I burned out last week.

Sometimes you hit a wall and just can't keep going. Here's what helped me turn things around (and what didn't).

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As a morning person, I do my best, most generative work first thing when I wake up:

• 5am - Immediately take my dog Ziggy for a walk.

• 5:30am - Make coffee, feed Ziggy, make my bed, unload the dishwasher, and put in a load of laundry.

• 6am - Morning Pages journaling, as prescribed by Julia Cameron.

• 6:30am - Creative writing, deep work, or other urgent prep for the day.

• 8am - Work out, shower, get dressed.

• 9:30am - Start the actual work day.

This 6:30-8am block is where the magic happens.

It’s during that time that I completed my daily homework for the four years I spent studying story structure under Talton Wingate.

It’s during these hours that I wrote 24 different short stories for Reedsy Prompts.

These are the hours that I spend batch writing my LinkedIn content and these Substack articles. I have also spent this time writing my How to Get a Manager Guidebook, building the 8-week class I teach at Screenwriter Brunch Club, and prepping the scripts I read during the consulting sessions I give one-on-one to screenwriters.

Everyone has their own Magic Time during the day.

This is the time where you have the most energy and the fewest distractions.

If you prioritize correctly, you can best leverage this time by prioritizing the most important things to you. You can spend it doing the activities that actually matter. You can use it to generate writing that will change your life.

That’s what happened to me.

I used the two-ish hours I have every morning to myself.

Instead of sleeping in, working out, scrolling social media, or getting ahead on email, I spent these hours leveling up my skills as a writer, building a side hustle that ultimately let me quit my job, and re-discovering my own creative voice.

I typically protect these hours obsessively because I have learned the hard way over the years that if I let day job obligations creep into this time, I hit a negative spiral quickly.

It’s how I know that at the core of my being, I am a writer.

“Artists are people who are profoundly compelled to make their creative work and when they are distanced from their practice, their life quality suffers.”

- Beth Pickens

If I don’t spend time every single day writing, I hit an emotional wall very quickly.

This is not a picture of me. But it could have been! (Photo by Kinga Howard on Unsplash)

I learned this the hard way back when I was an assistant.

If I didn’t wake up early and work on my own scripts before going in to my underpaid job, I quickly started asking myself, “What am I even doing in this industry in the first place???” If I didn’t take time every single day to move my creative work forward, I would have quit this grueling career long ago.

And yet…

The “urgency” of day-to-day concerns like earning money, responding to client needs, or satisfying customer concerns always creeps in.

I find myself spending my Magic Time working on things that matter to other people, not to me. And when I do this, I will hit a wall. Because I am human and need to be taught the same lessons over and over again, I inevitably end up doing this.

This is what happened to me last Friday.

I dutifully woke up at 5am and did my morning chores.

I wrote my Morning Pages. I read a script for a consulting meeting. And then I sat down to write my Substack post for the week.

I couldn’t do it.

No matter how hard I tried to summon the will and push through.

I did some more journaling to try and diagnose where the block was coming from and find the energy. I tried to summon any reserves of willpower I might have. I tried to remind myself of all the responsibilities I had to take care of that day.

Nothing worked.

I admitted defeat and took a nap, confident that I could rally before my consulting call.

Instead, 15 minutes before my meeting, I had an actual breakdown.

Burnout has a completely different root cause than Depression. They’re not the same thing at all. But their symptoms are similar.

Burned out, I felt:

• Devoid of energy. I couldn’t get out of bed. Couldn’t move. Not for any reason.

• Completely unmotivated. No matter how much I told myself I needed to show up for my responsibilities, I couldn’t summon the will to do it.

• Hopelessness. Nothing anyone told me could actually pull me out of my slump. Not logic, not inspiration, nothing. There was no point to doing anything except continuing to lie there in bed. It didn’t matter to me what the consequences were.

I had been going too hard for too long.

Writing content to publish every single day, showing up consistently to do script consultations for writers, building out and presenting an 8-week course with 3-hour long live classes. Marketing the new quarter for that course and booking the guest speakers for it.

All this, and there was another emotionally draining factor at play:

My 10-year-old dog was dying.

Although I live in Los Angeles, the 2025 fires did not affect me personally. So, I’ve been joking with friends that this shitty year had to get to me somehow. And this is how 2025 has taken me down personally.

In February, my dog stopped being able to walk properly.

