This Month at Green River Pottery: November 2008
Burnout
I woke in the night hearing rain on our tin roof, and also hearing the drip-drip of the buckets under the roof, filling with the water that leaks through. The previous day, Sunday, I had made a half-hearted attempt to clean my studio, hanging mats and towels outside on the line to air; now they were getting soaked. I lay awake.
The weather is cold and the leaves are down from the trees, blowing around on the ground. Ice forms on my buckets of rainwater outside the studio door. I got up Monday morning in the dark, dressed in layers, and went out to the kiln which was loaded with bisque ware ready to be glazed. Usually this is an exciting moment in the monthly rhythm of my work: I just have to glaze these pots, re-load them in the kiln, and the moment of the glaze firing will be here. I’ll have new pots.
Usually I’m excited. But not this morning. I stand in the dark with my hands in my sweatshirt pockets, shivering. I smell the wet cold air and hear the roosters crowing around the neighborhood. How many weeks till Thanksgiving? It makes sense, I reflect, that the big holidays fall at this time of year…wouldn’t it be good to just…sit? Just do nothing for a while. I don’t want to work. I’m burned out.
What is burnout, exactly? This feeling that I don’t want to work…that I can’t work…sometimes the best thing is to get in the studio and get going when I feel this way. Push through it. But sometimes that just makes it worse. I end up feeling sick, or getting sick, and I recoil at the touch of my hands to the clay. When burnout is bad, little tasks seem overwhelming and at the same time, the big picture starts to seem trivial: why am I doing this? Why be potter?
I swing the kiln door shut and huddle in a chair in the studio. The plastic I stapled up into the window frames to keep the heat in is already gathering dust, I notice. Outside, it’s still dark. When I was in high school, I had a piano teacher who once mentioned to me that when she felt this way she played Bach. I was glad to hear that. I was glad to hear that sometimes other people feel this way too—it wasn’t just laziness on my part, or a moral failing of some kind, which is how my parents made it seem. My piano teacher took the phenomenon seriously. Somehow it was part of the cycle, it was one of the things that happened. She had even figured out something she could do about it.
The kettle boils, and I make tea. There’s a little light coming up behind the dusty plastic covering the windows, now. My shoulders are clenched, my fingers dull. In high school when I couldn’t practice, sometimes I used to stand up from the piano bench and hold the backs of my hands directly under a light bulb, hoping the heat would bring my fingers back to life. Make them articulate again. Burnout is a kind of disconnection, as though my nerves don’t quite reach all the way to my finger ends. Burnout is fear, I think; my fingers feel dull, but that’s after a week of gripping at my work with white knuckles. I’ve been pushing it, pulling it, doing anything but giving in to the clay, letting it lead me. I’ve been working hard, yes, but I’ve been avoiding the actual creative part of what I do, which appears to me in those little moments when I change my mind, when I stop and write something down, when I suddenly wonder whether it’s possible to trail Woo Yellow over Reitz Green. Would that look good? Or would the surface crawl? In white-knuckle-mode, I can avoid all these inconvenient moments and time-consuming questions. But I’m just playing it safe. I’m holding myself apart from what I’m doing. To overcome burnout I just have to stop—really stop—for a moment.
I can hear the roosters, even here inside the studio with the door closed. Maybe I’ll just keep working this morning. Maybe I’ll work till noon and then decide—best not to think too much right now. I’ll glaze a few pots—I’ll listen to the Goldberg Variations. I take a breath and stand up. Outside, it’s light.
