The Decade Spent Managing Alone
About slow leaks vs blowouts…
I managed my performance anxiety alone for the better part of a decade.
And by that, I don’t just mean I kept it to myself, but I knew which situations to avoid, what pre-performance routines would take the edge off, even when to arrive and when to leave, and also what to say if anyone asked how I was doing. Yeah, I think I was really good at selling I was okay. Extremely good. Enter the slow leak…
Of all the myths that circulate in creative spaces, the one about self-sufficiency does the most lasting damage, mostly because many of us have a tendency to dress it up as strength.
The solitary genius
The artist in the garret (also known as “bohemian suffering”)
The idea that “real” creative work is done alone, from some super private, internal space that “real” creatives have access to and the rest don’t. You either have it or you’re still developing it, and asking for help is the tell that reveals which one you are.
And even if you consciously reject that (and if you’ve heavily rolled your eyes at the garret romanticisation), some of it can still run underneath. And it tends to shape what you’re willing to admit, and to whom.
Because I never really believed in the solitary genius myth either. I always believed in collaboration, and I talked openly about psychological support in our profession long before it was becoming more mainstream (I was born in the ‘70s). And yet I managed my performance anxiety alone for years, because some part of me had decided that it was something you solved yourself.
The creatives I’ve worked with who have sustainable practices over decades (I’m not talking people who had an early career and then burned out, but the ones who are still working at 50 and beyond) aren’t the ones who figured it out alone. Without exception, they developed relationships and got the right kind of support if and when they needed it. And I also count people who pushed back against harmful stereotypes and beliefs as part of these important networks.
People who come to me after years of managing alone often don’t arrive in crisis exactly, but they’ve been running on “manual override” for so long that they’re exhausted. And they’re exhausted because the work still happened, but under what are essentially unsustainable circumstances.
The research on this is clear enough that it’s near boring: Burnout in creative industries isn’t primarily caused by hard work but by hard work without adequate support structures.
Social support is one of the strongest protective factors for long-term psychological resilience.
And that’s a robust, replicable finding. And yet, it’s also consistently ignored in many creative spaces.
The really insidious thing about managing alone for a long time is that you get very good at it, and that’s ultimately convincing yourself that you were right to do it alone.
You slowly turn into the person who’s white-knuckling it for years and develops enough workarounds that you can still function, so you convince yourself you’re “handling it”. Which you are in a way. The workarounds become proof of self-sufficiency and the self-sufficiency then becomes part of your identity. At which point the idea of asking for help feels like dismantling yourself, not just getting some support.
And as weird as that sounds: It’s this “being good at it”, the competence, that keeps people stuck in this because the coping mechanisms work well enough. They just hollow you out because they’ve been eating away at you for so long.
I was never in complete crisis either. It was kind of a slow waking up to the fact that the energy I was spending on maintaining the workarounds was energy I couldn’t put in my work anymore. Because the infrastructure I’d built around my performance anxiety was definitely doing its job, but that took almost as much energy as the job itself. I had somehow exempted myself from things I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to others for a second.
I still find it hard to describe what it actually felt like to finally let someone in and address the thing I’d been managing alone for so long. That relief isn’t just about the problem as such, but rather about, well yeah, not managing it alone anymore.
Asking for the right kind of help is not the same as seeking validation btw. It’s not about someone telling you your work is good so you needn’t worry, or that the industry is hard and it’s not your fault. Those things may also be true, but they don’t really touch on what I’m describing.
The right kind of support knows enough about you and your world to push back when you’re getting lost in a certain narrative, and it’s definitely not about offering you a framework designed for someone in a different kind of life. There’s a whole ‘nother discussion about the same standard therapies getting recommended when they are not right for everyone. Here in the UK, it’s usually CBT. And while I’m not knocking it because I’m qualified in it myself (among other modalities), it’s not the right approach for everyone. And I’ll commit heresy now and say it’s not even right for the majority. It’s just a comparably short intervention and therefore comparably cheap. That doesn’t mean that its research base is wrong. It’s just incomplete for the very real needs of many very real people.
So long story short: I get it’s a high bar in terms of finding the right support, but it’s worth to keep looking for it. “Managing” and “thriving” are different things, and most of the people I know who convinced themselves they are identical look back at some point and wish they’d made the distinction earlier.
Yup, I managed my performance anxiety alone for the better part of a decade and I was very good at it. Until I wasn’t. And that was mostly because I’d decided, somewhere along the way, that treatment was for people who weren’t “managing”.
I certainly don’t want to make that sound more dramatic than it actually was, because we’re really talking about something that was more like a slow leak here. But at the end of it, the proverbial tire was still flat. And maybe that’s as bad, because these “leaks” are easier to absorb without noticing, and that makes them harder to repair. So don’t let the tire go flat…
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