Being Burned Out and the Tightrope of Creativity
The pressure of being creative on demand and the toll it takes.
Welcome to In the Flash, a reader-supported publication about intent and creativity in photography
Recently, I picked up my camera and felt a tinge of aversion. The usual giddy excitement was not merely absent, it felt inconceivable that it had ever been there in the first place. Whenever such a wave washes over me, I put on Is That All There Is, Peggy Lee’s epic gospel of tragic disappointment, and wait for its magic to rush through my veins and deliver me from apathy. But on that day, it accomplished nothing. The last thing the world needed was more photos, and I was contributing to the problem. In fact, the very idea of photography made me slightly nauseous. That's when it dawned on me: I’m burned out. Again.
Creativity on demand sounds like an oxymoron. In the ideal world, it is a vision born out of a flash of inspiration, as immaculate as Venus rising from her foam. It materializes suddenly, often uninvited but always welcomed. Paul McCartney screwed it up for many of us when he humblebragged that “Yesterday” came to him in a dream. The idea of the most famous song in pop history doing the courtesy of writing itself fueled the quixotic ideal of how art should be created — effortlessly and unintentionally. Forcing yourself to be creative is about as sexy as a dentist appointment, and everyone, me included, would prefer the romance of a nocturnal muse.