Burnt out? Or just scared?

On the difference between depletion and fear, and why serious creatives almost always get it wrong

I was thirty-five the first time I convinced myself I was burned out.

This was back when I should have known better (I’d been writing for over a decade by then, had published some things, had even made a bit of money from it), but apparently age and experience don’t inoculate you against self-deception. I’d wake up each morning with what I told myself were good intentions, sit at my desk with my notebook or laptop, and then... nothing. Just a kind of heavy blankness that settled over me like fog. So I’d close the laptop. Make tea. Reorganize my bookshelf. Research submission guidelines for magazines I’d never actually submit to. Plan elaborate revision schedules for the novel I hadn’t written yet.

And I’d tell myself: I’m burned out. I need rest. I need to recharge.

(Looking back, what I actually needed was honesty, but that would take another few years to figure out.)

The thing about burnout — real burnout, the kind that actually earns the name — is that it doesn’t play favorites. It’s not selective. When you’re genuinely depleted, everything becomes effortful. Not just the work you’re avoiding, but all of it. Sleep goes sideways. Your mood flattens out into something gray and unresponsive. Things you normally enjoy — that TV show you were loving, that walk you always take, even just talking to people — all of it starts to feel like wading through something thick and resistant. You don’t want relief from the work. You want relief from being awake.

But that wasn’t what was happening to me at thirty-five, though I didn’t know it then (or maybe I did know it, somewhere under all the elaborate justifications, but knowing and admitting are very different things). Because the truth was, I had plenty of energy. Just not for the thing that scared me.

I could scroll through writing advice on blogs for hours. I could read about other people’s creative processes, watch interviews with successful authors, reorganize my research notes into increasingly baroque filing systems. I could plan new projects with astonishing clarity and enthusiasm — just ask me about the three novels I outlined in exquisite detail during that period, none of which I ever actually wrote. I could do anything, in fact, except the one thing that mattered: open the document and face what was actually there.

And the moment I did try — on those rare occasions when guilt or some fleeting burst of resolve got me to actually put my fingers on the keys — something would tighten in my chest. My thoughts would scatter. That heavy exhaustion would roll in like a wave, sudden and seemingly irrefutable. See? I’d think. Burned out. Told you.

But that wasn’t depletion. That was fear.

(It’s taken me a long time to understand the difference, and even now I sometimes catch myself confusing them, because they’re such good mimics of each other, such convincing impersonators.)

Here’s what I’ve come to understand, slowly and painfully and mostly through making every possible mistake first: serious creatives — and by serious I don’t mean successful or published or even good, I mean people who actually care about the work, who’ve fused their sense of self to their ability to make things — we’re particularly bad at distinguishing between these two states. Because when you’ve built your identity around output, around being someone who creates, any drop in momentum doesn’t feel like a normal plateau or a temporary stall. It feels like evidence. Proof that you’ve lost it, that you never had it, that the whole thing was a delusion.

The brain hates uncertainty. Give it a choice between “I’m experiencing some resistance” and “I’ve fundamentally burned out and everything is collapsing,” and it will pick the dramatic story every single time. Because at least the dramatic story has certainty. At least it explains things.

And that catastrophic interpretation — that’s what creates the spiral. Not the stall itself.

I remember, during that period at thirty-five, having a conversation with a friend (another writer, equally stuck, equally convinced of their own creative demise) in which we talked earnestly about taking a break, about how important it was to rest, to refill the well, to not push ourselves. And there was something so seductive about that narrative. So comforting. Because if we were burned out, then the fact that we weren’t writing wasn’t a failure of courage or honesty. It was just biology. Depletion. Something that required gentle, extended recovery.

But here’s the question I wish someone had asked me then, the one that would have saved me probably a year of spiraling: If the fear of failing disappeared — if you woke up tomorrow and somehow knew, with absolute certainty, that whatever you wrote would be good enough — would you still be this exhausted?

And if I’m honest (which, again, I wasn’t then, but let’s pretend), the answer would have been no. Or at least: I’m not sure. Which is the same as no, really, just with more elaborate defenses around it.

Because what I was protecting wasn’t my energy or my nervous system or my creative reserves. What I was protecting was my ego. My sense of myself as someone with potential. The comfortable fiction that I might be good, as long as I never actually tested it.

Avoidance is very good at disguising itself as self-care. It borrows all the language of burnout — rest, recovery, gentle boundaries, listening to your body — and deploys it in service of staying safe. And burnout, for its part, often gets mistaken for laziness or weakness or lack of discipline, especially by the person experiencing it, because we’re so thoroughly soaked in narratives about pushing through and showing up and doing the work.

Neither of these mistakes is harmless.

When you call avoidance “burnout,” you prescribe rest for what is actually a fear response. You give yourself permission to stay away from the thing that scares you, and you call it healing. And when you call burnout “avoidance,” you push through genuine depletion, you override every signal your body is sending, you make things worse in the name of productivity or discipline or refusing to be weak.

The skill — and it is a skill, one I’m still learning — is diagnostic literacy. The ability to tell the difference. To sit with the discomfort of not knowing and then, slowly, carefully, figure out what’s actually happening underneath.

And here’s the thing: if you’re reading this and recognizing yourself in it (and if that recognition feels uncomfortable, sharp, a little too accurate), you’re not alone. Most serious creatives I know — the ones doing real work, not just performing creativity on social media — have experienced this confusion. Have convinced themselves they were burned out when they were actually just scared. Or pushed through what they called “resistance” when they were actually depleted and making everything worse.

The pattern repeats because we never learned to tell the difference. We were taught about discipline and showing up and pushing through, but nobody taught us diagnostic literacy. Nobody taught us how to look at our own stalled momentum and ask: what’s actually happening here? What am I protecting? What do I actually need?

So I built something to help with exactly that question. Not because I have it all figured out (I don’t, and anyone who claims they do is lying), but because after years of making these mistakes myself and then working with other creatives who were making the same ones, I started to see the patterns. Started to understand what questions actually cut through the bullshit and get to what’s real.

The Creative Disconnection Diagnostic isn’t motivational. It’s not going to tell you you’re amazing and you just need to believe in yourself (you probably already know that, and it hasn’t helped). What it does is help you distinguish burnout from avoidance, recognize your particular patterns of self-sabotage, identify what’s actually happening beneath the stall, and decide your next clean move.

Not the move that sounds good. Not the move that fits the narrative you’ve been telling yourself. The move that’s actually true to what’s happening.

You can take it here:

And if you want this kind of clarity applied directly to your work — not just in theory but in practice, with someone who’s been in the weeds themselves and knows what bullshit looks like because they’ve deployed most of it personally — I work one-to-one with serious creatives who want precision instead of reassurance.

Details are here:

You’re not fragile. You’re not broken. But you might be misinterpreting what’s happening. And that’s fixable.

The question is whether you’re ready to look.