Burnt Out, But I Don’t Want to Stop

MJ Wynn
2 hours ago
2 min read

I’m burnt out, but not in the “I can’t do anything” way. More like I still want to do everything, even though I’m running on fumes. I’ve started and stopped so many times that restarting has become its own exhausting routine.

I’m so tired of it.

It’s like I got stuck in survival mode and now I can’t even get out. Everything I tried to build up over the last year — the momentum, the motivation — it all slammed to a stop. And now I can’t figure out how to get it moving again.

I haven’t touched my book. Justice for Hunter and Peyton. They deserve better than this. Their story deserves better than me showing up halfway, once every two months, pretending I still remember who they are.

And yeah, I checked — it’s not Mercury retrograde. Mid-July for that bullshit, apparently. Cool, something else to look forward to.

In the middle of trying to get season two of the vlog rolling, real life decided to drop a house-sized anvil on my head. Living with people who don’t care about the way their shit affects the rest of the house is basically a hurricane you can’t leave. There’s no end date. No vacation. You just have to stand in it and keep picking up the pieces while trying to hold on to your own plans.

I wish I could just press pause. Just… freeze everything for a month, maybe even a week, and breathe. But the reality is I have to keep dealing with what’s here, even while trying to keep the creative stuff afloat. It’s like running a marathon with one shoe missing.

And I swear to god, I’ve spent weeks trying to build the “perfect” routine. Like, as if bullet journaling my life into a schedule would magically fix my motivation and get me out of bed at 8am. Spoiler: it didn’t.

I don’t know what the takeaway is. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe this is just me documenting the fact that I’m tired, but I still don’t want to quit. That I’m frustrated with how stuck I feel, but also too stubborn to fully stop.

Burnout doesn’t always mean you collapse. Sometimes it means you’re on the floor with your laptop open, forcing yourself to care, even when every cell in your body is screaming to lie down.