Why I Had To Take A Break From Writing My Adventure Travel Blog
It’s been one year since I’ve written a blog here. Why I had to take a break for a year, and how I’m getting my spark back.
I looked at the date of my last blog. It was marked July 24, 2024… One whole year ago.
A lot has happened in the last year. I almost feel like a whole different person.
I tried to start this blog up again a couple of months ago, but I just couldn’t get it together. I had planned it in January and opened the tab at the start of May. For some reason, I just couldn’t seem to write.
Really, I couldn’t seem to write about anything… which is a problem for someone who writes and edits for a living. I write my own business blog and social media posts, I write blogs and emails, sales pages and ads for my clients. I’m also a ghostwriter and editor (yes, I write and edit books for people). But I was stuck… hardcore stuck.
I defaulted to using AI for a lot of things, and I was not producing, what I felt was, my best work. Not that I would ever submit something that was bad, it just wasn’t as top-notch as I knew I was capable of. Nothing was inspired. I just copy/pasted a lot of things, adding my own thoughts occasionally, but I was barely getting by. I knew that I wasn’t in it.
Originally, I started having these issues because of burnout.
Something I have discovered about myself is that as an undiagnosed Autistic person, I continuously try to fit myself into the neurotypical box and meet ableist expectations. Because of this, I experience stress and burnout more easily than most people. I have been seeing a professional and we have identified this about myself.
But somehow, I go right back into old patterns and push myself too hard.
By last summer (honestly, even earlier), I was struggling to work enough to make large monthly payments on some debt I was paying off. The terms are super strict, and if I missed a payment, there were serious consequences. I was saying yes to more and more work just to make enough for those payments and to live, so it became just that. Work.
I was saying yes to a bunch of things I didn’t really love (not the point of starting your own business), just because I needed to keep up, that I lost myself. I wasn’t inspired; I was working long days and not making progress on my goals. (Goals? What even were goals?) I was pushing myself past my capacity because of the ableist expectations placed on me regarding this debt (and the reason why I had it in the first place). But here’s the thing…
The body always keeps score.
You might be able to pretend to BS your way through, but at some point, your body says, “I’ve had enough,” and you wind up burned out and unable to function. That leads to only the mandatory things getting done. Only the work that you have to do ends up getting done (and honestly, not even then).
When you can only do required work, that doesn’t leave a lot of time for pleasure tasks.
Eventually, you stop finding pleasure in your work. That’s exactly what happened to me.
Even the tasks that I loved (blog writing, etc.) started to become hard to do. I had to force myself to do it. Simply just going through the motions to make my deadlines. The blogs that were getting done on a regular basis were client blogs.
But something shifted in me this week.
Realistically, it’s been shifting for a bit, but I definitely noticed it this week. The debt I have been working diligently to pay off in the timeframe is almost fully paid off. My workload is somehow easing (or maybe I’m getting a better flow). This week, I switched my daily schedule a little bit (a difficult thing for an Autistic person to do), where I start my day with learning and courses and have loved doing that.
I love learning, but what I found was, by the end of my workday, I did not have the brain power to even want to dive into learning anything. But starting my workday with coursework or other learning means I am at maximum brain power… And bonus, I still got all of my work done.
I wrote my business blog this week, and while I used AI to help with creating an outline a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t use it to write the blog post, not even one paragraph. Sometimes I don’t have the energy to look things up, so I’ll ask ChatGPT to explain something to me. Instead, I was inspired and wrote from the heart. The ideas just flowed, and something I noticed when I finished… It was the best blog post I had written for myself in a long time.
I was starting to feel inspired again!
I also realized I was starting to get excited about the future again.
I was visualizing what I wanted, making goals, but also making plans.
For a while, I have been casually looking at a diploma in editing from my dream university (the one I had actually wanted to go to when I was applying for universities in high school, but ended up being too scared to apply). This week, I started visualizing myself applying and thinking about the essay I would write for it. I visualized myself actually doing it and succeeding!
I also started thinking about submitting articles for publications. This was a goal I had set for 2024, and then I couldn’t handle doing anything extra. I was barely getting by, and I ended up not writing anything.
All of the goals I had have suddenly started coming back this week, unconsciously.
I am finally seeing an end to my situation. I’m almost finished paying off this debt, and I am ready to start living again. For the past two years, I’ve just existed and pushed to make my payments. I did all I could do and just got through.
I had started to not like my work anymore. Even my CEO days didn’t give me the joy they once did. I wasn’t really working toward anything. But now I’m close. I’m so close.
I’m starting to breathe again. Last year, the end was so far away. I was in the middle of it and I couldn’t see the end, so I just kept pushing through. I felt lost and hopeless. But I’m starting to regain my sense of self. I’m starting to regain my passion and my energy for things that I haven’t had in a while.
I’m committing to having earlier finishes to my days, I’m focusing better and getting work done. I’m scrolling less during work hours, I’m engaged in what I’m doing.
I didn’t really have any big wake-up call. Nothing terrible happened that made me take action and turn my life around (like my car accident in 2017… That’s a story for another time). Burnout is always a cycle, so chances are this will not be the last time I experience it. I push myself a lot; however, I am getting better at setting boundaries to avoid it.
This time it was a long stint.
But there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
