Moments of Clarity:

Reflections on Burnout and Resilience IN HIGHER ED

 

How WRITING saved My Life

C. Jenise Williamson

The many moments that made up a string of years of burnout were hard to ignore, and I felt incapacitated to do anything about them. While my friends and acquaintances were publishing their stories and novels, attending conferences, and giving and taking summer workshops, my life simmered in a stew of mourning, episodic expressions of neurodiversity, and teaching. I did go to conferences and workshops, and I did give presentations, but doing that wasn’t enough to remedy my burnout.

Fortunately, at that time, I was teaching at a small college whose expectations of accountability were weak. Like teachers with their students, administrators get from their instructors the level they inspire. And I identified all too readily with an institution that was itself suffering from burnout and didn’t expect much in terms of publishing. At the beginning of my time there, I was even told my writing didn’t matter because it was a teaching college, not a research institution. 

Without writing, I felt I had little to give my students, that there was nothing more to say. Somehow I managed to find words and lessons to impart and hoped they were useful. When I spoke, students nodded and took notes and gave my courses good reviews. Still, during those years, I wondered if anyone else felt the way I did. Too embarrassed to ask my colleagues, I was left to think I needed to continue my role without admitting those fraudulent feelings that come from fears of inadequacy. In those days, I hadn’t seen any articles about it either, so, no, it must not be a condition many other writers faced. 

Many of us are teachers of writing but fewer of us make it in publishing. Why is that? The answers became obvious as I resumed my writing. I found the answers by culling the various sources that had more to do with the brain, the self, and the spirit, reading literature, and most of all writing again. The act of writing is far more important than publishing, the latter over which no creative has any control. 

A Lesson in Resilience

The most important answer I found and which might be the toughest for a teacher to enact was to put myself first. Teachers are generally selfless, tirelessly generous human beings whose powers of empathy find fulfillment in helping. We can also prepare for classes with the anxiety that no matter how much we do, we can never do enough. This anxiety begins on the slippery slope of knowing that students come to us ill-prepared and so many higher educational institutions are often ill-equipped to handle them. And we teachers believe that somehow we alone can save them even if it takes every last breath we’ve got.

If we look at other areas, though, we see that we have to put ourselves first if we want our lives as teachers to work. Let’s say, if you’re in debt, a financial advisor would tell you to pay yourself first then divvy up the rest to your creditors. The reason is that you need to eat and you need a warm, dry place to sleep and you need to save a little money for your future. Or let’s say, you’re on the plane that throws down oxygen masks. You know you’re supposed to put yours on first, then put on your child’s. You need not only to function but also to thrive, and for those who depend on you to thrive as well. So it is with teaching. Putting our writing and research first gives us more to give.

We can also recast our circumstances in a different light. To begin with, teaching is a creative act, and creativity itself is something to believe in when we have lost faith in the institutions we work for. In a meditation course I took this past summer, 60% of the participants said they most feared judgement from their peers and colleagues. The course through Insight Timer by Lou Redmond entitled “Learn to Stop Caring What Others Think” is a great place to start dismissing that fear which is deadly to the creative process.

Another recasting is that over the years of teaching writing, I became a better writer, even if I wasn’t always writing. Performing any creative act in a worthwhile endeavor improves creativity in other endeavors. I took up the violin, danced Scottish reels and strathspeys, remodeled kitchens, sculpted models of original landscape designs, and developed writing courses about madness and movies, emotions in fiction, and fights over food and agriculture. While they weren’t works of fiction or essays, they fed my creative desire.

There are other benefits to being creative that are brain and body related. Ashley Stahl in Forbes magazine, lists five of them: increased happiness, reduced dementia, improved mental health, boosted immune system, and improved intelligence. Healing from burnout certainly can come from improvement in all those areas.

Writing is where I’m most at home with my creativity. While other creative activities have fed my writing, writing is what settles my sometimes anxious spirit and helps me rebel against, and perhaps even to help heal, the demands of an anxious world. As my late father Lockhart Harder, a sociologist, once said, though jokingly, but which I still take to heart, “Starve a cold, feed a writer. Starve a writer, feed a revolution.”

References

Lockhart Harder in discussion with the author, January 1992.

Redmond, Lou. “Learn to Stop Caring What Others Think.” Insight Timer, Insight Network, Inc., 2021.

Stahl, Ashley. “Here's How Creativity Actually Improves Your Health.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 10 Dec. 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2018/07/25/heres-how-creativity-actually-improves-your-health/?sh=20252e2c13a6