Taking Breaks

Whenever I scroll through Bluesky, I find artists and writers experiencing some combination of sadness, frustration, and fear, wanting or needing to take a break from their art. And I can’t blame them. During an extended fallow period, I felt the pressure to create, the fear that that part of my life was over, the sadness with what felt like wasted days slipping into wasted weeks, months, years. It took me a long time to make peace with taking a break.

It started by recognizing my creativity hadn’t ended. It had only changed.

After working for ten years in educational theatre, it was a shock to me to be starting my career over in customer service. I remember the first time I got the aggressive “I’m just browsing.” I stood there, taken aback, caught between wanting to be helpful, make a good impression, and indignation at being dismissed. Before I knew it, words that I had never uttered before slipped out of my mouth.

“Okay, well my name is Sean and if you have any questions or want to hear a bad joke, just let me know.”

The person (I honestly can’t remember any details about them) laughed and said that they’d like to hear a joke. I told them an old one I knew, which got a chuckle, then I left them alone to browse. During that first holiday season, when my indignation threatened to get the best of me at times, telling jokes helped diffuse those feelings.

I didn’t see it at the time, but this was an incredibly productive time in my creative life. I didn’t see it, because I Took Myself Seriously.

I was a Serious Writer Who Wrote Stories. Everything else didn’t count.

It always rankled me that, in college, I won awards for every kind of writing except stories. Rather than see the success of my poetry, play writing, and essays, I focused on the failure of my stories. I never really thought about it in any critical way, like maybe I should pursue those other avenues of writing. I was, after all, a Serious Writer Who Wrote Stories.

So during my extended fallow period, when I couldn’t write more than a first chapter in a long story, or a couple of pages in a short story, before deciding it was horrible, I was horrible, and I should just give up, I didn’t realize that my creativity had just funneled into another outlet. I wrote about two dozen jokes. Unfortunately, I didn’t write any of them down, because they weren’t Serious Writing, I was just goofing around. So I only remember my favorites.

Why don’t they make romantic comedies about trees? They’re too sappy.

What kind of dog always seizes the day? Shar-pei diem.

Most of the time, they came to me out of nowhere. But sometimes, I would think of something and say to myself, “There’s a joke here,” and turn it over in my mind until I came up with something. Just like originating, developing, and writing a story. But like I said, I didn’t see it that way at the time.

One of my hobbies is scrolling Bluesky and offering encouragement to strangers. I’ll comment on a thing they made and say it’s awesome. For people who are upset because they aren’t creating, I try to tell them that the mind needs to rest, or it may have just changed gears, and they should try to find how their creativity is still there, maybe just changed.

Encouraging others helps me to encourage myself. Because breaks suck if they aren’t planned. But don’t listen to those assholes in your head that tell you it’s over. Energy, even creative energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form from time to time.