A friend of mine, who lives in an apartment and has a busy, demanding life, recently got a new dog. Border collie/staffy cross. Within weeks she was frayed at the edges. The dog was naughty and needing. Tearing up the furniture. Clawing at the door frames. Howling when left alone. Growling at other dogs in the park. As frustrating as this was for her, it wasn't hard to understand, once you stepped back. A working dog, bred over generations for stimulation and purpose and space, dropped into eleven square metres and a ten-hour workday. The dog wasn't broken. The fit was.

A friend of mine, three wines into a Thursday happy hour, announced she was "doing a full personality reset" following a recent birthday. Now this was not simply a quest to relinquish some less-than-healthy habits… or a reorientation towards healthier ones. This was a personality reset, like she was going to factory-restore herself and reinstall a better version. I asked what the current version had done wrong. She thought about it for a long moment and said, "I overreact to things that don't matter and under-react to things that do." Which is, if you squint, one of the more accurate pieces of self-diagnosis I've heard from someone holding a chilled red.

Maybe you've lost interest in work that once lit you up. Maybe every email feels heavy. You find yourself procrastinating, avoiding clients, staring blankly at projects that used to excite you. You wonder if you're just lazy? You wonder whether you've simply fallen out of love with your creative career. For many artists, writers, musicians, designers, performers and creative business owners, that's where burnout begins. Not with collapse, but with disconnection.

For a long time, I treated emotional needs as a kind of personal weakness. I admired self-sufficiency. Independence. Competence. I wanted to be the person who needed very little from anyone. Many of us do. Sometimes this develops because our needs were inconsistently met growing up. Attachment theory suggests that when caregivers are unavailable, unpredictable, or overwhelmed, children often adapt by minimising their needs in order to preserve connection. We learn that needing is risky. So we become fiercely independent adults who pride ourselves on "having no expectations."

There is a particular brand of misery that doesn't announce itself dramatically. It doesn't arrive with a breakdown or a crisis or anything you could point to and say: there, that's the thing. It arrives, instead, as a kind of flattening. You are technically functioning. The emails get answered. The work gets done. You show up, you perform competence, you even occasionally produce something you don't entirely hate. And yet…something is missing, not from the work, but from you. Some quality of aliveness that used to be there has quietly packed its bags and left without notice.

There is a particular kind of grief that arrives when someone brilliant dies young. A collective gasp that then quietly reshapes itself into awe and reverence. We speak of them differently afterwards. We say things like “at the height of their powers” and “a light extinguished too soon” and the eulogies are always, somehow, luminous.

We do not do this for people who die at 84 after a good dinner with people that love them.

Something we don’t talk about is the silent grief cycle embedded in the creative process We talk about blocks. Burnout. Resistance. We romanticise the grind, the breakthrough, the comeback. But beneath all of that, there can be something quieter. Heavier. Grief.

This Valentine’s Day I had an evening date planned with someone I had been seeing for a while. We laughed and talked about our favourite movies, our favourite music. We had shared playlists. He asked me about my favourite flowers. As the weighty romantic date crept closer, a creeping unease took hold of me. I ran in refuge to the url of one of my favourite florists and pre-ordered myself a large bouquet of natives. Waratahs, sprawling gum, prickly banksia. Something unruly, coarse and bright. Something textural, pungent, excessive.

Yesterday I removed a dusty purple wrap top with pendulous bell sleeves from my wardrobe. I rolled it up small and placed it in a bag, ready to be donated. The poetry of the shirt was very loud. The first and last time I wore it was on a first date at a wine bar with a man from Hinge. He was kind, sensitive, amiable. We saw each other across a few months but this weekend I sent the text that signalled I felt we were on different tracks. He said he understood, and thanked me for my time.

Burnout gets talked about a lot these days. It shows up in workplace policies, LinkedIn posts, wellness checklists, and those well meaning reminders to take a break and go outside.

But for creative people, burnout often feels a little different. Something beyond just exhaustion. Something more nebulous and disorienting than that.

When your creative identity is tethered to a specific skill, and that skill disappears, you do not just lose income. You lose orientation. You lose language for who you are. You lose the way you introduce yourself at parties. Who are you if not that?

Creative burnout is a strange beast. It doesn’t always arrive with a dramatic collapse. Sometimes it looks like competence. Productivity. A calendar full of meetings. Deadlines met. Invoices sent. Posts scheduled. And yet…

That hum in your chest? That sense of standing on the edge of Some Grand Portal? Delicious. You’re in the foyer of a year that feels like it might actually meet you where you are, instead of insisting you shrink or contort. Year of the Horse energy is motion, muscular momentum, wind in the mane, grab-life-by-the-reins kind of living.

Let’s build some rituals that feel like devotion, not obligation.

Therapists have feelings too. Just like us, they experience their feelings in different ways and employ different strategies to manage those feelings in the moment. I reached out to a few of my favourite psychologists and counsellors to learn more about how their own emotions impact them, and the practical strategies they use to feel better.

Perfectionism is an insidious mindset parading as motivation. The truth is that perfectionism holds us back and keeps us playing small. This workshop explores the features of a perfectionistic mindset and how we might opt for something more empowering.

Ever feel guilty when it comes to taking time for yourself? Here are six ways I’ve learned to reckon with emotional resistance towards self-care & personal renewal.

When life gets too much to handle, a soothing practice can be to zoom out of our weird little lives. It’s easy to become completely embroiled in the tedium and drama of existence, that we forget that the universe is perfectly indifferent to us being here.

When I had my breakdown/through a few years back and had the opportunity to start assembling my life from scratch, I started to ask myself questions like “what do I really want my life to look like?”

We’re never really taught how to navigate the big emotions - the ones that overtake us like a brutal and mighty storm. We distract ourselves from them (which can be useful at times), we deny them, battle them, and we push them down and hope they don’t rear their ugly heads again ( which they inevitably do).

Some knobs we all have at our disposal - many of which gather dust. We believe that our external situation must be “just right” for these to work or be applicable. We place all the power in people and outcomes outside of ourselves which is bound to leave us miserable and dissatisfied.