Mrs. Puff, can I be excused for the rest of my life?

Okay, let’s just get one thing outta the way — this Substack is not going to turn into one of those things where a content creator has nothing left to talk about besides creating content. But stay with me for one more post about my job and social media endeavors, because I have no doubt that these experiences and feelings can be applied to any creative or working person.

I’ve experienced burnout a couple of times since starting YouTube in 2023. The first was after I had been vlogging my life every week for about 8 months. I was ringing in at around 550 subscribers. I was starting to get slightly antsy about my slow growth, but more than anything I felt like I was running out of things to document or talk about.

I thought that keeping my channel broad would help me never run out of ideas, but as it turned out, it’s harder to think of worthwhile things to talk about when the possibilities are THAT endless. And let’s be honest, I wasn’t going on exciting road trips or flying overseas every week of the year, and the appeal of filming myself getting coffee and going to the beach seemed to have a short shelf life.

Think about this: if a professor hands you a sheet of blank paper on the first day of class and says “write about anything for the next 20 minutes,” it is so much more intimidating than if they were to say “write down everything you remember about the first time you experienced nostalgia.”

Prompts and guidelines are often framed as restrictions, but they’re more like a door. A door lighting up in a room of 100 doors, taking off all of the pressure to choose which one to walk through.

So my first period of burnout was from that — standing in a room of 100 doors every week and not knowing which to open. I didn’t film for two months, still the longest break I’ve ever taken.

I knew I needed a consistent door with my name on it — one I actually had business walking through every week.

Okay, enough with the door metaphor. Basically, it was time to finally pick a niche.

As much as I wanted consistency with what I was creating, I was also really scared of losing the ability to f*ck around and try a bunch of stuff. When I was little, I remember always thinking to myself “when I have *insert job,* I’m going to do it this way.”

Ex: “When I’m a teacher, I’m gonna set up my classroom like a homey coffee shop.”

Or, “When I’m an architect, I’m gonna blah blah blah”

“When I’m a fashion designer…”

Insert literally any career, and when I was a kid, I thought of it in terms of when I do that, not if. It wasn’t like I was stupid — I knew grownups only had one or two jobs. It wasn’t that I genuinely thought I was going to do all of those things, as much as I was allowing myself to be fully immersed in the daydream every time I imagined one.

And when I got older, choosing one path felt like taking a ~big fat dump~ on the rest.

Movement toward one career meant grieving the possibility of others.

And I honestly feel like I never fully pushed past that.

That was the appeal of YouTube for me. If I made a career out of filming myself, at least I could film myself doing ANYTHING. But now that it was time to narrow in on my content a little bit, I was back in that room of doors, this time trying to pick one to walk through for the rest of my life.

I tried to really jerry rig my “brand” so that I could maintain as much freedom as possible. For a brief but very concentrated period, I thought of making my channel about me trying a bunch of different things, and calling it Phoebe Dabbles.

It would follow a girl who wanted to spend her life trying everything. An episode would begin with me being a total novice at something, and then I would make getting better at it a full-time job for a month, and see how far I could get by the end.

Think “Try Guys” but without cheating middle-aged men.

I got so excited about the idea. It was all I could think about throughout our entire van-life month traveling up and down the coast. It’s easy to feel inspired when you’re essentially living outside and having brainstorm sessions on various seaside cliffs.

But as quickly and strongly as that idea came, I became burnt out. I burnt out before I’d even begun.

All of the logistics really overwhelmed me. I would need constant hired help and commitment from outside “coaches” in essentially everything I was going to dabble in. I still think it would be such a fun endeavor, but for a girl with no money and very few resources, it seemed like a bit of a stretch.

This led right into the second phase of my burnout period — Idea Burnout.

As I thought of more and more ideas, I became increasingly discouraged by the feeling of excitement consistently followed by the realization of all of the reasons that it probably wouldn’t work. I would get burnt out just by thinking about the idea, and then I became burnt out from thinking of so many ideas.

It was burnout on burnout on burnout.

The conversation with myself shifted from, “None of this will work,” to, “Maybe I’m just lazy, and any of this would’ve worked if I’d actually gotten off my a$$ and tried.”

And thus, I entered the world’s least productive thought loop.

I wanted to quit everything, marry rich, and never have to figure anything out ever again.

I went from hating the idea that I couldn’t do everything to hating the idea of having to do anything.

And then came the involuntary leave of absence. Better known as: ~depression.~

I ceased all creative operations. I went to my day job, went to the beach, hung out with my friends, travelled back to America to see family, and didn’t give a damn about anything else.

Then, and only then, did an idea come to me.

And it wasn’t some big channel or brand overhaul idea. It was just an idea for a video I wanted to make. And it wasn’t even a unique idea. In fact, it was probably one of the most unoriginal ideas ever.

Little spring fashion trend predictions kept popping into my head, and I would write each down in my notes as they came. One day I woke up with the instinct to film a video talking about them.

And I’m not lying when I tell you it was NOT a strategic move. I had filmed and posted one trend forecasting video about 6 months prior, and it had absolutely tanked. I’m talkin’ the worst-performing video on my channel.

But I just wanted to do it again. So I did.

And that video got about 6x more views than the best performing video on my channel at that time. Thus, my fashion niche was born. Not because of the view count, although that certainly helped, but because of the ease and fun that I had while making it.

I was off to the races. And for the first time in a year, creating felt easy again.

Maybe you’ve already gathered the “lesson” in all of this. But it took me a while to understand it, so at the risk of insulting your intelligence, I’ll spell it out anyway.

I’ve always heard that burnout is normal. I’d heard there was a difference between laziness and burnout. But what nobody tells you is that sometimes the way out of burnout is to stop trying.

When you’re exhausted from pouring effort into something, pouring effort into “fixing” that exhaustion can become its own kind of trap.

Sounds obvious, but when you’ve confused burnout for laziness, not trying seems like the last thing you should do. When your brain says “I haven’t created anything in a while, I’m being so lazy,” it’s very hard to tell yourself that the solution is to continue not creating anything, but this time, on purpose.

But there’s a reason giving up is the, dare I say, “key to opening the next door.” And it’s a little hippy-dippy.

Wanting something badly while believing you don’t yet have the tools or direction to get it creates resistance within you. The gap between what you want and what you believe you can actually do is the reason for the pit in your stomach.

So thinking of more ideas from that headspace — no matter how good they are — only widens the gap.

Your ideas become more plentiful, yet your belief in your ability to carry them out remains the same.

And eventually that resistance becomes paralyzing.

When your brain is being mean to you, thinking of more things you don’t believe you can do only makes things worse. And when your confidence isn’t ready to catch up to your ambition yet, the only way to close the gap is to quiet the ambition for a little while. It won’t go far. It will always be there when you’re ready for it. But for now, just give up. And soon you will realize it was the best business decision you’ve ever made.

I learned this lesson because I hit a breaking point. I gave up because my brain went so far that depression took over and didn’t really leave me another option.

But it would probably be wise to give up before the depression hits — a theory that can really test your relationship with the idea of “laziness.”

Don’t wait until something forces you to give up. Just do it the next time you find yourself wanting to ask Mrs. Puff to excuse you for the rest of your life. And before you know it, the burnout won’t feel like something you have to push through anymore.

One day you’ll just notice it’s gone.

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