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Have you ever fallen madly in love, only to have it go horribly bad later? I’ve done that enough times that it doesn’t surprise me that much with people, but lately I’ve been feeling it where I never expected.

I love writing. When I started this blog, it was absolutely my favorite thing. I had about 7 readers, but I didn’t even care. I was just so excited about doing it.

I know a lot of other people feel the same way about their blogs and writing. Yet two of my favorite bloggers (Ash Ambirge and Jen Gresham) have declared their blogs to be on hiatus for a while.

I’m not sure what to think about that. On one hand, I’m 100% in favor of people doing what they need to do to take care of themselves. It’s far better to consciously decide to put some things on hold than to wait until you reach the breaking point and drop all the things you’re juggling in a huge, catastrophic smash.

But on the other hand, I think, “These poor women have to give up their blogs?”

I’ve never been all that good with balance. When an idea or project takes hold, I get pretty obsessed with it, and it tends to crowd out everything else. In fact, my favorite way to work is to take a small project, go absolutely balls to the wall, and finish it in a very short period of time.

I love becoming totally consumed by an idea and letting it carry me away and get bigger and bigger until we crest together. Later, I wash up on the shore with some insanely awesome piece of work and everybody shakes their heads, wondering what the hell just happened. The Less Hassle, More Harmony Relationship Workshop was a perfect example–I wrote, edited, designed, and completely built all 25 modules / 38,000 words of that in 11 days.

It’s not healthy, and it’s not sustainable, but it’s so frickin’ exhilarating!

Enter Burnout

Burnout is a huge downside to my approach. I have a history of it, and frankly, it’s been my biggest misgiving about quitting my day job to write full time. What if this turns out just like all the other hobbies, crushes, careers, marriages, etc. that went before?

See, a few years ago, my favorite thing in the world was yarn. The colors, the textures, the softness, the simplicity… It’s so tangible and gives so many opportunities to be creative. I fell madly in love with it. I learned to crochet, then to knit, then I bought a spinning wheel and learned to make my own yarn. I learned about how to design patterns and get them published, how to get hired as a contract crocheter, how to sell things on Etsy.

After a ton of research, I decided that dyeing yarn was my best bet for a business. Everything else was so slow, there was no way I could ever support myself due to my outrageous labor costs. I’m a really slow crocheter, even slower at knitting, and not a fast spinner either. But dyeing is a much faster process, and you can do multiple skeins of yarn at a time. As yarn processes go, it’s instant gratification. You soak the yarn for half an hour, pour the dye on it, steam it for another half hour, let it cool, rinse it, let it dry, and in a day or so, you have a finished product.

I became convinced that this was my calling, what I was put on earth to do, so I made a minimal investment in materials and equipment and got to work.

Whenever anyone talked to me, all I wanted to talk about was yarn and how much I loved it and how it gave my life meaning. I wanted to get the business to the point where I could support myself with it and quit my day job, so I worked all the time dyeing yarn. I had a wholesale customer whose demand often outpaced my ability to supply, plus I wanted to establish other wholesale customers and a thriving retail business of my own, including a festival circuit, which required enough yarn to fill a whole festival booth, plus extra to replace what people bought.

I could never dye enough yarn. I worked like a madman trying. Basically all I did was work, eat, sleep, and dye. Oh yeah, and blog. I had a blog about yarn that I updated religiously every morning before work. I was getting up at 6 am to do that.

So what happened?

After one yarn festival, I got home and crashed. I was so absolutely exhausted, I didn’t care about yarn. I didn’t care about anything. All I wanted was to rest.

So that’s what I did. I thought I’d feel better after a week or two, so I decided to take some time off. Well, at that point, I hardly had any choice–I just didn’t have anything left for dyeing or working. Yarn production screeched to a halt.

What I didn’t expect was that even two and a half years later, yarn still has almost zero appeal for me. I did one mad dyeing binge before a festival I had booked way in advance but no longer wanted to attend, but otherwise, I haven’t touched a dye pot in over two years.

When I think about this, I feel three things: sad, embarrassed, and afraid.

• sad: Yarn was the love of my life, and I killed it. I keep hoping that if I don’t push myself, I will eventually gravitate back to it, but so far, that hasn’t happened. It’s hard to explain how much joy and delight I got from all things yarny. It’s a big loss not to feel that way any more.
• embarrassed: When I was into the yarn, I went around telling everybody about it and how I had finally found my calling and my passion and all that. Now whenever I see any friend or relative who doesn’t see me more than once a month, they always ask how the yarn is going, and I have to admit it’s yet another thing in my string of abandoned pursuits. I feel like a quitter and a flake, especially after all that talk about how I’d finally found what I was meant to do with my life.
• afraid: What if writing turns out the same way and I end up with no job and having killed my enjoyment of another beloved pursuit? What will I do?

Honestly, that’s my deepest fear right now–more than ending up in a van by the river or being laughed at or being wrong or failing. It’s ruining another thing I love for myself. I thought quitting my job would solve this problem, but if anything, it’s gotten worse.

