I am recovering from the worst bout of burnout I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.
I am no stranger to burnout. I experienced listlessness after high school and college where for 5 years straight I juggled work and school. I left everything behind and started my life over after my father’s suicide which was absolutely warrented. And in 2017, I took a weekend getaway to upstate New York where all I did was watch Catfish on MTV in my AirBnB. It was what I needed to soothe my soul after being unceremoniously fired from my job for advocating for more diversity and inclusion.
Every batch of burnout is triggered by something different but it’s usally made up of the same ingredients. For me, the recipe for burnout is a mix of pushing against systemic issues in our society, trying to work through unforseen circumstances and attempting to move forward while other areas of my life are pulling me back. Basically, I give more energy than I get back, and with every move I make, friction builds up and slowly burns me out.
Generally, I’m the kind of person that treats moments of discomfort as an invitation to reflect and grow. Understanding the factors that lead me to these periods of burnout helps me become more aware of my needs.
But this time around there were so many ingredients thrown into the pot it was hard to deconstruct exactly how and why I became beyond burnt out.
For the last 8 months I’ve been navigating through it. At some moments I was almost convinced that my burnt out state was going to be permanent. I had a sense of what had caused it, but only when I figured out the secret ingredients to my latest bout of burnout did I fully grasp what I needed.
The Conditions Were Ripe
Burnout was a hot topic during the pandemic — it still is. It makes sense that being in a state of constant fear, weighing the risk of every decision, the isolation and the instability of the world paired with the fact that society demands that we be as normal as possible and stay productive takes a lot of energy.
But this round of burnout wasn’t just the result of the pandemic. For many like myself, all of this was just added weight to the generations of societal issues we are already carrying around. I’m a bi-racial, multicultural woman. With everywhere I go and everything I do I have to spend extra energy to prove my worth and justify the space I occupy. I have to prepare extra research to back up my work that will inevitably be scrutinized. I have to dull down my behavior to make others around me more comfortable in public. If I make one small mistake it just confirms all the biases I spent so much time pushing against.
I don’t necessarily have to do these things — but I do sense it is still expected of me in certain situations. And just like getting fired for not being a “culture fit” for initiating uncomfortable conversations about race and equity, you can feel the added resistance as you try to push through. When you’re anything but a white guy you develop a hyper awareness of where you are and how you’re perceived in the grand scheme of things - a hyper awareness that takes up a lot of energy already.
The Ingredients
Before the pandemic I was a contributing Food & Travel Editor with USA TODAY 10Best and (was and still am) the host of Check, Please! Philly, a television show for Philadelphia’s local PBS station, WHYY. After years of hard work, I was finally in a position where I could give space and a platform to the diversity and inclusion that I wanted to see in food and travel media. It was the perfect balance of work that I loved along with stimulating challenges that helped me grow professionally and as an individual.
March 16, 2020, I was in the WHYY studio getting ready to film Season 2 of Check, Please! Philly when we put the show on hold due to the pandemic. Days later, everything shut down and, like many people, I found myself scrambling to stay afloat. I was trying to live during a pandemic while constantly pivoting to stabilize my career — a career that was built entirely on travel and dining out in restaurants, things which were extremely difficult to do and, at many points, irresponsible to promote.
I consider myself to be extremely lucky. My job was already remote and my family and I were safe, but being the main source of income for my household, I definitely felt pressure to keep our finances secure.
For nearly two years I rejected pitches from travel writers wanting to cover destinations the CDC was actively telling people not to travel to. I picked up every gig I was able to, putting in around 70 hours per week to recoup the lost income of Check, Please! Philly being on hiatus. And I spent nearly all of my free time creating FREE content to keep my personal brand relevant (like this here newsletter).
By December 2021, I could feel my burnout coming to a rolling boil. I was drained. I felt stagnant. My thoughts were becoming scattered. I couldn’t focus on a single task. My creativity was fizzling out and activities I love like writing, cooking, reading psycho thrillers and making silly at home videos, felt like they were impossible to do. I was losing interest in everything that gave me life.
