The pattering of rain on the bathroom skylight sung us to sleep… well, almost.
It arrives in great billows, drums the roof with passionate vigor, leaves the air saturated with creosote, you can practically taste it through the closed window. I lay there, my thoughts beating to the rhythms of the rain. Rapid, random, ruthless. My mind racing to solve the same problem, rewriting the same interactions, rooting for every mistake and misunderstanding.
So I swung lmy legs out of bed, threw my robe on, and shuffled to my office across the hall. It was somewhere in the wee hours and I just started click clacking away.
I have a jumping spider who lives on my desk. I would stop, check on him, ask how the night was treating him, and then go back to it. He had no notes. I worked until the rain stopped and then… I kept working.
When the sun finally crept up over the hill, I fetched my pup and we stood in her favorite spot, basking in the crisp morning sunlight.
Wet desert. Everything dripping and sharp and clean. The light striking my face, I took a deep cleansing breath… and I had the clearest thought I have had in months.
I am burnt out.
Dysregulated. Wrung out. Up for twenty-some hours working on a project that could have waited until Tuesday.
And then, standing there in that beautiful sunlight, a feeling I did not expect.
Gratitude.
Landscape architecture asks you to be technical and creative at the same time, constantly, for the same deliverable. You have to know the slope percentage and you have to invent something nobody has built before. You have to hold the code in one hand and the idea in the other, and neither one gets to go first.
That is two entirely different kinds of drain happening in the same afternoon.
And creative work has no schedule. The idea does not arrive during business hours. When it shows up you ride it, because you do not know when the next one is coming, and you are not going to be the person who let it pass.
I was trying to explain this to a friend recently and the only version I could explain even slightly coherently was: I give my all and some change, or I give nothing. There is no middle setting. Trust, I have looked for it.
Which means burnout is not a failure of my system. It is my system, running the way it runs.
What was different this time was the gratitude.
Usually I meet this moment with frustration. Disappointment that I could not sustain it longer, that I let it get here again, that I am the kind of person who does this.
But standing in that sunlight, what I actually felt was that my brain and my body and my sheer willpower had carried me through the biggest year of my life. Every ounce of it went somewhere real. The business. The people I love. The thing I am building.
And now I get to stand in the sun on a beautiful morning after a desert rain, in a house I love, with the hard part behind me.
So I spent the entire day resting. And no guilt about it.
And now I am giving myself a season of grace. No obligations I did not already make. No pressure to generate at the pace I was running at six weeks ago. I will work when the work is there and I will stop when it is not, and I will not treat the stopping as evidence of anything.
Because something is better than nothing. A little bit of good work in a slow season beats forcing brilliance out of a body that has nothing left to give it.
Burnout is real. For those of us who find genuine passion in this work, it is also inevitable. The only variable is how you meet it.
I am choosing to meet it with gratitude this time. Ask me again in a month.
When was the last time you let yourself actually stop… and what did it take to get there?
