A New Chapter After Burnout & Introducing Paid Subscriptions
A personal story with a happy ending in progress...
Firstly, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone that is here, has signed up to receive my ramblings in your inbox, your support is very special and encourages me to keep going!
This week’s post is a personal one and I will probably make a mess of it, but hopefully if nothing else, you enjoy seeing some photos I took recently in Faro, Portugal. Video to come soon! :)
So then, let’s get into it:
Substack to Replace Social Media
What is the one platform nearly everyone on the internet checks daily?
Email.
Email is the only tool that is transferrable between different providers. Can you send an Instagram message to someone on Twitter? Nope.
Email can though.
You can send messages from Gmail to Yahoo to Microsoft to Proton Mail. It’s one of the best digital ways to communicate.
Plus, you can still manage to find email providers that will give you an address for free without ads like Protonmail.
For the most part, it is also a social media lock-out-proof way to communicate. Remember that one day where Instagram was unavailable for about half the day? How bad did that scare people!
It’s healthy to take a break from social media and many people find their lives and mental health improving as a result. I support this. Being someone who has often taken breaks and deleted accounts for a while, I appreciate the ability to receive updates via email while being off social media.
For a long time, I felt the effects of not being able to partake in community groups because they are on Facebook. Or missing photowalks because the only announcement was on Instagram.
The FOMO is real, but with Substack, nobody has to miss out! If only more groups were made accessible to everyone, not just those on social media, that would be helpful for those who aren’t on it.
So this is where I want to be, in your inbox! Aaaaaand it would be cool if you started a Substack too so that I can see your work and read your words in my inbox (Nudge, nudge).
I’d also love to have more ways for you to be a part of this newsletter or channel, whether that’s call ins for the podcast maybe or contributing thoughts on topics, polls, interviews, let me know if you’d like to get involved!!
It’s also free. Substack doesn’t put ads (that I am aware of) on your newsletters, and they seem to want to help everyone not just the bigger accounts.
I’ve been growing on Youtube and recently realized that while my channel is NOT monetized, they still put ads on my videos. Which irks me to a degree. It is a platform that I can use for free, allows me to grow and engage with people, and recommends my content to others. So there is a toll to pay there and that’s fair enough.
Youtube is a grind though.
That being said, my plan is to invest time creating on both platforms, but perhaps more on Substack. I’ve been mulling this over for months and several folks have said, why not just do it?!
Soooo…
Offering Paid Subscriptions
Sometimes it takes one last straw, one more comment, another nudge, or a bold dare to push us into doing something we have been wanting to do but a little scared to start.
Thanks to a dare from the prolific, entertaining, and generous writer of Everything is Amazing - Mike Sowden, I’m going to throw my hat completely into the Substack ring.
What does that mean?
I’ll be offering a paid subscription version of the Eclectachrome newsletter for those that want to both support the channel and also receive extra writing, posts, access, and other things like digital or physical zines, and drawings for film giveaways! All to come in 2+ extra subscriber-only posts a month full of photography fun and curiosity. Posts will be a little more than what I’ve been doing, longer, more in depth, more topical.
If you are interested in this, feel free to sign up here and join me!
Substack doesn’t let me go below the $5/month subscription option but I’ve made the yearly one much cheaper for $3/month. I would make the monthly one lower if I could, but don’t have another workaround at the moment.
There will be a free newsletter that still goes out, but this will be monthly now instead of bi-weekly.
There are so many tools on Substack, podcasts, voiceovers, and even for video! So I will be exploring and using more of these in the near future as well.
Burnout & The Last Straw
What many of you might not know yet is that I recently left behind my full-time job to take a well-needed break and change my path of work. I didn’t know how to share this news, or even if I should share it at all.
However, it is one of the reasons I’ll be writing more on Substack, so I figured it was good to explain a little more.
This break has been in the making ever since working 60+ hours a week in my early 20s, hunched over a small laptop in cold client conference rooms for a few years at PwC (a public accounting firm) in Boston.
After burning out from this, I left.
But instead of getting an easier job, I jumped straight into another high-pressure fast-paced environment, this time at a public software company that was just as grueling, just as toxic despite the promises of a better work-life balance.
I guess I’m a glutton for punishment! But also, I had debts and rents to pay.
A couple years in, I was burnt out again.
Though I became disciplined and paid off a good chunk of debt (and cancelled all credit cards), I was making plans to move my life to somewhere cheaper, somewhere warmer. Maybe find work I enjoyed more.
I wanted to find work that wasn’t so unsustainable, winters that weren’t so long, and living that wasn’t so expensive…
That was the plan, anyway.
At work, after voicing my intentions to relocate my itchy feet and essentially handing in my notice, I was surprised by an offer to pursue the option of relocating to the London office.
An international adventure! Wait a minute, I could hang on for that!
It was a long-time dream to live abroad, greener grass kind of ideals and such…
Four months on the ground in the UK and things WERE better but Covid took over and it was downhill from there.
