Some progress on #burnoutrecovery after my partner spent three weeks taking care of me. She's really refilled my emotional tank and helped me to regain some of my self-esteem. I'm feeling proud of who I am in at least some ways. She also helped with day to day tasks a lot, which allowed me to get better quality rest and freed up some energy for cooking healthy meals.
It's difficult to adjust now that she's gone back to Canada. I'm struggling with things like washing dishes, staying hydrated, and deciding what to do with myself when I'm awake. Also, I overdid it on the trip to London to see her to the airport, and it's thrown me into a crash with higher heart rate and increased fatigue. It's hard to choose between being horizontal as much as possible and maintaining good sleep hygiene.
I had a consultation with an NHS talking therapies service this week, and they are going to get back to me on whether and how they can help me. I haven't had any indication that my case might be too complex for them, but I'm nervous that my honesty about being a plural system might become an issue. Together we identified that my main therapy goal would be to restore my capacity for excitement, and reduce the impact that resentment and dread have on my enjoyment of my own and other people's art.
A very embarrassing thought that keeps coming up when the career grief sets in is "I wanted to be loved". I am loved of course, but my heart has been aching for a long time over the loss of creative community and audience that happened over the past decade, which intensified when #multiplesclerosis limited my capacity and mobility. I always knew that it's foolish to use art to try to be loved, and I just hoped I wasn't doing that, or justified it by distinguishing horizontal community from hierarchical creator-audience relationships. But honestly, the grief is telling me that I really did want to get a kind of love back after putting all that effort into my work, whether it was videogames or the bookshop or theatre. It was after all a labour of love, and now it feels like it was unrequited.
In contrast to that, I keep getting messages from people who want to hire me or work with me. I shouldn't believe the thoughts that say "nobody wants what I have to offer". It's just complicated because right now I don't have the capacity to do the things that they need me to do, including the emotional capacity to stay positive for long enough to have a productive discussion about a project.
I find myself longing for a way to sustain myself for the next year while archiving my last 15 years' work, exploring what it's like to take care of my body and mind properly, and maybe doing a bit of writing and crafting when I have the capacity. On the other side of all that, perhaps I would consider returning to a professional art practice, or maybe I'd develop a practice that's more research-focused like my mum keeps exhorting me to do.
