When Creatives Work In Crisis
Feast, famine, and the crash nobody warns you about
I think many of us get these moments when we run at close to full capacity. We teach/see clients, write, consult, perform, do CPD, maybe some of us are parents on top of it all or care for elderly parents (or both). We don’t collapse and we don’t look like we’re struggling. Some of us might even be proud of it all because we’ve learned to equate “gruelling pace” with “competence”. If we can sustain it, we surely must be doing it right.
And then it stops.
But there’s no “real” breakdown. You might just notice that you have a piece of writing due and you can’t make yourself start it. And the stress is on “can’t”. You just sit there in front of a blank document and then go and do laundry instead. And the next day the same thing. And the next…
And the laundry in your house is all of a sudden immaculate 🧺🤣
Say hello to the creative crash that doesn’t really look all that bad from the outside, certainly not like a “real” crisis, right? You’re not crying into your coffee, you’re just… temporarily offline.
When that kind of thing happened to me, I didn’t really understand why it happened then. I’d been through genuinely hard periods before (grief, starting over in a new country…), so why was a comparatively good year the one that brought me to capacity when I’ve worked through much more pressure and apparently “harder stuff” before?
It took me a while to understand the relationship between an extra productive period and “going offline”, because it’s not burnout I’m talking about here…
The feast-famine cycle is a bit of a strange beast for our nervous system, which has its own ideas about when it’s “safe” to create.
It’s not really a conscious decision we make, it’s just that over time, the conditions under which creative work feels possible narrow down to specific circumstances. And for a lot of creatives, those circumstances include urgency and deadlines. In short: Something external.
So when that kind of pressure is present, you work. And when the project is done, you expect to feel relief. And often, you might, but it’s also not that uncommon to feel… nothing. Or to feel a weird dread about starting the next thing. So you wait for the urgency to return, and in the meantime you do everything that isn’t “the work”.
Many creatives I know are ashamed of that feeling during the famine when they really shouldn’t be, because at the end of the day, it’s just a nervous system that learned to associate creative vulnerability with specific external conditions and now struggles to generate those conditions internally. And funnily enough, the urgency was really never about the deadline, but rather about permission.
Under sufficient pressure, I have permission to be vulnerable.
Without pressure, the vulnerability starts to feel somewhat optional, and that’s something the nervous system is very good at avoiding.
But our relationship with our own creative process isn’t fixed. It’s a relationship, which means it’s sometimes better, sometimes worse, not always workable in exactly the same way, and it changes over time.
When creative output is entirely tied to external urgency, the relationship starts to get a bit out of whack and ends up with the laundry basket when we run out of said urgency, but we’re not going to rebalance it with more discipline or a better productivity system. I think it’s much more important to understand what the urgency has been doing for us. And often, it has been giving us external permission for something that we haven’t really learned to give ourselves internally.
Is it straightforward? Definitely not. I still notice the occasional pull toward filling my schedule in a way that the work has to happen, because the alternative is letting someone down. Urgency as a creative fuel works until it doesn’t…
And I also think it’s important not to be too hard on ourselves when we catch ourselves doing it. It takes time learning to spot it before we’re three weeks into the immaculate laundry phase 🤣
The feast-famine cycle isn’t a character flaw, and the creative industries (I use that somewhat oxymoronic expression on purpose) train many of us to tie our output to it. So what many of us develop is a nervous system pattern built on years of learning that the only time to make something good and/or worthwhile is when we have to. But once you understand why the pattern developed, you can stop fighting it as though it were a deficiency.
Because that really isn’t what it is.
And if the bursts and the gaps and the slightly strange inability to start when nothing is on fire sounds like someone you know, feel free to share this article with them. It won’t fix the pattern, but it might make the shame feel a bit less intense, and that’s the most important place to start…
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