Sabbatical & Creative Foresight

Today's kindling:

• Recognizing burnout

• Limiting beliefs around writing & creativity

• One explanation for how I got here

• What I’m learning on sabbatical about how I want t …

Recognizing burnout

In true burnout form, I still didn’t recognize it as burnout initially. I saw it as failure, lack of commitment, insecurity, self-sabotage, proof that I didn’t have “it” in me.

The pain and confusion of the burnout state is severe. It is worth avoiding at all costs. This is the first time where I am truly able to acknowledge that. It steals. It steals energy, joy, presence, ideas, motivation, confidence, trust and hope.

It’s the opposite of activated creativity.

And that’s what I want — activated, sustainable creativity. I have a ways to go to achieve that, much less maintain it. But I’m on the path.

Limiting beliefs around writing & creativity

I’m learning that I hold limiting beliefs around what creativity can look like in my life. Such as:

• Writing & creative work will only be side hustles or bring in side hustle-level income

• I can’t write and create what I want and also make money from it

• My writing is valuable only in service to other business endeavors (not in and of itself)

• People who know me in real life will reject me if I succeed in building a creative writing career

• Growing/having an audience is inherently vain

Many of these narratives have been buried so deep down, I didn’t even realize they were there. Others were masked so well that I couldn’t see them for what they were.

I am feeling so pulled to pursue a writing career. As if it is my destiny.

And its sobering how unprepared I feel for that.

I’ve known that I was meant to write since college. Since I chose Writing as my major and started my blog. I began writing my first book the year after I graduated and followed through on every step to publish it.

So where did I get so off track?

There are countless answers to that.

One explanation for how I got here

One answer is: as I pursued writing and publishing the book, I had to learn a lot about building a business. I knew that I wanted people to be able to find and read my book — it wasn’t enough for me to just complete the act of writing it for myself. So it necessitated marketing, developing campaigns, and expanding the message of my book to speaking events and workshops.

I was young. I was so bullish about it all.

Anyways, I came to a fork in the road personally. I wanted to write and talk about other things than my faith (topic of my first book). Buuuuuut, I had no model for that. And the criticism/judgement I feared and faced for changing was too painful to navigate.

So instead, I chose to use the business skills I’d developed to build a creative service-based business as a career coach.

I opened my career coaching business in 2019, and focused on supporting creative professionals. I was still out there building something, but it wasn’t nearly as personal as writing can be.

For a few years I helped dozens of creative people make career changes, increase their salaries, start side businesses and find more alignment between their priorities and work.

Then my own priorities evolved after becoming a mom. And this deep knowing that the business I’d built was not my life’s work took root in my chest.

I followed that feeling pretty blindly, trusting it would work out in the future. I chose to go back to full-time work to bank some cash, then 6 months later closed my business.

While on maternity leave with my second child in 2023, I invested in self-care and attention more than I ever had before. And, surprisingly, writing kept popping into my subconscious. The creative awakening that came from this is what led me to start Rekindle.

But, interestingly enough, I could only conceptualize writing as a means to another end - like I could write a newsletter but it would be inservice to another rendition of my coaching business.

And this is at the heart of my disconnect between knowing marketing best practices and writing this newsletter. I want to create art. But I feel pressure to have this be a marketing channel.

What I’m learning on sabbatical about how I want to move forward

What I am learning on this sabbatical is that I deeply want to be a creator for a living. I want writing and making art to be my main thing. I want to use my business skills to build a business around my writing — not the other way around (using my writing to build another form of business).

I don’t know what that looks like or how I’ll get there. But I believe that I can figure it out by taking small steps. And I am committed to trying to pursue it without driving myself into burnout.

I’ve long been interested in the build in public method for content creation, but struggled to do that when I was building other businesses. I plan to shift this newsletter in that direction — sharing progress on my writing projects and how I’m growing in the opportunities and challenges that come with that.

My current thinking is getting back to Sunday sends in which I recap the previous week — what I did and how it went. I think that would add healthy reflection and accountability to my practice, while at the same time creating a valuable resource weekly and holistically for you.

But here’s a highlight: I wrote the first 1,200 words of my first NOVEL the day before Thanksgiving. And wow, am I grateful for that!

I’m grateful for you, too!

Thank you for your patience with me (even if it’s really just that you forgot I had a newsletter all together! ha!).

Warmly,
Jennifer