'In other news, all signed up to my next gig. Been a while since I've been able to face up to anything other than filler work - hope I'm ready'.
Earlier this year, I took the first deliberately long break of my career. The break was longer and more needed than I ever could have realised. It's taken all these months of rest, and a couple of months of being back at work to finally begin to understand, admit - and crucially, open up about what I feel and felt.
Just before my break, I remember turning down a decent sounding job, and feeling guilty for doing so. I was making myself unavailable for work at a time where there were just are not enough experienced assistants to go round, and I was stalling my career. I was convinced that I'd miss out on that one job which would lead to me stepping up, and paranoid that other assistants would get trained up and jump ahead of me.
Outwardly, I presented a happy, positive spin on the break. I said I was looking forward to a rest, looking after myself, and that I couldn't wait to throw myself into my hobbies. What I presented was, on one level, completely true - what I was doing was a positive, necessary step, but what I presented couldn't be further from what I actually felt.
What I felt was absolute, total defeat.
I was incapable of dealing with the basic demands of working in television and making my own opportunities. In my mind, not only was I too inadequate to achieve my own goals, I was feeling things I wasn't allowed to feel, and that made me a bad person. Bitterness, jealously, irritability, anger and resentment all bubbled inside me. I tried to just not feel them at all, but in the end, I couldn't stop myself expressing them. They were bursting at the seams and spilling out onto the mask I'd spent years building. Taking a break should have meant admitting their existence and why I felt like that, but instead I hid behind the nice things, and tried to avoid facing what my mind was really doing.
That came tumbling down when I thought I was ready to go back to work. I met with a post supervisor who told me excitedly about 'how great it is that there's so many opportunities for assistants to step up', whilst interviewing me exclusively as an assistant. That fed deeply into every insecurity going. I spent hours thinking about all those assistants stepping up around me. How awful I must be to not have stepped up with all those opportunities floating about - to not even have noticed them. That was my first glimpse back into the world of my work for weeks and it broke me in the space of a ten minute chat. Clearly, I wasn't ready to return.
I am back at work now, but I still have to be careful. Despite the fact that somewhere inside me I know there are things in my life to be proud of, so much of me still feels defeated. I'm still grieving the missed opportunities and skills I don't have, and the person I'm not. I still beat myself up for what I haven't achieved and look longingly at those who have bigger or faster successes.
Cheery reading eh? I know my blog posts, when I do write them, are rarely a barrel of laughs these days. I had even told myself that I wasn't to write one until I had something positive or funny to say. I don't want to present myself as 'weak' or 'miserable' - I want, so desperately, to be the calm, happy Naomi who rocks up with a perfectly baked cake and handles every struggle and setback with nothing but a smile and a to-do list. But as I see more and more friends and loved ones push themselves to their absolute limit, I'm realising that this stuff needs to be talked about.
So please - if you're feeling like you're on the cusp of being, or are burnt out, learn from my experience. Pushing yourself to the limit is so tough but I know, I really do know and understand that admitting there is a limit and taking action is ten times more painful. You'll always give yourself a reason why now isn't the right time. There's something that absolutely must be done at the moment so you'll stop next week, which turns into next month which turns into next year. We all go through times where we have to give more to get more, and when life deals us a tough hand - but at some point, you have to find a way to look after yourself. Some things a long, slow recovery can gradually restore - but some you won't get back. There are beautiful parts of you that you are sacrificing, and you have to ask yourself - is it worth it? Because it's not just 'an hour of my life I'll never get back'. It's a part of you.
I remember distinctly the fear of going back to work, because it's the same fear I have now. It's the one fear that's managed to out-root the still deeply embedded one of not being good enough - and it's that I cannot feel like that again. I cannot give what I gave before, without at least some small sense of it paying off. I'm still carrying a lot of pain from last time, so I simply can't go back to that heightened level of alertness, activity and anxiety, where every hour I don't give, any request I say no, or even 'not today' to, I could be loosing an opportunity. Where everything matters and hurts so much. Where work becomes more important than sleeping, eating proper meals and seeing people I care about.
So many people told me to look after myself better when I was starting out - friends, colleagues, family, and I blindly soldiered on, working all hours, believing it was the only way to prove myself, trying to find a way to be the 'best'. Now I'm the one telling friends, second assistants, trainees and family to look after themselves - and the resistance I so often get mirrors that which I gave. Clearly there is a cultural issue - certainly in my industry, but I imagine in so many other careers and even hobbies, that embeds these damaging ideas deep into our psyche.
So I'm making positive changes. I'm learning. The career break won't come any faster for destroying myself in the cutting room hour after hour, so I'm trying to make the journey a little smoother in the meantime. Things are better and I'm in a far better place than I was in January. The process I kicked off by taking a break may have revealed more wounds than I knew I had, it may have felt so overwhelmingly like surrender, but it pulled me away from breaking point and is dragging me towards something better.
There's no contrived happy ending here, because I can't in all honesty, describe myself as 'happy' yet - I'm still, deep down, quite confused and conflicted, I still want to be more than I am. However, I am beginning to reflect more about what makes me tick, and stop ticking.
So, that's the messy, honest truth of it all. I flew what to me was the white flag. I did what every inch of my mind and body was telling me not do, but that which they desperately needed me to do. This was not an easy post to write, it took several drafts and I wrote much of it through tears, but I press 'share' because I think more of us need to hear this - not only is it ok to stop, it's brave, it's honest, and it's vital.
