Burnout and Creative Block

This is a funny thing to start a blog page about, about not being able to create, but here I am. 

For those who don’t know me, I spend a few months every two years packing up my life and trying to recreate somewhere new. Often including finding new schools, working out how to keep my day job remote, finding new friends. This is all part of army life and anyone reading this familiar with the forces will see something they recognise. However the move was bigger this time, not just because it was a move abroad, but because it happened after a very busy summer and I took a somewhat drastic decision to make it harder on us all. 

As you should all have seen if you follow me on Instagram, this summer I held my first solo exhibition in a number of years. The local gallery I have always loved (shout out to Richmond’s “The Station”!) offers exhibition space for those who need it. It so happened that there was space for two weeks, over my birthday, in the middle of the summer. At the same time my husband was posted away on Operational Tour somewhere foreign. This meant 4 months of solo-parenting, less than a normal tour, but still challenging. I thought that having the exhibition to focus on would be a good distraction and coping mechanism. 

And it might have been a good coping mechanism if that had been all I needed to worry about. However, just before he left, we were told that we had to move to Germany only a few weeks after the tour finished. This meant a lot of the move admin was managed via teams messages and emails (the only form of communication we had). And what about making our lives harder…? I also decided that as we were moving to Germany, we should try putting our children into the local school rather than the amazing English Army one available. This decision was not an easy one and took a lot of heartache and back and forth to come to, and was motivated by my rusty but not quite forgotten German. I wanted to gift my children another language if we could. 

If you haven’t quite joined the dots together yet it’s plain to say that this has all been a lot. Even though I was proud of the exhibition, and the children have just started to settle into their new school, it has been a very long 6 months. All this has put a chokehold on my creativity and despite best efforts of setting up studios and trying to carve out time… Generally I’ve been trying to recover from what I can only assume was nasty burnout. 4 months of sleeping and dog walking I feel like I could be waking up, but I need to take it slowly. 

If you’ve read this far, then thank you. I will try to always be honest and share my journey with you, and although this blog could simply be another project that fades into the winds of time, as many of my others do, it would be silly not to try, right?