This week’s guest post is from another friend, Vanessa Ricci-Thode. She sent me SO MANY beautiful photos of her garden that I couldn’t pick just one or two. There are extra ones down at the bottom. All photo credit to Vanessa herself. Enjoy!
I first saw the phrase “rest like it’s your job” in regards to recovering from covid to help reduce the risk of long covid. But it applies to so many things. Life under late stage capitalism doesn’t allow for rest—rest is mocked and self-care seen as weak. But when we push too hard, we eventually run out of juice. This applies to all types of labour, including creative pursuits.
I’ve had depression my entire adult life and in my teens and twenties, writing was what got me through. Writing gave me worlds to retreat into and characters to fill the holes in my social life. But as I got older and became a mother and everything got more difficult, writing often became another chore. Or something I was desperate to do but could never find the time or energy.
Sometimes life just gets in the way. When this happens, I try to sit down with my schedule and see what I can move around or what I can drop in order to make time for writing. I used to sacrifice sleep, but I know better now. I usually cut TV first, and then look at chores that can be put off just a little longer. That’s often enough to get through a rough patch.
But then sometimes the “rough patch” isn’t merely writer’s block, lack of time or even depression—it’s burnout. And friends, you cannot push through burnout. Trying to make burnout recovery go faster makes it that much longer.
I hit the wall of burnout during the first lockdowns of 2020 and it did not let up until spring of 2022, and even then, writing was a difficult slog. It took forever for me to write a short story when I first got back to writing. I did NaNoWriMo that year and it was also a slog, when previously writing well over the word goal had been a breeze for me. I had a burst of writing in July of this year where I was able to write a lot of words very quickly—words that I was very happy with and had fun making. I hadn’t experienced this since late 2019 and it was amazing. But the slog came back in November for NaNoWriMo again. It’s still hanging around. My current NaNo novel sits half finished and I just can’t.
Sometimes I worry that I’ll never get back to writing the way I used to. And maybe I won’t. There is some reassurance in the fact that I can write at all, a little bit here and there. And blogging and article writing hasn’t been affected (yet) so that’s something.
But I know better than to push too hard.
Getting through burnout (as much as I’m actually through it) took a lot of work (ha!) and retraining myself when it came to how I thought about productivity. Sometimes you need to just exist. To just survive. And that’s okay.
First, I played a lot of video games and did a lot of crying. I started getting enough sleep. As the weather improved and I started to cope a little more, I spent a lot of time outside. I went for walks around my neighbourhood. And as it became apparent that the lockdowns here were going to stretch on well into the summer, I looked to bigger projects to occupy my time.
Writing couldn’t be it. But I did a curbside pick up of a load of craft supplies and started painting again. And then I did curbside plant pick up and started gardening. I’ve been veggie gardening for a lot of years, but hadn’t tried much with flower gardening. My house came with some small, lovely perennial gardens and I didn’t do much to add to them, just doing the basics to keep them looking nice. But the patches of my front yard that were lawn were sad scraggly things and I’d been dreaming of turning them into something better for years.
So with a lot of time to kill, I dug out my lawn by hand, transplanted a few things, divided a few well established plants, and made something beautiful out of something ugly. Planning which plants would go where and making sure I would have something blooming from spring thaw to autumn frost took a tremendous amount of research. It got me through a very difficult winter and another round of spring lockdowns. Over those two years I couldn’t write, I planted somewhere in the vicinity of 1500 bulbs, most of them early spring blooms, and several dozen plants.
The rewards were so very worth it. I have a sea of colour in my yard at a time of year most gardens are still dead, brown things. And I do have things that bloom straight through until there have been a few hard frosts. And my garden is now a monarch butterfly waystation, and a source of joy and pride.
While I was digging grass and pulling weeds and fighting squirrels and planting bulbs, I had a new creative outlet, but also the time and space for my brain to rest and to heal and to reforge connections. Until one day the right writing prompt lit a fire and the words came back to me.
And I learned that it’s okay to just exist. Continued existence is a good thing! It’s okay to set one passion aside for another. Or for nothing. It’s okay to reread your favourite book ten times in a row. It’s okay to do whatever you need to do to pass the time your body needs to process and recover. The things you love will still be there when you’re ready again.
Vanessa is a fantasy author whose life seldom strays from the world of books, especially during winter hibernation. Even her volunteer work revolves around the literary world, formerly as the long-time municipal liaison to her region for National Novel Writing Month, and currently as co-founder of KW Writers Alliance. She is also a member of SFWA and TWUC.
When she’s not being bookish, she’s into astronomy, hiking, gardening, and has a personal goal to visit all the national parks. Don’t ask her about her love of trees unless you’ve got some time. She loves Halloween and hates to be cold. Vanessa lives in Waterloo (no, the other one) with her spouse, daughter, and dogs, where she can be found in her butterfly garden, achieving her final form as a forest witch. To learn more, visit www.thodestool.ca or follow her on social media @VRicciThode
