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Creative Burn Out Mapped

Jenna Citrus
11 min readDec 27, 2020

Join me through the chronicles of switching from art making to video production and back again while watching the slow buildup to burn out. From October 2019 (and on and off before) to October 2020 I experienced a long period and many levels of burnout, this article records and explores my burn out, what I did to fight it, and how I finally overcame the struggle. Originally published on December 27th 2020

From 2014 when I mapped my accomplished goals for a month on my wall.

October 2019

I’d been feeling this burn out coming for a long time, it came in stages, and waves, but the tide took me under when I returned from six weeks on the road in October of 2019. I didn’t want to travel anymore. In 2015 I’d began to take many trips, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 all came in the form of being gone as much as possible. In the last few years I was typically gone 100 days out of the year. Traveling for art making: to connect with other creatives, traveling to modeling gigs, to be stimulated by external environments, to see exhibitions, to be part of gallery shows, to scope out graduate school, and to immerse myself in a different surrounding. It was all quite inspiring, but on this last epic adventure, I’d lost my yearning for travel and found the need to be rooted. I’d been trying to buy a house for over a year at this point in time, and I still hadn’t found my match.

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Jenna Citrus
Jenna Citrus

Written by Jenna Citrus

Writer, Artist, Creator, Image & Music Maker, Mediator, jennacitrus.com & beacons.ai/jennacitrus

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