What I learned from not working for six months
Resting, healing, and connecting with my creativity.
Before I dive into this blog, I want to address the elephant in the room: taking a break from working sounds like an inaccessible luxury. While I did have the benefit of having worked a middle-class job alongside my husband for a couple of years before my break, there were many practical and mental hurdles to overcome in order to prioritize my rest and creativity as I do now. As someone who was raised in financial insecurity and survival mode, I have always felt the need to have a plan and work two or more jobs at a time most of my adult life. My path toward taking time off from working was neither straightforward nor easy.
In 2018, after graduating with a dual Master’s in Social Work and Latin American Studies, I started my own program focusing on the intersection of mental health and immigrant justice at a university research institute. During and after graduate school, my life involved regular trips to immigrant detention centers, support groups for burnt-out and traumatized legal professionals, and a constant feeling of climbing uphill against an unjust immigration system. Then, on top of it all, came the 2020 pandemic.
I, like many others, was burnt out.
I was burnt out from years of survival mode and crisis management. From a job that I had created and poured my love into, but which involved holding the trauma and burnout of others day after day. From the pandemic. Throughout the time of working from home, I delved deeper into the social justice work being done around rest practices. In particular, the incredible work of Tricia Hersey and The Nap Ministry was a guiding light. After so many years of encouraging others to take breaks, acknowledge their own needs, and engage with their creativity, I was ready to do so for myself on a deeper level.
Enter The Artist’s Way.
In the spring of 2022, while still at my full-time job, I began The Artist’s Way 12-week course with a friend whose talents also lay in both social work and creativity. The process was intense at times and breathtaking, as I navigated each week’s revelations and tasks. I learned that I, someone who has always balked at routine, could in fact write three pages a day every morning. I explored mediums of art I had never truly tried before as part of my weekly artist dates - including painting, working with clay, and mosaics. Going through The Artist’s Way with someone else was invaluable to both of us, providing support, accountability, and compassion for one another as we learned to build those things within ourselves. In fact, we loved the course so much that we immediately restarted the process a second-time through for another 12 weeks.
The last week at my job in September of 2022 also happened to be my last week of the second time through The Artist’s Way. These coinciding events were not in fact planned carefully in my calendar, but rather felt like an example of one of The Artist’s Way’s central concepts - synchronicity. Julia Cameron describes synchronicity as the universe responding to actions you take toward fulfilling your dreams. Again and again I have seen it play out in my life in small ways, which has caused me to trust that as I put my ideas, creativity, and true self into the universe, I will be met with that same generosity in kind.
On October 1st, 2022, my time off began.
I had committed myself to six months away from work. A scary, exciting time with no calendar, emails, or to-do lists. I am so grateful to have done The Artist’s Way before I left my job, in part because that time did not feel like an open, terrifying void. I had already started exploring my creative self and my authentic desires and dreams. However, as someone who had always relied heavily on planning, I still had a plan to not have a plan. I had decided that for the first 3 months, I wouldn’t worry about the future. I wouldn’t decide what was next or do anything else in a structured way. I wanted to learn how to just BE. For the second 3 months, I would explore my artistic pursuits more intentionally and begin brainstorming what I would do next.
That fall, I felt untethered or unsure at times, but at other times the freedom was exhilarating. I found myself slowly but surely wanting to work on the creative ideas turning over in my head. The burnout lessened as I enjoyed slow mornings, time with my cats, and a major break from social media, emails, my phone, and technology in general. I dreamed up a book concept and a new musical. I continued taking vocal lessons and composing music. I even started trumpet lessons with the instrument I had bought the year before that had lain untouched in its case.
By the time I entered 2023, I felt transformed.
The burnout that I at one point truly believed might never fade, wasn’t gone, per say, but felt more like a memory than part of my present reality. I started to regain my all-time favorite emotion - ENTHUSIASM. In The Artist’s Way, enthusiasm is described as “a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process, a loving recognition of all the creativity around us.” I think of enthusiasm as an energy that comes from within, combining excitement, hope, vigor, and forward-motion. I have always appreciated my capacity for enthusiasm, and its loss was one of the things that had hit me the hardest in my state of burnout. I hadn’t felt like me.
