I haven’t actually enjoyed writing these blog posts in a long time. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that in any of my posts reflecting on my current burnout or creative process or whatever. I don’t really enjoy doing these. I don’t dislike writing them and I do still get a sense of satisfaction out of writing them, but I haven’t really felt the joy of writing in a while now. I’ve done it because I’ve felt the need, to help figure out what’s going on in my head, and to provide myself with a sense of satisfaction after a day largely devoid of anything resembling that. But I haven’t felt any of the joy or passion I once I did. I’ll be the first to say that it’s better to rely on discipline than passion or inspiration since discipline will never abandon you like passion and inspiration might, but I think it’s worth considering that enough discipline will also enable you to actively harm yourself if you force yourself to keep performing past the point where your body is telling you to stop. I don’t think I’m there yet, but I can’t deny that my burnout hasn’t gotten any better in months or years and that I just don’t really enjoy any of my creative pursuits anymore these days.

I’ve thought a lot about taking a break–about taking a planned hiatus of some kind as I near the four-year-anniversary of resurrecting this blog–but I rarely get further than considering it. I’ve gone to such lengths to keep this blog alive at this point that I have a very complicated relationship with any consideration of letting it lapse for any amount of time. I’ve kept going through the rise of LLMs, the theft of every word written on the internet, the fall of WordPress hosting, the destruction of my two favorite social media sites (Twitter and Cohost), and so much personal stress and burnout that it feels strange to consider letting my blog stop for no extrinsic reason. I mean, I probably should only stop blogging for instrinsic reasons rather than external ones, but I never figured that I’d be the cog in the machine to break down first. I mean, I’ve spent thirty-three years just constantly pushing forward because there was nothing for me in the past and while I probably shouldn’t be shocked that I’d eventually run out of steam, I am nevertheless shocked at what feels like a degree of human frailty I’ve never allowed myself.

I started writing back in my teen years because I needed an escape from my shitty life that was entirely mine and I kept it up because I had friends who seemed to like what I was doing. It didn’t take long for that, the act of writing and telling the story I’d begun, to become my reason to stay alive. Back when I had precious few of those as a teen, I always told myself that I needed to finish my story whenever the suicidal ideation from my mingling OCD, depression, and trauma grew to be too much. It was the first thing I ever used to automatically deflect those intrusive thoughts when they’d show up and I clung to it so tightly in those years that it eventually became my life’s goal: to be able to support myself with my writing. It took years to go from “be a millionaire famous author” to “support my own life with my writing,” but it stayed in some form of that for a very long time, from about eighteen or nineteen until the start of the pandemic. As all my plans for my future crashed down around me and I slowly realized that I might be stuck in the hole made by my student debt for another decade unless I managed to drastically alter my current course, I started to realize that maybe supporting myself with my writing alone wasn’t a realistic goal.

I changed my goal then to “support myself with my storytelling” as I imagined some kind of multi-media empire of my own creation, acheiving my goal of self-support by just having enough work out there in the universe that I made enough to get by, but that only lasted a few years before I realized that the days of being able to succeed in that regard was reserved for the breakout storytellers who were living exceptions to the rule that creativity and art are being more and more rapidly devalued. Hell, most of my favorite writers, storytellers, and artists were either working horrible and all-consuming hours or had a job that paid the bills and wrote during their free time. Which is what I’ve been doing for years with this blog, but I haven’t actually made any progress on any of my book projects in long enough that I can’t actually hazard a guess at it. It could easily be years, if I don’t count the story I was posting here before I ran out of the energy needed to push myself to write on the weekends and even that was cut off some year and a half ago. At this point, I just write so I can keep my writing muscles somewhat limber and so I can feel like I’ve accomplished something. I haven’t felt the drive to create something for the sake of creating something in a long time and sure, discipline is still carrying me the way I always said it would when inspiration and motivation failed me, but I’m really starting to wonder if it’s doing me any favors at this point or if I should just set down my metaphorical pen and let myself rest for a while.

I am not going to make my mind up today, but this is kind of the thought overwhelming my mind most of this week, so I’m willing to bet it will come up in one form or another later this week (since tomorrow’s post is about Final Fantasy 14: Shadowbringers, but that’s all I’ve got planned out at this point). I just… I don’t know. I don’t expect to achieve what I’d called “success as a writer or storyteller” anymore. I don’t even really hope I will. I think about it the same way I think about winning the lottery and that really sucks because that makes this blog feel like the writing equivalent of buying a lottery ticket every time the jackpot goes above a billion dollars. Something done to keep a fantasy afloat rather than because you expect it to work out. A thing you do because you might as well rather than because you genuinely believe it might to lead to something or like it actually benefits you. Which is still a more healthy relationship with my writing than a lot of people have, sure, but given how many more are “creating” stuff with LLMs and how shitty the artistic environment is getting as my country descends ever-deeper into fascism, it really doesn’t feel like there’s much of a future for me in terms of creative expression. Hell, I can’t even tell if anyone’s actually reading this blog or if meta’s just scraping the contents of it every time I post a link to facebook. I could be talking to nothing but a host of scrapers and I’d never know.

I wish I could say something about the radical act of resistance that is continuing to make act in the face of authoritarianism and the slow destruction of society, but I don’t know that this is actually accomplishing anything other than generating more text for LLMs to steal and giving me a place to pour out my energy every day that might be better spent on trying to make material change in my life or to just, like, be less exhausted every single day. I don’t know. It certainly doesn’t help that I’ve felt physically and emotionally miserable pretty much constantly for a year and a half or so now. Everything seems worse when you feel poorly. I don’t know. I just don’t know what to do or if I should even be considering making any kind of decision right now as I’m exhausted and suffering from withdrawal from a medication that left me more constantly sleepy than I’ve ever been in my life (and I used to have insomnia that kept me awake for multiple days in a row during my freshman year of high school). Still, I can’t just tell myself to keep going because that’s a great way to worsen my burnout. I have to figure something out eventually. I just have no idea what that will be or how to figure this out while still in the depths of this exhaustion.