Burnout on Every Level

Will I always feel this way?

I ran into my neighbor, who also happens to be my friend, who also happens to be the actress, director, and writer

Amber Tamblyn

, as we were both stepping out the door earlier this week. We both had our dogs and an hour to spare, and after pleasantries, one of us floated the idea of a walk to the park. Which one? was then the question. We began ambitiously: We’d walk to the bigger park a fair distance away. But we were both under-caffeinated and tired, and we decided instead to go to a smaller park that was much closer. Then I asked, “Does your backyard count as a park?” We settled on that instead.

This very leisurely choice felt fitting, as I’ve been working long days and feeling the toll of it. I’ve also been feeling supremely uninspired. I have zero desire to write or paint or go to a museum or cook or do anything that feels remotely creatively enriching. In moments, I wonder, “Will I always feel like this?”

This line of inquiry is familiar to me. I’ve experienced writer’s block and, like anyone, bouts of the doldrums. When I was 25, I had a serious case of burnout, burnout on every level—mind, body, heart—that didn’t lift for an entire year. But after sitting with the feeling for a few days and contemplating alternate career paths (homesteader, miniature donkey minder, florist), I concluded that I just need a really long nap, both literally and figuratively. To remind myself of what the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Marie Howe said to me in a Studio Visit a few years ago: “After I publish a book, I’m completely empty and silent for a long time. In many ways, you have to wait to become a different person with different concerns. But also reading really helps.”

I’m trying to take comfort in her words and to follow her wise counsel. I keep ordering books, thinking I’ll immerse myself in one and draw some energy from it, but I can’t bring myself to crack one spine, and they keep piling up. I was feeling bad about that until a friend texted me an article about tsundoku, which is a Japanese concept that describes the act of buying books and letting them pile up, unread. (“Crucially, it doesn’t carry a pejorative connotation, being more akin to bookworm than irredeemable slob,” the author noted, much to my relief.) Instead of reading, I’ve continued putting things in order, clearing space, purging what’s weighing me down, getting ready for when the muse returns, trying to cultivate faith that it will.

In this great decluttering, I found something exciting: I came across a trove of sealed letters penned by six young women, all 16 or 17 years old, whom I taught when I was scholar-in-residence at a school in Ojai, California. They were nearing a threshold—going off to college—and I had them all write a letter to a future version of themselves at a creative low point. I intended to send the letters to them the following year, but life got busy and they got lost in the clutter, and here they still are. I feel a little bit shame-faced about this lapse, but in some ways, I think it could be more interesting to receive them now, six years later, so unexpectedly. They have all reached another threshold: they have graduated and are finding their way in the world, and if they’re anything like I was, they may be feeling a little unmoored, creatively or otherwise. I’m excited to drop them in the mail this week.

I’m also going to try to rest, and rather than picking up a thick novel, I’ll go more gently and dip into some shorter works, maybe some poems. “You find those poets who can put you into a trance, who can move you down into the depths,” Marie told me in that same conversation. “I say poets, but it could be prose writers. It could be any artist who moves you more deeply into yourself.”

Today, I’d like to share a piece by one of those poets,

Ross Gay

—who also writes prose—with you. I am such a fan of Ross’s work, from his Whitmanian “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” to his treatise on small joys, The Book of Delights, to his new Substack, Mondays Are Free, where he sends out daily poetry prompts for creative inspiration. It’s Father’s Day here in the U.S., and I’m doing something a little subversive: I’ve chosen a poem about becoming a father by a man who has only imagined it. Called “Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be,” it’s searching and visionary, full of striking images, fairly bursting with possibility. May it speak to you. May it inspire you in the waiting—in the becoming.

Some Items of Note—

• Mark your calendars! We’ll be gathering next Sunday, June 22 from 1-2pm for our virtual creative hour for paid subscribers, where we’ll write and explore together. I hope you’ll join us!

• There’s a very limited stock of Alchemy Tour merch left—the silk scarf and baseball cap sold out, but the Wonder sweatshirt and the Book of Alchemy tote are still available. Get yours here!

Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of the fetus in the womb (c. 1510)

Prompt 342. Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be by Ross Gay

 —after Steve Scafidi

The way the universe sat waiting to become,
quietly, in the nether of space and time,
 
you too remain some cellular snuggle
dangling between my legs, curled in the warm
 
swim of my mostly quietest self. If you come to be—
And who knows?—I wonder, little bubble
 
of unbudded capillaries, little one ever aswirl
in my vascular galaxies, what would you think
 
of this world which turns itself steadily
into an oblivion that hurts, and hurts bad?
 
Would you curse me my careless caressing you
into this world or would you rise up
 
and, mustering all your strength into that tiny throat
which one day, no doubt, would grow big and strong,
 
scream and scream and scream until you break the back of one injustice,
or at least get to your knees to kiss back to life
 
some roadkill? I have so many questions for you,
for you are closer to me than anyone
 
has ever been, tumbling, as you are, this second,
through my heart’s every chamber, your teeny mouth
 
singing along with the half-broke workhorse’s steady boom and gasp.
And since we’re talking today I should tell you,
 
though I know you sneak a peek sometimes
through your father’s eyes, it’s a glorious day,
 
and there are millions of leaves collecting against the curbs,
and they’re the most delicate shade of gold
 
we’ve ever seen and must favor the transparent
wings of the angels you’re swimming with, little angel.
 
And as to your mother—well, I don’t know—
but my guess is that lilac bursts from her throat
 
and she is both honeybee and wasp and some kind of moan to boot
and probably she dances in the morning—
 
but who knows? You’ll swim beneath that bridge if it comes.
For now let me tell you about the bush called honeysuckle
 
that the sad call a weed, and how you could push your little
sun-licked face into the throngs and breathe and breathe.
 
Sweetness would be your name, and you would wonder why
four of your teeth are so sharp, and the tiny mountain range
 
of your knuckles so hard. And you would throw back your head
and open your mouth at the cows lowing their human songs
 
in the field, and the pigs swimming in shit and clover,
and everything on this earth, little dreamer, little dreamer
 
of the new world, holy, every rain drop and sand grain and blade
of grass worthy of gasp and joy and love, tiny shaman,
 
tiny blood thrust, tiny trillion cells trilling and trilling,
little dreamer, little hard hat, little heartbeat,

little best of me.

Your prompt for the week:

Write an ode to someone not yet born, be it a child or a future version of yourself, in the style of Ross Gay’s “Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be.” If you’d like, you can address it to “little dreamer,” “little best of me,” or your own “little __(fill in the blank)__.”

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This prompt is adapted from “Imitation is the Highest Form of…” from Mondays Are Free

Today’s Contributor—

Ross Gay

is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays—The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights was released in September of 2023.

How are you approaching The Book of Alchemy?

One of the things I love so much about journaling is that it inspires conversation with the self and the world. It connects us with the past and also lights a path forward. Here are stories from a few Isolation Journals community members who are making The Book of Alchemy and a daily journaling practice their own—

• “I called three friends and asked if they’d do 100 days of creativity. Each day we’d send what we did. The rule is, all we can do is 🩷 the photo. It’s been such a gift to connect every day with these three beautiful women that I’ve known for 34 years! It’s absolutely lovely! Thank you, Suleika!!! The Book of Alchemy is delicious.” —Lisa

• “The Book of Alchemy has led me to new writing. I was already an (almost) daily writer—a habit that’s filled my home with notebooks for decades. And I know their value—I have my grandmother’s 1929 journals. To record a life in all of its marvelous complexity. What will it mean to ‘leave word’ as my good friend said before he died? It means to give courage, I think; we write to nudge others to write.” —Penny

• “I’ve embarked on my own ‘100 prompts in 100 days’ while working my way through breast cancer treatment. I have written through chemo, days I’ve had surgery, and moments I wasn’t sure if I could go on. The practice of starting again each day is so grounding. Thank you for such a beautiful collection.” —Mercedes