I had to do something quick before burnout would boil over and cause a mess. So I did what I always do when I sense burnout on the horizon - I planned time off to reset and restrategize because clearly something wasn’t working for me.
I’m notorious for spreading myself too thin - a trait I likely picked up young when I subconsciously realized I have to work harder than others. I was accustomed to how thinly I could spread myself and knew my limits in the Before Times. And to be honest, I was sometimes grateful for my dilligence. Not only has it gotten me far but when opportunity arises, I’m always ready. But during the pandemic, I ended up taking on more work than I had lost and spread myself so thin I became translucent.
While in survival mode I said yes to every project — to too many projects. I learned so much along the way and I’m very proud of the work I accomplished, but I was spinning so many plates I was having trouble keeping them all going and was losing focus on my long term career goals.
The Process
As 2022 began, I made the hard decision to dial things back and commit myself only to the projects that focused on the things I wanted to pursue. Sometimes you need to trim things back in order to keep growing.
I started saying no to projects. I took a break from personal projects. I even stepped away from a job I loved for nearly 5 years - being a contributing Food & Travel Editor with USA TODAY 10Best.
As much as I enjoyed being an editor, I decided that I am happier as a writer. I enjoy research, I love interviewing people and I am driven by the thrill of following stories down the rabbit hole. Storytelling is my passion and as great as it was to facilitate the work of other writers, I wanted to focus on my own writing. That paired perfectly with my on-camera work, and with Check, Please! Philly Season 2 coming up (yes! the show is coming back) I knew that these were the two areas I wanted — no, needed — to focus my attention.
This was usually the process for burnout. Let go of what no longer suits me. Carry with me only that which gives me life. Make room for what comes next.
I thought this was just what I needed for my burnout. But despite having a steady stream of freelance assignments flowing to me, I was becoming even more drained than when I started. I went from being spread too thin to being almost completely depleated.
What was wrong? I was doing the work that I loved, writing and reporting on the stories that I was passoinate about, but I still sensed that I was putting more energy in than I was getting back.
The Secret Ingredient
There are a lot of uncontrollable factors that contribute to burnout — kind of like how weather affects the way sourdough bread bakes. You can control the amount of flour, water and yeast to an extent, but you can’t control how on a cold day your dough will take longer to rise than it would on a hot and humid day.
The pandemic, systemic issues, white supremicist patriarchy — they’re all factors that can’t necessarily be controlled on the individual level but are issues organizations and groups are tackling collectively (that’s a conversation too big for the point I’m trying to make). These ingredients made sense as contributors to my 8 months of languishing. But there was one ingredient that I didn’t account for: the exploitative nature of the current creative ecosystem.
I’m not trying to vilify anyone or any organization. I loved working with USA TODAY 10Best, I feel valued working with WHYY, the Philadelphia Inquirer has given me a lot of creative freedom, and my current employer, McClatchy, has invigorated my creative spirit and has played a huge part in lifting me out of my burnout. Truly, the teams of people you work with make a world of a difference.
But there are many occassions where the media industry as a whole undervalues the work of creatives, especially freelancers. Rates for creative work are outrageously low while the demand for quality research and reporting remains high. I’m the kind of writer who refuses to let the quality of my storytelling suffer, even when it means I’m putting in more time and effort than it’s worth. That’s not just because my name is in the byline, but because I take pride in my work and deeply believe that readers deserve accurate information with a balanced and fair perspective.
Oftentimes, the extremely low pay isn’t even a manager or an editor’s fault. In a lot of cases, their hands are tied. They may want to pay you more, especially to retain you as a talent, but they seriously don’t have the budget. In some cases they may want to hire you as staff but again, don’t have the resources to do so. But understanding what’s happening on the other side of the negotiating table doesn’t soften the blow when you know there are staff making several times more than you with more of a sense of job security and benefits for doing similar work.
So here I was, doing the work I loved with my own editorial calendar packed AF, but just scraping by. I was creating pitches, waiting for editors to respond, going out and doing the research, using my own money to pay for gas, buying meals, taking photos and videos, and doing the work for a few hundred dollars at a time — a few hundred dollars that didn’t come in a timely manner and you sometimes had to hunt down — again not by any fault of an editor or manager but of a system in place meant to pay freelancers 30 to 90 days out.
