Nurturing a Creative Life After Burnout
featuring an audio essay from the story archive of "The Librarian Monologues"
Keeping Creative Time
It’s never too late to be the creative person you want to be. 💖
The act of burning out shed light on my creative life—or my inability to nurture one.
—The Librarian Monologues—
by J. Faye D’Avanza
Dear, Creative Friends—At age seventeen, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but by age thirty-seven, when I burned out from a job that I loved as a public librarian, I was forced to ask myself questions about how I was living my life, how I was showing up for myself, my loved ones, and my community.
What was stopping me from being the creative person I wanted to be?
This became the dramatic question that haunted my days, kept me hostage from my sleep at night, and fueled an obsessive four-year search for answers.
What I discovered in this highly personal research project, was the painful truth that I’d never actually been living my life for me. Rather, I’d become the master of ceremonies in a life spent performing for other people, instead of being present with them and myself. This constant giving of my time and energy depleted me to a mental and physical state of feeling like a broken clock beyond repair.
The chronic stress from always running late and on empty, inside the people-pleasing hamster wheel of perfectionism, overworking, and overgiving, left no breathing room for me to power the creative life I longed to live; the only life I wanted to live, and the life I needed to live so I could feel most alive and at home with, well—me.
Selfless. It’s the raw ingredient required in the master recipe for burnout.
—The Librarian Monologues—
by J. Faye D’Avanza
The question that came next was: how to begin?
I didn’t know how to create a life that nourished me, but being the nerdy librarian that I am, I turned to books for answers. Self-inquiry came not only through reading—it unfolded through sensory experiences and conversations with other creatives and healers, slowly reconnecting my mind, body, and soul. That transformative time period has since integrated to become the infrastructure that supports my whole creative life.
I am ready to share more fully the stories and knowledge I’ve gained from DIY-ing my burnout recovery and finding my way back to the life I once longed for. As creatives we are called to create well-nourished lives for ourselves—lives that are sustainable, joyful, and spacious enough to move through the energetic cycles of being human without fear of judgment or shame. Knowing how to do this for ourselves is a skill most of us were never taught growing up at home or in school.
At the heart of my work with Library of Care is the sharing of stories and tools that invite us into conversation about what it means to live a whole creative life. This newsletter is a channel for that conversation to flow.
I believe that creativity is nourished through relationships. Choosing ourselves first is how we begin to build a home for a whole creative life that grows rather than confines, that gives as much as it receives, that is open, curious, responsive, and engaged in the shared presence of experiencing this magical gift of being alive.
Below you will find an audio essay from the story archive of “The Librarian Monologues.” It’s an excerpt from an unreleased body of work that I wrote in the first six months after quitting my job as a community engagement librarian from a public library career that spanned a total of twenty-two years in the field. In true librarian monologue style, it was first drafted in the voice recorder app on my phone during a time when I was struggling to find my purpose as an artist without an audience.
Burnout is the result of chronic stress from living in the modern age without the time, space, awareness, or resources to successfully manage it. Work is just a place where we spend the majority of our time. It’s the obvious culprit, and it’s the hardest thing to change.
—The Librarian Monologues—
by J. Faye D’Avanza
If my story sparks something inside you, and you want to dive deeper, then come join me for the six-week workshop series Beyond Creative Burnout (Feb 5-Mar 12) held live and in person at Story Parlor in Asheville, North Carolina, or for the one-hour webinar Let’s Talk Beyond Creative Burnout (Feb 17) on Zoom.
Thank you for being here with me.
Enjoy the excerpt from the story archive below.
Take care, y’all.
<3Faye
An excerpt from The Librarian Monologues
Listen or Read
Burnout is a failure of being whole. It’s the constant pressure of having to leave fragments of yourself everywhere you go. And when you have no fragments left for yourself, that’s the moment when you are faced with the choice to accept that you’re burned out, except you probably don’t even know what it is—you haven’t been able to name it—you just know it’s a feeling, this thing inside of you, this nameless thing inside of you.
