In Praise of Burnout
I used to think burnout was this mythic thing that happened to some unlucky people somewhere else. But over the course of my life, I’ve gotten pretty familiar with burnout in all of its forms, and I no longer fear it. Burnout is what happens when you push yourself too hard and put too much of yourself into a project, for too long — but it’s also often a result of unpaid labor, especially emotional labor. And burnout seems to happen most often when you’re trying to give back to your community and things get complicated, the way they always do.
Here’s what I’ve learned about burnout:
1) You can definitely take steps to keep yourself from burning out, including pacing yourself and taking breaks and having self-care and asking for help. And admitting when you’re overwhelmed and overtaxed. Burnout is by no means inevitable or necessary.
2) But there’s no shame in burnout. It doesn’t mean you failed or that you let anyone down, unless you made promises you didn’t keep — and then, hopefully you can apologize and people will understand. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with telling people, “I have loved doing this thing, but now I need to take a step back for my own mental and physical health.” Burnout doesn’t mean you gave up. Burnout means you gave something your all, and you feel proud of the work you did. But now you need to take a break. If anything, burnout is something to feel proud of.
I’ve certainly experienced burnout in paying gigs, especially ones which involved long hours and unreal levels of stress. But when I think back to my crispiest, most smoketastic experiences of burning out, they were all volunteer gigs where I was working long hours without much support or recognition.
The first time I experienced burnout was in college, when I worked with a couple of homeless organizations. One of them was a community organization that distributed food to the homeless year-round and ran a shelter during the coldest months. I eventually got to be on the board of directors and also did a ton of overnight volunteer shifts, when the shelter was in operation. The other org was a student group that helped the homeless in various ways, but also raised awareness about homelessness. I got to be good friends with some of our clients and volunteers.
So why did I burn out? Well, it was exhausting work, especially the overnight shifts, working with a population who had fallen through the cracks of the healthcare system in a variety of ways and often needed more help than we could provide. But also, every board meeting tended to turn into an exhausting debate about whether we should be catering only to the most “deserving” homeless people. Some people felt we should only be helping people who were properly grateful, were avoiding drugs and alcohol, or were living their lives the way we thought they should. I always pushed back against these notions, because most of our volunteers were not trained social workers, and we didn’t have the right to judge people just because they needed help.
The actual work was exhausting and demoralizing — we were able to help some people get into permanent housing, but most of the time, we were just providing short-term aid to people with long-term problems. But the politics were the worst part: there were just too many people who believed that because they had housing, they were morally superior to, or smarter than, the homeless. When for the most part, they were just luckier, and it wasn’t our place to make value judgments.
After college, I tried volunteering for another homeless organization. But at our volunteer orientation, the people in charge told us we would be expected to make judgments about whether our clients were living right, or making the right choices, or taking steps to improve their situation. And those clients who weren’t being virtuous enough, according to our personal judgments, would get cut off from services. I started getting flashbacks to all those endless arguments about the “deserving” poor, and bailed.
Since then, I’ve burned out a few other times. I was volunteering for half a dozen queer and sex-positive organizations in San Francisco at one point, and had to scale way back. And for several years, I was spending a lot of time and energy as a trans activist, fighting for trans women to be included in women-only spaces and organizing tons of stuff, including a nationwide spoken-word tour. And then there were the bookstore fundraisers I was helping to put together during the early months of the covid-19 pandemic, along with a whole group of heroic people who all worked their asses off. None of these things ended with me feeling quite as crispy as volunteering with the homeless, but I learned to recognize the tell-tale signs of frazzle.
Over the years, burnout has taught me a lot about myself. I’ve learned that I’m not particularly good at activism, in the sense of campaigning or arguing with people on the other side of an issue. And a lot of my strengths as a creative writer, like my sense of the absurd and my tendency to try and empathize with even the worst people, are liabilities in a political debate. I can also be a bit of a control freak when I’m in a position of authority — a great quality in someone who’s creating a whole fictional world in her head, but not so terrific in a volunteer organization. Also? I don’t always know when to take breaks or pull back, which is honestly a liability as both a volunteer and as a creative writer.
At the same time, burnout has made me a better listener. It’s helped me to be more collaborative, and to take on less myself when other people are able to step up. Burnout has helped me to appreciate everyone else who works hard to make a difference, doing things that I know I wouldn’t be able to do. And burning out on some stuff has helped me to find the stuff that I could commit to long-term, like running Writers With Drinks or writing novels. I’ve had to think more about sustainability and self-care, and become less of a martyr. I’ve gotten more patient with myself and others. I hope so, anyway.
So yeah, I’m weirdly grateful for the times I’ve burned out.
Make no mistake, though: a major cause of volunteer burnout is inadequate social services and shredded safety nets. There’s nothing admirable about leaving whole populations, like the homeless, in precarious long-term situations, and relying on a few social workers or volunteers to fix the problem. In many cases, the real cause of a few people’s burnout is the indifference and complacency of everybody else.
Top image: John Scally (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Something I love this week:
I’m trying to make the most of my HBO Max subscription, and I ran out of episodes of Doom Patrol and Harley Quinn. (And most of the great DC animated TV series of yesteryear are not available, for some reason.) So I’ve been watching Summer Camp Island, which is another Cartoon Network show in the vein of Adventure Time or Steven Universe. And it’s SO GREAT. It’s about a giant summer camp on an island, where the counselors are witches. And there are monsters and yeti and stuff. The show is super cute, but also contains a really interesting critique of excessive cuteness and infantilization. Really fun stuff, totally worth checking out.
My stuff:
I did a conversation with Charles Yu for the paperback release of his novel Interior Chinatown at Greenlight Bookstore, and you can watch it here. And please buy Interior Chinatown from Greenlight Bookstore!
In case you missed it, I posted all of Ines Możdżyńska’s gorgeous artwork of the characters from my novel Victories Greater Than Death on my Instagram!
The Trans-Galactic Bike Ride, a collection of bicycle adventure science fiction featuring trans and non-binary adventurers, is out now, and includes a new story by me!
You can read the first few chapters of Victories Greater Than Death over at Den of Geek!