I was still spread thin, just in a different way. In the world of freelance you get paid for the project, but not necessarily the time from conceptualization and pitching through the end of editing. And you certainly don’t get paid for the weeks it takes for an editor to write you back (again - because they’re also working in an ecosystem that is overloading them with responsibilities).
Now I wouldn’t have gone freelance with editorial clients alone. My client roster was equal parts brands, two of which were anchors that I had worked consistently with over the pandemic. Within weeks of ending my contract with USA TODAY 10Best, one brand — a large, notable kitchen appliance company — just stopped paying their creators entirely, while another cut my projects in half.
Low pay with publications — sure, I get it. But there’s no way brands are struggling. As I sought to replace the brands I’d lost, it was so insulting when companies with large commercial budgets didn’t want to pay more for branded content. Some brands even had the audacity to ask for free labor.
I was becoming frustrated and even resentful of the work I love. I had found myself, yet again, in a place where I had to work extra hard to go half as far. I kept thinking to myself, after a decade of being a successful food and travel writer, with a portfolio packed with milemarkers ranging from developing an entire digital publication with America’s largest newspaper company to being an Emmy Award-Winning TV host — when would I “arrive.”
The cherry on top: social media, likely the largest contributor to the current state of media. As a person whose career is literally creating content and being a public personality, it blows my mind that these platforms have conned people into creating content - let alone video content - FOR FREE.
The idea of creating content for free after creating content for very low pay was beyond exhausting. And with that, I was completely burnt out.
Emerging from Burnout
Retrospect is 20/20. I didn’t realize just how much the explotative nature of the creative ecosystem was impacting me until I found myself in a healthier place. Over the course of a month, after I accepted a position with McClatchy and returned to the set of Check, Please! Philly, I knew I was finally on the right track. I felt myself coming out of the fog and back into myself. I had moments of inspiration, I found peace in my downtime and the moment I sat down on the set of Check, Please! Philly I completely snapped out of my burnout. It was only from the safe security of being in a place where my work and creativity were valued and fairly compensated when I could see clearly what was wrong.
For over two years, I had put an immense strain on my creativity. Every hour of my day had a monetary value attached to it, and in order to make the income that I needed to support my household, I had to crank out at least 10 well thought out researched articles per month ranging anywhere from 800 to 2,500 words. The need for productivity strangled my creativity.
If there’s anything that I’ve learned from this bout of burnout it is this:
Creativity needs room to breathe.
Creativity needs stability and security to thrive.
If you’re in a state of constant anxiety wondering where your next paycheck is coming from, your creativity is going to feel that pressure. And like a vulnerable child being told to perform on command, your creativity might become exhausted by the frequency of being called to the stage and entertaining the masses under the heavy burden of expectation.
Freelance was a great gig when I was young and hungry and I only had myself and rent shared with roommates to take care of (I was able to pay off my student loans after my father’s suicide left me with a modest life insurance policy). But when I started out, I was making $1 - $2 per word.
Now freelance writing is treated as if it’s a hobby. It’s treated like a vanity project someone pursues when they’re feeling creative on a whim and not as a careerpath all on its own.
Freelance writing clearly isn’t for everyone, but I do wonder who is it for?
A big thank you to all of my readers and friends who still supported this newsletter during the hiatus.
This newsletter will be coming back in some form. Now that I have more stability in my life, I am planning how to structure this newsletter in a way that is valuable to you and also supportive to me.
You will be hearing from me again in the coming weeks. I have been quiet on all social media channels lately because I have been pretty consumed in projects that I can’t say too much about right now, but they’re all going to drop around the same time this fall. So stay tuned! This might be some of the most exciting projects of my career.
Could not agree more about the current media ecosystem. Not to go all commie, but I think the growth of freelance culture at the expense of staff positions has killed us as well -- I have friends who worked at Condé Nast and were laid off staff jobs and then offered the same jobs the next day as contract workers with no benefits. There’s something to be said for a) unionizing or at the very least organizing with our coworkers and b) exploring models where the creators own their work and the publication as a whole.