Working more than ever, just from home in my sweats, the burn out crept back in until I couldn’t push it away anymore.
Then, the company was bought by an investment firm and it was messy. Co-workers jumping off the burning ship left, right, and forward. Leadership crumbled, taking their inflated stock option payouts and sailing away, high as clouds.
I knew I needed to get out after my boss said he was turning up the dial to see how much more work I could take on, with my capacity already over the limit. I couldn’t do it anymore. Couldn’t dredge up any more energy for work.
A few months later, I tiredly gave him my notice in a quiet conference room in an empty office. I felt like a zombie. I was tired, so tired.
The chapter of finance, corporatism, office politics, drinking culture, late nights, Sunday emails, unnecessary Zooms, etc closed for the near future.
And I haven’t been able to bring myself to open it again.
A New Chapter
So, now I’m working to create a healthier reality. Life is short and I want to see what can be done with the things I enjoy. Find a path through this.
At the moment, I’m taking a break from full time work, healing from what was a deep burnout. But I’m also still creating, still writing, still obsessed with photography. I’ve never lost any energy for what I love…
I have no plans to go back to accountancy. My favorite job was actually working at a coffee shop, so that’s where I might be again soon and sometimes I wonder if I would have been happier if I had never left that job.
But we can’t change the past and do learn from every experience we have, whether joyful or painful.
Speaking of learning from things, I want to share a few lessons that this burnout taught me in case someone somewhere needed to read or hear something in here as I did many times before from others.
Lessons I’ve Learned From Burnout
Work is not the end all be all: It isn’t. Yes, there are bills to pay, but if you are feeling burnt out, if where you are isn’t healthy, then it’s okay to change course. Make a plan, hang in there while saving or planning, but eventually, craft a heathier reality. Save up what you can, dramatically reduce spending, move into more affordable housing, etc.
I moved from a tiny studio to a very cheap house share while in London which was one of the best financial decisions for saving money for this break.
It’s OK to take a break: There is no shame in taking a break if we plan for it, save for it, need it. I’ve watched countless individuals and couples save up for taking breaks, traveling the world, starting fresh. You are an adult and can make your own decisions. Your work does not own you. Reality is what we make it and we don’t have to live the reality others tell us to.
You have the power to make things happen: You can do it, no matter how slowly, but you can make things happen. You can pay off debts and save up. It will take time and requires patience. It may also require sacrifice, but only you are going to make it come into reality.
You can say no: They might not like it, they might treat you poorly for it, but you can say no. In certain corporate worlds, especially Finance, there is a culture of never saying no. Of taking on whatever they pile up on your desk, powering through, working late nights and weekends to get it all done. No, this is not human. You are allowed to voice your concerns. Unfortunately, if you are in such a culture or team like mine, voicing your concerns may hurt you, but perhaps then if it does, it’s not somewhere you want to be anyways.
Follow the path of love: What gives you energy, go after that. I learned the hard way, you can very easily deeply burn out of something you don’t love, so it’s never going to work out well. It is much harder to invest into something you don’t like, which makes it harder to succeed.
Health comes first: For so many years, I put aside my personal health in favor of work and trying to impress or fulfill manager expectations. At age 31, I had to see an Osteopath. I love coffee, but we used to drink those horrendous Monster or Redbull energy drinks to get us through the long 6-day work weeks.
I fell asleep at the wheel driving home at 2am from a client site because our manager told us not to leave until certain work was done that she didn’t look at for days afterwards. I had vertigo and crashed into my desk after a busy period.
It all sounds ridiculous now. If you have alternatives, no job is worth risking your health or letting it deteriorate.
You don’t have to go it alone: Let people in, let them help, share your experience and vulnerability. This is one of my biggest struggles. I’ve always been proud of being fiercely independent, doing things 100% on my own, not asking for help. But I have also learned that this is a lonely and hard way to go about doing things.
When you share and let people in, let them help, if they are the right people of course, your life and your work are improved wildly. Not everything works this way, but a lot does. If not just to share the burden which lightens your load if someone else has the capacity to take some off you.
Just for a moment though, to allow yourself to recover, because asking other to carry your burdens for longer than that puts a strain on them which may not be fair in the long term. And others might need you for the same down the line as well.
Moving On
I know this is a heavier post than normal, so I’m going to include something positive and encouraging that I found recently for you at the end here!
Another Substack newsletter about psychology and mental health:
Alf is a psychologist and writer. His instagram is full of positive well-designed graphics about mental health. It’s well done and worth reading, especially if psychology or mental health is a subject you don’t know much about and would like to explore further.
So that’s all for today, I will see you in the next monthly newsletter update! And if you would like to support the channel & newsletter with a paid subscription, I will see you sooner than that!
Love to you all :)
-M
Thanks Aragon! Glad you have found a good place to be now, its grueling as you know and I wish I had come to that before I even started lol But I did learn a lot from the experiences and work so I will take the good from that and leave the rest in the past. Thanks so much for reading!