Reflective Memory of Burnout in 2023 - Part 2

What came after was pure magic!

Life can change its colours and days can feel different, sometimes, just in a few days. Despite having a burnout, my creative genes couldn’t wait to show up to take over the newfound space in my life. The long-delayed pleasure of simply enjoying my hobbies in an uninterrupted fashion and showing off my talents like in the old days felt like an old friend showing up right on schedule.

The thing is, I couldn’t understand my own behaviour. Things were coming as if they were programmed. I signed up for voice training classes, and I started indulging in music and creativity of all kinds.

It started with resting and sleeping, a lot of it. Then very naturally, I started reading not for knowledge but for pure pleasure. In the meantime, I was so excited to discover my new hobbies that I bought all kinds of musical instruments: a darbuka, an electric drum, a microphone, an electric piano. Together with the guitar I already had, the apartment truly became a music studio.

I realise now, looking back, that I am a lucky person. I had enough space, time and money to support all of the things I wanted to do at that time.

What a luxury I had!

However, somewhere deep inside, I was feeling the ache that it came so late and that I had to repress all of it into a bucket and seal it with a lid so tight. I had to hide so much in order to perform and to fit into the norm perfectly.

The creativity was the form. What was actually happening underneath was the long delayed reckoning with the pain and the struggles I had pushed down, over the years, into the very bottom of my psyche, so that they would look like they did not exist.

Just as a volcano erupts when the pressure is too high, everything that was stored inside me splashed out and created a field where there was only destruction. My life fell apart. The job, friends, the relationship, and the cats were all gone, and I was left alone to face myself, honestly and clearly for the first time in my life.

This was the time to pay the price, for ignoring the past and the pain.

So be it.

I had to keep looking forward.

It wasn’t easy. At all! I would walk forward for a few steps, then go back for one step reminiscing about the life I once had but no longer have. It felt like I was walking on top of the rubble and I had to keep the strength and optimism so I wouldn’t fall down there and never get up.

Maybe, I wasn’t even walking - I was crawling. The steps were as small as a key on the piano, a line of song lyrics I scribbled on my notebook and a brief voice recording I recorded in order to transform the rubble into something beautiful, something worth standing up for and climbing upwards.

Life is amazing and intelligent, in the sense of how it tests you and how it guides you to your own path.

All of those things have happened, for real.

Now, I am sitting here, in my room, in Urumqi, having my mother in the other room, making this profound conclusion.

Finally believing that my life is here, now.