Creativity Is the Antidote to Burnout: A Creative’s Manifesto for 2021

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We don’t need anyone’s permission to be creative.

I coach clients who can’t seem to connect with their creative potential, often because of burnout. They know they’re creative people, or think they could be, or maybe they were one in their past life, but for some reason their creativity engine is broken. They feel called to create, but can’t make it happen. And it feels awful. It’s like having a terrible itch under your skin you can’t scratch – or worse. Creativity is an essential need of every human being, whether we recognize it or not, and without it our lives cease to be as meaningful. And for some of us, creativity is one of our primary needs. Burnout is an emergency for creatives, because when we lose our ability to be creative, our purpose in this world is gone. Life becomes like a living death.    

But when we try to seek out help, we run into a big problem. Most of the info out there on burnout is useless for creatives. It’s surface-level and it’s mostly saying the same thing. We live in a world of copious information that is all essentially a copy of itself, replicated over and over in the digital dimension through articles, blog posts, videos… Our info reservoir is cluttered with crap. This was my problem when I started looking for help with my own burnout. None of the available information resonated with me. It was all just more of the same. Please just stop with the four things I can do to cure my burnout! That stuff doesn’t work, at least it didn’t for me. The reason is that we don’t understand what burnout is. Not really.       

In its most severe form, burnout is the death of our creative capacities. And for creatives, it is often the result of years of living out of touch with our creative center – as we are required to do in order to “succeed” in conventional ways. So burnout, in creatives, is both caused by, and causes, this loss of ability to be creative. Note that I am not talking about what is typically labeled “creative burnout” here. Creative burnout is a type of fatigue that results from overwork in the creative realm, and taking a break to recharge can help. The kind of burnout I’m talking about results from a disconnection from the creative self; it happens when we have not allowed ourselves to live creativity-centered lives.

This kind of burnout is a whole-life phenomenon, and that’s why it can’t be solved in the way advised in all those burnout resources. You can’t just take up watercoloring and hope that it will fix your existential problem. Before you develop a specific creative practice, you have to open your life up to creativity – fit a creativity lens over your perspective, if you will. A solution to whole-life burnout is a whole-life creativity. What creativity is, at its core, is a type of problem solving. It’s figuring out how to do the stuff of your life in a way that suits you and inspires you. At an intellectual level, it’s figuring out answers to what puzzles you and arouses your curiosity. Creativity as a lifestyle is adaptive, responsive, and open-ended. It’s a way of being in the world.

You can’t develop a satisfying creative practice from the outside in. Without a connection to your creative source, that creative engine at the center of your existence, you will only ever be playing in the shallows of your creative potential. I wrote for years this way, and I turned out some good stuff I’m proud of, but it wasn’t a fulfilling practice. It wasn’t until I developed a sense of myself as a creative being, rather than just someone who does creative stuff sometimes, that I began to feel like I was tapping into my potential. I went from struggling to come up with a single creative idea to finding creative possibility everywhere, all the time, as if creativity is part of the very fabric of the universe. And it is – at the quantum level, our universe is one of infinite potentiality.

So let’s make this new year, 2021, one of tapping that creative potential. We can start by accepting that we have a right to be creative, not just in some things, but in all things. And by acknowledging that we aren’t just people who do creative things – we’re creative beings from the inside out. And finally, by respecting our own creative natures through internalizing the fundamental truth that we don’t need the permission of anyone outside of ourselves to be creative. We already have permission. We just need to open our eyes to it. We are creatives if we decide we are.

So go do it!