The Lessons I Needed to Hear (When I Was Quietly Burning Out)

A few weeks ago, I was approaching burnout. I won’t dress it up. I’d been running my podcast at full tilt, converting transcripts into titles and essays and social posts, promoting my books, teaching, finishing a PhD, and somewhere in the middle of all of it I started asking myself the question every creative person eventually asks: what’s the point of any of this? Should I give this up? Should I give that up? Maybe I’m spreading myself too thin. Maybe none of it matters.

And then I sat down to interview Mirela Cufurovic for Amra’s Armchair Anecdotes, and she handed me back the answers I’d misplaced.

Mirela is a historian, a writer, and the founder of Tea Time with Mirela—an Instagram interview series with female authors—and more recently the Australian Muslim Review on Substack. We met because she interviewed me, then launched one of my books in Sydney, and over time an acquaintance became a friendship. She is, like me, from the Bosnian diaspora. She is doing her own small thing in her own corner of the internet, with no funding, no team, and frankly no guarantee that any of it will pay off. And listening to her talk about why she does it anyway was the dose of inspiration I didn’t know I needed.

So here are the lessons I took from that conversation. I’m writing them down partly for you, and partly so I don’t forget them the next time the doubt creeps in.

For years I talked myself out of things. I told myself I needed one more credential, one more piece of the puzzle to fall into place, and then I’d be ready. Meanwhile I’d watch someone with a fraction of the experience I’d accumulated go ahead and do the very thing I was too scared to attempt. For the longest time that baffled me. The answer, of course, is embarrassingly simple: they tried.

Mirela didn’t start Tea Time with Mirela because she was an expert at recording or podcasting. She said as much—it wasn’t perfect, she wasn’t an expert, she just wanted genuine connection and decided to find out what would happen. That’s it. That’s the whole secret. You begin before you feel ready, because the readiness you’re waiting for is a mirage. As she put it, sometimes you try and you fly straight away, and sometimes you have to grind through the hard work before you earn your wings—but either way, nothing happens until you begin.

When my daughter wasn’t even one, I joined a Muslim women’s leadership group, mostly because I wanted to get out of the house and have a bit of intellectual stimulation. My husband asked me what the point was—why was I tiring myself out like this? I didn’t have an answer. I just felt I needed to do it.

That leadership group led to an anthology about what a Muslim woman looks like. Which led, eventually, to Growing Up Muslim in Australia with Allen & Unwin, a book that’s now taught in schools across the country. At the time I could not have drawn you a line from A to B to C. You almost never can. Mirela said the same thing about her own work: you go in with one idea, and it takes you somewhere surprising. She set out to have nice conversations with authors and ended up curating a diverse panel for an International Women’s Day event in a rural town, challenging a whole room’s assumptions about who gets to be called Australian. None of that was on the plan, because there wasn’t a plan. There was just a willingness to start and see.

This is the one I most needed to hear. When you’re tired and doubting, you start measuring everything by what it returns—downloads, sales, followers—and that’s exactly when the joy drains out of it. Mirela’s advice was to be true to your intentions. If your only intention is to make money, you’ve already trapped yourself, because you can’t control that outcome. But if you’re building something for genuine connection, to celebrate creativity, to grow as a writer, then you can actually sustain it for the long haul.

She doesn’t earn a cent from the Australian Muslim Review. She copy-edits other people’s reviews in her own time, watches those writers grow through the editing process, and tells me that is more valuable to her than anything. I believe her, because I feel the same buzz watching other women try new creative things and build on them. The intention is the anchor. When I hit the wall a few weeks ago, the thing that pulled me back was asking myself why I’m doing this in the first place—not what am I getting out of it.

We spent a good while talking about publishing, and the picture isn’t pretty. Authors in Australia often earn around a dollar from a book that sells for thirty-five. Non-fiction interest is declining, the humanities are being gutted, grant funding is fiercely competitive, and even traditionally published authors frequently fund their own publicity. It would be easy to be despairing about all of it.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe, and what this conversation reaffirmed: there is no single path. I started doing direct sales this year—going to events, talking to readers, learning the trade from people who do it—and I discovered a whole ecosystem of authors making a genuine living without relying on the gatekeepers at all. Self-publishing isn’t a lesser version of the “real” thing. As Mirela’s friend told her, indie publishing got her foot in the door, made her an author, and connected her to people she’d never otherwise have met. We get to define what success looks like. And if you can put yourself out there, you’ve already opened doors that traditional publishing might never have opened for you.

A small practical lesson tucked inside the big ones: if you love a book, borrow it from the library and request it too. Authors earn more from library borrows than you’d think, and supporting those public spaces keeps the whole ecosystem alive.

Mirela admitted she sometimes feels like an imposter—she hasn’t been awarded her PhD yet, doesn’t have a book with her name on the spine. And yet she reminds herself that everything she’s done to reach this point is valid, that she’s earned the right to take ownership of what she knows. That persistence, that passion, that love for the work—none of it comes for free.

I needed that reminder as much as she did. We are ambitious women with more ideas than hours, and the work of sustaining creativity isn’t separate from the creativity itself — it is the work. You trust the process, and you trust yourself.

I came into that conversation depleted and came out of it lighter. That, in the end, might be the biggest lesson of all: find the people who are on the same path as you, the ones quietly doing their own thing in their own corner, and let them remind you why you started. Then go and do the thing.

If you’ve been waiting until you feel ready to begin a creative project — consider this your nudge. Start messy. Start anyway. I’d love to hear what you’re working on.