I’m trying to write something positive today, but I’ve been feeling overwhelmed, burned out, and under so much pressure, I feel like I’ll crack at any moment.
So I think I’ll write about that instead.
Because you’ve been there. You know how it is when you’re overwhelmed beyond belief and the intensity grows to a point where it feels that the only way to escape is to snip the connection, to run away from it all and not look back. To… shudder… just get a “real” job and be done with it.
I spent some time in that dark place this week after someone I was counting on to handle a project came back to me on the day of the deadline to say he just couldn’t be bothered. So in addition to three 1,500-word articles that I already had due, I now had another one on top of it. Thankfully, I’d left myself a few days, so it was possibly salvageable, but the stress, oh my God, the stress.
I spent two hours curled up in bed, ate a whole box of my son’s chocolate chip cookies, and then decided that I was the person in charge of my career and my work and the only one I could hold accountable, and so I did. I stepped up, took charge, rolled up my sleeves, and got down to work. I immediately wrote to my editor asking for an extension because even though I wasn’t sure I’d end up needing it, why take that risk? I looked through my weekly to-do list to see what I could bump up to next week and I asked for help in other areas for my life—childcare, housework, and communication, for instance. I slept very little.
There are inevitably going to be times in your writing career when things all spiral out of control, sometimes in ways that are good and sometimes in ways that are bad. You could have half a dozen assignments that are all well-paying but on short deadlines (which is what happened with me) and you say yes to each of them because, gosh, wasn’t it yesterday that you were saying you had no work and could really use an assignment (or six)? Or it might be that you’re overwhelmed because you’ve been marketing like mad, people are responding, and now you’ve set up seven meetings in as many days and well, you hadn’t quite planned on that happening.
Whatever it is that’s causing the stress and the overwhelm is not important. Because the stress and the overwhelm are going to happen to you in your freelancing career, probably a lot more frequently than you’d like to believe. What will make the difference, then, between sanity and regular meltdowns, will be how you handle them and how well-prepared you are for them.
Don’t wait for disaster to strike to plan how you’re going to deal with an abundance of work or weeks when there’s a family crisis or a huge power failure in the city. Do that now, today, when the seas are calm and the skies are clear. Soon enough, the storm will come, and you’ll be thankful you have a life jacket and a friend to help you through.
Do you have a life support plan for your writing business? If not, start building one today.