Let Simone Biles Inspire Us to Normalize Taking Mental Health Breaks
It's actually not normal to just push and push and go and go and never rest enough to allow your body and mind and feelings and relationships and creativity and wellness to thrive.
When you invest in Create Me Free, you invest in a value system, a community, the creation of a library of online resources about the complex relationship between art and mental health. This supports a societal shift away from a productivity-driven consumer market where your money buys x product that you can use for y amount of time on your own towards a model that supports holistic wellness, deep creative process, and meaningful social contributions.
Support this with a subscription to the newsletter you’re reading:
Today’s share was originally a 2021 newsletter that went out to my Patreon subscribers. The “timeliness” of the Simone Biles news might no longer be so relevant but the message behind it certainly is. We all need mental health breaks sometimes, breaks for grief, breaks to simply rest and allow ideas to marinate. Breaks are not only okay, they are necessary. Let’s normalize them.
One of the clients I work with has a ton of things going on right now and recently had to cancel a free online event. Reschedule actually, not fully cancel. But I could tell that she agonized about it. And I could relate. Because I agonize when I can't complete what I've said I'm going to do - even if I'm the only one holding myself accountable. I assume that someone somewhere is expecting something from me because I said I'd do it and I feel terrible flaking out. Although over the past few years I've had to learn to be increasingly gentle with myself.
As you may or may not know, a few years ago I had a terrible dental surgery experience. The $20000 that I'm still paying off was painful enough. But it was two months of literally constant pain - pain like I've never experienced in my life. Mouth ulcers, brain fog, antibiotics, and root canals after root canals. It was awful. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. In any case, I've never been quite the same since. Honestly, the six hours under sedation did something to my brain that was freaky and for awhile there I was truly worried that I'd never come back from it. I would start a sentence and lose the words. Not exactly a great trait for a writer. Eventually, the big side effects went away.
But what stayed is a shift in my ability to write for extended periods of time. Honestly, it had already been fading for years. Throughout my late twenties and most of my thirties, I wrote a ridiculous lot of content. I'm talking tens of thousands of words per day every day for years. I've got ten books under my belt. I've written for about a dozen magazines. And I can't count the number of blogs I've written for over the years. At some point, churning out that much content was bound to burn me out. I just simply slowed down. I began to be late on deadlines which was something this always-early girl had never done. And since the dental surgery, it's been even slower. I've had to admit that I'm never going to return to the "before" level of productivity. Nor do I want to.
You are about to hit a paywall. This is a subscription-based newsletter. Your support allows me to keep writing. Please subscribe.
Below the paywall you’ll learn about drawing inspiration from Simone Biles and Michael Phelps about dreaming big and being great while taking breaks.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Create Me Free to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.