Until one day you happen to be reading an email by a women’s empowerment coach that talks about burnout, that names it, that leads to an article that went viral in 2019, and was so popular it was expanded into a book, but you were so busy in 2019 you didn’t know about that.
You didn’t know the fragments of your being were gone. Well, you kind of knew they were running out but it wasn’t dire yet. Warning signs were flashing. Then the pandemic happened. You held on. You just kept going, for what?! A time when the world, everyone in it and the systems would change? The body revolts and the mind makes up stories. You might begin to feel like there is no period of this ending. And I’m here to tell you, this holding on to your resentful burnt ends will become your perpetual state.
The general advice to recover from burnout is to gather yourself together, do all the self care so you can relax. And after working through the to do list of all of those self-care prescriptions—by yourself—you conclude, well, fuck! It’s not going to get any better because I’ve been trying, I’ve been trying as hard as I can.
It’s time to let go now. I can’t put the pieces of myself back together because that wouldn’t make sense. I don’t want to go back. So instead, I’m creating myself anew.
There’s something regenerative about that.
It’s scary. Terrifying.
But I’d rather do this. I’d rather face this unknown. Then stare down every day knowing the treadmill I have to run, and not having the energy to keep up with it as I continue scattering whatever dust is left.
In November 2021, I joined the 4.5 million Americans who quit their job during The Great Resignation.
As a public librarian who began her career in the wake of The Great Recession, it seemed I’d become bookended by time. Trapped in a story that perpetuated feelings of fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, and a constant belief that nothing I did would ever be good enough. In quitting my job, I saw myself as a part of something bigger, even if at the time I felt more alone.
While in the height of my burnout anxiety, I found comfort in capturing the many strands of thoughts and questions I now asked myself on index cards. What began with the question, Why did I burn out in a job that I loved? morphed into, How do you teach yourself to write a book when you are recovering from burnout, and on most days, you only have the energy to write a fragment of a thought?
The act of burning out shed light on my creative life—or my inability to nurture one. While not classified as a medical condition, the World Health Organization defines burnout in the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases as being a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. “Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”
To me, burnout is the result of chronic stress from living in the modern age without the time, space, awareness, or resources to successfully manage it. Work is just a place where we spend the majority of our time. It’s the obvious culprit, and it’s the hardest thing to change.
Andy Warhol once said, “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
I used to think it was my job as a librarian to save the world. It’s an intoxicating message that many of us who enter into public service careers take too seriously because the work is undervalued, under-resourced, underpaid, and often misunderstood. If only we are more passionate, more giving, and more flexible we will be seen as caring more for the communities we serve than for ourselves. Selfless. It’s the raw ingredient required in the master recipe for burnout.
I now believe it’s my job as a person to cultivate a cycle of regeneration. I have learned to find the joy in leaving fragments of myself everywhere I go, because now I know how to create more of myself everyday.
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🐦🔥 Thursdays, February 5-March 12 | Beyond Creative Burnout: A 6-Week Workshop to Rest, Digest, Play, & Create Again
6-8:15pm | Story Parlor, Asheville, NC
🍳 [Rescheduled Date!] Sunday, February 15 | Creatives Over Easy: A Monthly Soul Reset for More Community, Connection, and Creativity
10am-12pm | Story Parlor, Asheville, NC
🔥 Tuesday, February 17 | Let’s Talk Beyond Creative Burnout
6-7pm | Webinar for In the Studio Online Workshop Week
Until Next Time
Keeping Creative Time
It’s never too late to be the creative person you want to be. 💖
Before you go, enjoy a song from the playlist I call . . . Odes to Time.
Lucius ft. Brandi Carlile & Sheryl Crow —“Dance Around It”—Second Nature, 2022.
Keeping Creative Time follows a former public librarian and perpetually late clockmaker’s daughter as she grows and heals her whole creative life in the twenty-first century—one breath, step, and morning page at a time—sharing stories and tools from the heart of her creative community in Asheville, North Carolina.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for listening!
J. Faye D’Avanza, MSLIS
Artist, Writer, Librarian
Founder + Creative Guide at Library of Care
jfayedavanza.com
Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a book purchase from one of the book links I’ve shared. ☺️❤️📚