• I just went on vacation a couple of weeks ago, and I already feel like I really need a vacation.
• I see my friends even less than when I had my job, and I find myself filling all the stereotypes about self-employed people and poor hygiene.
• Worst of all, when I sat down to write this, I spent two hours wandering around, procrastinating, and trying to think of anything to write about. What I thought about most was a thousand other things I wanted to do instead, number one being Go To Bed.

I’m definitely on the road to destruction, and I need to change my ways immediately.

So I guess it’s time to get acquainted with balance. People are always talking about it, but I’ve never really made it part of my life. I’m a serial monogamist obsessive with everything from projects to guys. I start out madly in love, not wanting to think about anything else, and convinced I’ve finally found The One, whether it be a person, a hobby, or a career. And then I get burned out and stop feeling much attraction for it, whatever it is.

The one thing that gives me hope is that I’ve broken this cycle with relationships. My current relationship is the first I’ve had that skipped the crushy love-potion phase. Unlike my previous relationships, I never thought of this one as the solution to the mystery/problem of my life. And when the initial “I can’t get enough of you!” hormones wore off, we established a new pattern that’s sustainable in the long term, so we can still enjoy each other.

I think I need to do something like that with my writing. I’ve been running it as a sprint up to my July 22 quit date, and it certainly required a sprint to quit that quickly! But now, this is my life.

If I make myself miserable, I might as well go back to sitting in my beige box at my old job. The pay was regular, and I never fell behind on my email.

So far this post has been all about me, but I know many people have the same problems. You’re overwhelmed, overbooked, overstretched. It feels like there’s no time to exercise or rest or do anything fun, yet you know those are the things that recharge you and make it possible to do the things you need to do. What do you do?

In fact, any time you find yourself not enjoying your life, it’s time to take a step back and look at where it’s going wrong and what you can do to make it better.

For me, that means a few things.

• Although I hate having things scheduled for particular times, I do like routines. I’m going to make up a routine for myself involving working hours and non-working hours. Even if I end up modifying it later, I think that will be better than just working randomly (read: all the time).

• I’m also going to start doing project management. Leading up to the launch of Beyond Fear this week, I was getting really frustrated with my productivity. I had a 4-item to-do list, yet it seemed like I could never finish a single item. It seemed like all I did was try to start something, realize I had to do something else before I could do that, switch to the new task, and realize I had to do something else before I could do that. So frustrating!

  I finally broke down my four items and listed all the pieces and all the prerequisites. It turned out my 4-item to-do list actually contained 45 small tasks! When I started at the bottom and did all the prerequisites first, I felt better because I didn’t have to keep switching tasks, and I could see that I was accomplishing something as I checked off each small item. I checked off 23 things in the first day! I still couldn’t check off any of the Big 4, but at least I could see what I had done and what I had left.

  From now on, when I plan my week, I’m going to make a realistic list of tasks, broken down into the real tasks involved, and estimate how long they’ll take. I always bite off way more than I can chew, but if I do the estimates in advance, I’ll be less likely to expect myself to accomplish 29 hours of work in one day.

• I also resolve to answer all emails within 48 hours. I’ve been horrible with email lately–my apologies to everyone!

  When I let it go, it quickly accumulates into a large cloud of guilt and dread. It takes no more time to reply when messages are fresh–there’s no need for all that angst.

• Most importantly, I’m going to schedule exercise, fun stuff, and rest. One of the best productivity books I’ve ever read was The Now Habit by Neil Fiore. He suggests that one of the reasons people procrastinate and stretch out work is that we think we’ll never get to do anything fun anyway, so what does it matter if we ever finish our work? By putting fun stuff on your schedule and letting the work fill in, rather than the other way around, you make sure you have something to look forward to. I’ve done it before, and it really made a big difference in my motivation and overall happiness.

• Finally, I looked at what’s frustrating me most, and I spend a lot of time at my computer waiting. I have the slowest, crappiest DSL you can get. I originally bought it because it was only $10 a month, but the price has gone up. Now it’s more like the price of normal internet service, yet it’s still dog-slow, to the tune of 0.5 Mbps for download and a 0.1 Mbps for upload.

  I run an internet business. The vast majority of my work is done online. So why am I using this horribly inferior service for something I depend on so much? That’s really stupid and counterproductive. I called around and upgraded my internet service to 12 Mbps. Now we’re talking! And it’s only $13/month more than I was paying. Talk about a no-brainer.

• One thing I’m not going to do is go on blog hiatus. That’s the right answer for some, and I salute them for taking care of their needs. But it’s not what I want, so I’m not going to do it.

The Takeaway

If you find yourself feeling frustrated or dissatisfied with your life, I encourage you to look at what’s going on and what you could change to make it better. There’s always something you can do. Even if you don’t get it perfect on the first try, just the fact that you’re trying to make it better for yourself can make a big difference in your morale.

I wish you a rich life, good tools, and happiness… maybe even that elusive thing called balance! If you have any suggestions to share, please leave a comment–I’d love to hear them!