In the lead up to my 7 week travelling adventure around Australia and Bali, I worked myself flat out. Achieving so much last year both within my work life and personal life, that I’m unbelievably proud of, but unfortunately it came at a cost.
I naively threw around the word burnout quite loosely, knowing I was wearing myself a bit thin, but with the outlook that it would all be worth it once I was away on my travels. Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite the case, and despite the trip being incredibly inspiring and joyful, it was also unbelievably overwhelming. The experience of travelling for a long time, taking in new surroundings, and being out of my routine, on top of already being very burnt-out, caused my mental health to deteriorate. Towards the 2nd half of our travels I experienced a fair few meltdowns, and along with this came a worsening of my mood and outlook.
Returning back to the UK was thankfully mostly quite grounding, as I had people and places around me that enabled me to calm down and get back to feeling more myself. I definitely found aspects of returning home overwhelming too, and unfortunately took on more work than I was able to handle, which definitely did not help. I did however after a month of being back, and feeling pretty horrendous, finally accept I wasn’t able to keep going at the pace I wanted. I cancelled a project midway through (something I’ve never done before) to give myself some breathing space, and started looking for a therapist. I was becoming quite hopeful that this would be the start of feeling better, but unfortunately shortly after this I got laryngitis and became possibly the most ill I’ve ever been… I’ve heard a lot of people say the phrase “make sure you rest, or your body will force you to” and I feel this was a perfect example of this. As a result of being ill, I had to cancel markets I was booked on and paid for, had no hope in completing any projects, making stock or even replying to emails. It took around 2 weeks for my physical health to get back to a functional state, but my mental health had only deteriorated even more. My to-do list felt like a completely unachievable mountain of tasks, but I needed to do something as my flow of income has understandably taken a very hard hit.
It’s now been over 2 months since coming home and I FINALLY feel back to my normal self. I’ve worked my way through the vast majority of my mountain to-do list whilst also prioritising self care. My income is still certainly not thriving which doesn’t help my stress levels, but working myself to the bone again isn’t an option right now.
I’ve restocked with all of my retailers, worked a couple of markets, completed a few commissions, reached out to shops, and made some baby steps on personal projects. Thankfully, sales wise the markets went really well, as I was really dreading an exhausting and disappointing day, but they gave me the confidence boost I desperately needed and encouraged me to book in for more as well as restocking some products.
Each of these tasks were no easy feat, but now on the other side of it, I’m reminded of the incredibly feeling of satisfaction that comes with my work, and I’m finally at a place again where I’m proud of my current self and not negatively self comparing with others, or even my past self.
Throughout my episode of burnout I particularly struggled with self comparison when it came to my Instagram presence. I am however, coming to accept that this desire to constantly create content, is exhausting and also really not that beneficial. Yeah pushing your work in different ways to engage an online audience is defiantly helpful, but I think many platforms encourage this constant train of media to be produced, and many of us fall into the trap that we need this to be successful. We don’t, and I’m always trying to remind myself of this.
My website has always been my favourite way to showcase my work, so I’ve been putting in there hours here and there to make sure my website is up to date, and the best it can be! I’ve also spent some time recently making my instagram page more similar to my website, by preparing posts to pin to the top of my profile that answers some FAQs regarding shops, market dates and commissions. This hopefully, will enable me to waste less time on the app all together, and consequently spend more time focusing on illustration!