily to you?
PS. I’m Made by Dyslexia, so expect small typos and big thinking.
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