In February, through a synchronous series of events, in February, I found a class out of the Songwriting School of LA on writing musicals that was beginning THE NEXT DAY. Now in the past, I would never have signed up for a class so quickly. But it was exactly the kind of format I enjoyed - sharing our projects and getting feedback from the instructor and the class. Learning by doing. I watched a video of the instructor and three past students, felt a good vibe, and leaped in head first. I now have been with that class through two extensions and have completed the first act of a musical I had started writing when I was 15, as well as beginning to flesh out the concepts, characters, songs, and script for 2 more musicals.
But I knew my time off was soon slotted to end. My husband and I had saved enough money for me to gift myself this break, but I would need to start working again. I embarked upon the brainstorming process to find some middle ground between my old life and this new one.
Launching Vidina Visions Consulting.
I knew that for whatever I wanted to do next to make income, I wanted to bring my whole self to the project. No matter how hard I tried, in my past job, I never truly felt like my creative self was at the table. Maybe it was because I was in academia, maybe it was my own blocks, or maybe it was my scope of work. But this time, I was determined to find a way to stay in the creative space I had been so carefully cultivating.
I had done a Skillshare course the year before that asked me to map out my life in events and then find connections between them that I hadn’t seen before. While I immediately saw obvious connections like music and social justice, a new one leaped off the page. I loved the act of creation. Not only for my own projects, but for others’ as well. This had been simmering in the back of my mind since then. Now, in the spring of 2023, I wrote in my morning pages -
What would be the most intuitive way for me to make money?
Not the easiest way. Not the quickest way. The most intuitive way. And of course, as it always does, an idea came to me in the shower. My friend Lynn calls them #showerthoughtsbyana, and truly my best ideas always seem to bubble up, quote literally, in that sudsy, steamy air. I thought to myself, “what if I consult with people on their ideas?”. I could stay in that generative state of creation that I love so much, bring all of my enthusiasm to the table, and still have the capacity to work on my own ongoing projects. Just like that, the idea of Vidina Visions Consulting was born.
As I brainstormed my new business, I tried to take everything I had learned from my time off into the process. At first, I realized that thinking about making money brought forward my “planning brain” in full-force. I could feel my intuition taking a back seat and crying for attention. I reassessed and focused on better balancing the two. Likewise, I could feel that my inner artist child (a concept from The Artist’s Way about where our creativity lies) was concerned that a new job would take away from the fun and play of creativity. So I decided that to start, I would work 2 days a week, reserving the other 3 week days for my own creative projects. How best to help others with their ideas, I thought, than to be actively engaging with my own?
Finding a new path.
And here I am. Having launched Vidina Visions Consulting, meeting with my One-on-One Idea Consulting clients, sharing my mental health knowledge with creators via Mental Health Representation Consulting, and about to start The Artist’s Way for the 4th time. This time, I’ll be sharing my journey on Instagram @vidinavisionsconsulting and @vidinavisionsart. I hope that as I continue to explore this new territory of working and creating, I can hold onto the lessons learned from this restorative time off.
From The Nap Ministry, I have learned to incorporate rest as part of my social justice and creative practices. From The Artist’s Way, I have learned to lead with my intuition, believe in my art, and take risks. Creatively, I’m taking advice from Shakira’s song in Zootopia, “Try Everything.” Nothing is off limits as I create and share my new work from a variety of mediums.
Yes, I started a business. Yes, finances are a priority. And I make time for creativity every day. The two do not have to be mutually exclusive, or inextricably linked. I prioritize my projects, my desires, and my voice. I take up space for myself and my art. I’m dreaming bigger than I ever have before, and I can’t wait for what the future holds.
Cheers to many more creative adventures!
