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This story isn't told from the end.

I’m not sure I can adequately express my level of cringe right now - or the level of cringe I am sure I will feel looking back at this video in a few years time - but I am sharing anyway.
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Truly, I’m not sure I can adequately express my level of cringe right now - but I am sharing anyway. Partly because I owe you an explanation for disappearing on you for months, but also because I believe the cycle of creativity isn’t fully complete until we share our art (no matter how new we are at it, or how bad we think it is). We take inspiration in, make something of our own, and pay the world back by sucking up our fear and putting it out there, as potential inspiration for someone else. That’s how we make more beautiful things, all the time.

Although saying I believe that to be true about creativity, and then actively sharing my own is, of course, wildly different.

So for those short on time or interest (I say that with zero judgement, I get it) - I’ve been messing around learning how to shoot and edit video, and these two minutes are my first shot at putting something together. As you’ll see, I’ve also been experimenting with making jewellery, which is challenging in so many wonderful ways.

And that’s mostly what I’ve been doing for the last few months: burning out badly, recovering, and then trying to reignite a faint spark of creativity in new or lost ways. 

Here’s the video - and for those interested, the longer story, a version of the voiceover I didn’t use, is below.

I hope you’re doing okay, and I’d love to hear from you either way! It’s been a while. 

Take care 

X

This story isn’t told from the end. 

It’s not crafted afterwards, with insight and retrospect. 

It isn’t polished, or finalised. 

I can’t give you knowledge and understanding from a journey well travelled. 

This is the dusty road. 

It is the mess of the middle. 

Maybe even right at the beginning, I’m not sure - do we ever really know where we’re at in our own story? - But, it is present. It is where I’m at. 

Every fibre in me wants to jump to the end. I am desperate to fast forward, to have the certainty and assuredness that comes with a happy ending.

And yet at the same time, I know how unhelpful that is. 

I know that it is exactly that - the avoidance of the middle - that has kept me in perpetual undoing. The dreaming of the end, the yearning to have the answers only ensures that I am seeking time travel, rather than seeking true connection to the process of desire and creation. In other words, it is the ultimate fuel for procrastination.

And I am bored of being stuck there.

But this is the story they don’t tell. It’s not the one that makes sense at the end, when the hills get levelled out by distance, but the up, down of the thick of it. The part where - and no one tells you this - you hate it. 

I spent 2022 in a gradual and then accelerated state of burnout, which I think is pretty common post-covid. We’ve been told we’re okay to pick our lives back up again, but when so many pieces fell apart for two years, I wonder if there’s much at all to grab hold of. It feels like it’s all been slipping through our fingers - through my fingers, at the very least.

People often talk about burnout like it’s a state of being worn down, like extreme tiredness - but I don’t think that quite covers it. It’s more of a steady abandonment of everything that makes a person a person - let alone a happy one. 

First, relaxation. Presence. You can’t experience the ease of being in one place because you’re always somewhere else too, straddling worlds of reality and thought. And not necessarily negatively - at first. It can be exciting to be charged up - but we lose real, restorative rest - the quiet, pull back of the arrow.

Without rest we lose capacity for creativity and fun - and our fuse shortens dramatically - so we can’t deal with further inconvenient problems, or people, that cross our path. We become snappier, less open versions of ourselves.

And with that, we push people away. I withdrew into myself. I stopped reaching out to people, stopped replying to people who reached out to me. Loneliness became the norm.

A lack of connection eats away at the soul. As humans, we are meant to be around each other. I naturally lean more towards introversion, but isolation is a completely different beast. And one thing I learned last year was how possible it is to be in a loving, supportive relationship, and still feel burnout pulling you deeper and deeper into yourself. We are not immune just because we aren’t alone. 

And as all that is good departs, and stress hormones rise, the body enters a survival state. Our perception of dangers increases as the nervous system takes over, and at that point - we have no choice. We don’t have access to emotional intelligence, or a better mindset - we cannot reason with ourselves. It doesn’t make us ‘bad’ at it - that’s like saying we’re bad at snowboarding when there’s no snow. We have to tend the state we’re in.

So I spent January in sloth mode. The sole, selfish intention for the first month of 2023 was to rest. I used money I’d saved to pay the bills, quit my horrendously anxiety-inducing part time job, removed all pressure in doing anything towards my coaching business, and just… took it off.

None of this was filmed during that time. There was a a lot of TV, a lot of laziness - a lot of nothing, honestly. And a lot of trying not to feel guilty about that.

And here I find myself in the aftermath of that indulgence. As February opened up, I realised I was ready for something new. Still raw, but a little more willing to try. Still staring at my reflection wishing for clarity and getting nothing but fog but - I don’t know - maybe I’m also willing to just be lost inside of it.

There’s blurry, unsuccessful creativity here, and I’m learning what it is to feel bad at something, and yet still do it. It’s been a long time since I gave myself enough slack to do that - but I can’t pretend it’s comfortable. I hate that everything I want is all in my head, and my muscles don’t have the memory of creation yet, so they flail in response to the information and effort. There were points during this month when I couldn’t understand my camera settings, and I couldn’t think of what to film, and I just wanted to curl back up on the sofa and forget about it. 

But this is the mess of the middle. It’s awful. I’ll take it.

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Alex Kate Hare