When the Work is Burned Out and Broke—but Still Breathing
Capitalism isn't a creative process.
My creativity isn’t on hiatus — it’s applying for loan extensions and chowing down on snacks. A few years ago, I cranked out personal essays and marketing tutorials at a rate that now gives me palpitations. I’m exhausted just remembering how I taught hungry marketers to build brands with glee. I’d oscillate between instructor Felicia and broken Felicia, who wrote sad stories while crying into pillows and choking on the feathers. Look at the velocity on that woman! But then came a moment when I felt I’d said everything I needed to say about marketing. The career I’d pursued for decades started to feel dirty, unseemly—populated by toddler CEOs and influencers who were omg so obsessed with a brand’s products. Love always has a price-tag.
When it came to my personal essays, I was revisiting the old traumas, the old hurts, wheeling them out for one more hurrah when all they wanted was to be buried. I kept a vigil for my pain without moving past it.
One day, I stopped. Stop penning LinkedIn updates. Stopped writing the stories. Stopped screaming into the void that ROI isn’t the only measure of success. I sat in front of a monitor and stared and stared and stared at it until I gave up and binge-watched The First 48 Hours. Who knew everyone was getting murdered in Tulsa? I got used to blood on the walls and bullet-ridden bodies. It was easier than facing the blank page.
I tried all the tricks—morning pages, creativity coloring books, productivity porn but nothing worked.
I felt broken, burned out. The ease had fled, my writing now in witness protection. But this burn, this ghosting is a sign. Maybe I wasn’t broken. Maybe the system was. Maybe I wasn’t blocked. Just done pretending.
It’s brutal out there for a working writer. NEA grants are getting slashed. NPR will lose $9B in funding. Sometimes it feels as if artists will face extinction because capitalism doesn’t reward creativity unless it’s for profit. Capitalism doesn’t care about self-expression unless it’s tethered to productivity. Some days, it feels like we’re trapped in Metropolis, automatons humming under the weight of machines.
It can break you unless you refuse to be broken.
For years, I set my writing aside in favor of a six-figure paycheck in a job I didn’t like—let alone love. I wrote my first book on lunch hours and at night. My second after I’d resigned from a job that had been slowly killing me. A year ago I decided to stop working in marketing because every project, every deliverable, took a piece of me I couldn’t get back. Because the world shifted from let’s be human, let’s forge real relationships with our customers to let’s sell shittier products hocked by pretty blond influencers who will say whatever we need them to say for a paycheck. I gave one client a blueprint to building a sustainable business that will not only endure but prosper and they set my plans aside for influencer campaigns and clever Instagram captions.
The world felt hollow, empty, and I no longer wanted to be a part of it. Instead, I wanted to focus on the work that wouldn’t compromise me. And while one can say that’s a noble pursuit, we still exist in a society that demands we work. Everything bears a cost and those costs are soaring.
There’s rent. Health and car insurance. Credit card bills and student loan debt. Tuition for your kid, care for your aging parents. Coffee used to be a dollar at the corner cart—now it’s ten bucks at a bougie café in Los Angeles. Sometimes I have fantasies of living rent-free for a year—oh, the money I’d save.
Pretty prose doesn’t always pay the bills and books take me forever to write so I had to get crafty. I had to get creative. I resell clothes on the internet. I pitch stories and essays. I write marketing and pitch decks, the kind of writing that doesn’t kill me—and doesn’t come with too much client interaction. I don’t have to hear them pantomime going viral. I’m creating a craft book on writing—the kind of book I wanted to read as a beginning or mid-career writer—that I plan to sell.
I had to find ways to balance writing that pays and writing that nourishes.
The spark didn’t return because I took a nap or tried the Pomodoro technique—it returned when I decided to design a life that balanced the realities of living in this world while creating art that makes it more livable. The writing didn’t make its triumphant comeback from inventing muses and subsisting on daydreams. No, it returned when I had to get crafty about finding cheaper cat litter and cancelling all the subscriptions. Did I really need Hulu when Tubi is free?
And sometimes the work returns when you let go. Years ago, my pop asked, why do you go at everything so hard? Why can’t you just let go? Back then, his words frightened me. They were free-fall. The idea of losing control was unimaginable. But lately, as I’m assembling a new essay collection, I’ve had to revisit some of my old stories, the picked over hurts, and recognize they’ve had their time. Now, it’s time for their burial. Now, it’s time for something light and fresh and beautiful and new.
The work announces itself when you write through what has haunted you to find out what’s on the other side. For years, I sat comfortably in discomfort. Content with the dark. But this isn’t a way to live, to grow, it’s an excuse to be complacent and stuck.
I challenged myself to ask: what else is there, what’s next? Revisit the past like an old friend but don’t be tethered to it. I wasn’t broken, I was in chrysalis, transforming. Shedding an old skin and slipping into another.
It took me a long time to realize my creativity never diminished, it was quietly molting. Waiting for me to recognize it, to tend to it, to bring about its bloom.
If this essay found you somewhere between creative burnout and cat litter budgeting, hit subscribe. Or send this to a friend. Or become a paid supporter. Or just root for all of us from the sidelines. We’re figuring out the next version of the work, together. And I’ve got so many more goodies to come.
So beautifully said about the tug between commerce and creativity.
Love your writing ❤️