I took him into the vet to see what was wrong, and they diagnosed him with Arthritis.

But they also saw something in that X-ray and recommended I take him to a specialist to have his prostate examined. Sure enough, after an ultrasound and a urine test, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

I spent the past few months grieving him while he was still alive.

And last week, I knew that it was almost time.

I could only do so much work in the morning before I looked over at my sad boy and felt the need to lay down next to his bed and cry. And that’s what I did.

I’m gonna miss my little buddy.

I was burned out, for sure.

But a lot of it was exacerbated by grief.

Since I was sobbing and panicking, I felt unable to do my consulting meeting, so I texted the client to cancel it. They were very understanding. Then I had to figure out how to rally and what to do next.

I knew that I had to get up, shower, and get out of the house.

One thing that I knew would help would be to sit down and create some new rules, boundaries, and habits for myself regarding my work habits.

But before I could even get there, I had to get off the treadmill of immediate work and reset in a way that could enable me to get out of bed.

Here’s what didn’t work:

Any advice I read on the Internet.

I did Google (and search on TikTok) “What to do if you’re burned out.” Everyone suggests logical yet ultimately useless-in-the-moment pieces of advice like “Get some rest” and “Try breathing exercises.”

What ultimately did work:

Step 1: Let go of everything.

I was stressed out over marketing and scheduling for the Screenwriter Brunch Club class that was starting the next day. Instead, I recalibrated my attitude and told myself that it would not be the end of the world if I didn’t get as many sales and new students as I otherwise would have.

Step 2: Get out of the house.

I dragged myself to a rooftop bar and allowed myself to order a sugary cocktail.

A change of scenery and sunlight does wonders.

Step 3: Listen to music.

Musicians have sung about burnout.

They experience it too. If you find yourself in any emotional situation that feels dire, rest assured that someone, somewhere has already experienced this and wrote a song about it. In fact, I made a playlist that you can follow and save in case you ever find yourself in a similar situation (Warning: I am a millennial white girl, so this playlist is a very specific vibe and taste and is not universally appealing. I do not apologize for this).

Step 4: Revise the calendar.

The first thing I had to do was block off my morning time for creative work.

Work for myself.

Not Substack posts, not reading scripts, and not working on the PowerPoint presentations for my class. I can’t slip up. I need to ruthlessly guard my Magic Time and only spend it on screenplays, short stories, novel writing, or any kind of creative writing that feels like the reason I was put on this earth to do.

Everything else helps support me and pay the bills, but if I sacrifice the creative work, there is no point in paying those bills.

Step 5: Set some new boundaries.

I schedule consulting clients via an automated system on my website.

Creating new parameters here is technically very easy, but it’s still easy to procrastinate actually putting those limitations into place. But sometimes the simple fixes are the most important guardrails to prevent falling into that treadmill feeling. And I know I am not alone in my tendency to overload Future Me with extra work that I assume she can handle.

So moving forward, in the interest of preserving my own mental health and sanity, I am instituting new scheduling rules and sticking to them:

1. Only schedule meetings on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. This will allow me to do my Weekly Review on Monday, prep for my class on Friday, and do my creative work on the weekends.

2. Only schedule one consulting meeting a day. This will allow me more time to focus on building the more scalable parts of my business.

These are simple fixes, which is why it’s so ridiculous that I never implemented them until now. But better late than never. Hindsight is always 20/20.

The feeling of putting everyone else’s needs, demands, and careers ahead of my own is a recipe for disaster. It’s an unsustainable approach that inevitably results in a breakdown.

And I am trying to design a life for myself that does not result in breakdowns.

Oh, and one more thing.

I put my dog down on Tuesday afternoon. There are no takeaways or learning lessons from this. I’m not going to write about the experience or try to extrapolate it into some big picture observation or lesson.

It just sucks.

That’s it.

I miss him.

I’ll get better. I’ll keep going. And I will return to your weekly scheduled deep dives on the craft and business of screenwriting. I wanted to publish this essay last weekend to tell you why I didn’t post anything last Friday. But obviously, life got in the way. I am finally coming up for air today.

I guess the only real actionable takeaway I have here, is keep in mind when you’re following up with people or scheduling meetings in this—or any—industry:

You never know what they’re going through.

Please have grace for them. And more importantly, have grace for yourself.

I’ll talk to you soon.