The highs of creativity and the lows of burnout

There’s a piano, painted in bright colours and bedecked with jewels and sparkles, that sits on the landing, opposite the lifts, on the first floor of a school for pupils with severe learning difficulties, or rather, there was. I’m not sure if it’s still there. I haven’t been back since the day my teaching career screeched to an abrupt halt.

The piano was inspired by the psychedelic piano Sir Paul McCartney commissioned in 1966 for his London home, created by Dudley Edwards and Douglas Binder. Decorating a piano was just one of many exciting projects, part of a year’s work, in which the sixth-form students I worked with completed a Creative and Media Diploma. We also made films, a phoenix sculpture that rose from the ashes, wet felt ammonite sculptures, willow domes, and experimental music, culminating in a whole day’s festival. A glorious riot of colour and sound that celebrated the year’s work.

Inspired by the vocational national diplomas in further education at the time, I had written not just this year’s diploma, but a three-year rolling curriculum. No one asked me to do any of this. We had just moved into a new school, and I had an empty classroom, no equipment and ten students, all with their own unique learning styles, learning needs, medical and physical needs and communication and behavioural difficulties. I had asked the boss, ‘What should I teach?’ and the answer had come that I should make it up. And I did! We studied Creative and Media, Environmental and Land-based and Sport and Active Leisure studies. I wrote the full curriculum, with learning outcomes, activities and accreditation that these youngsters could take into life, such as the Arts Award and the John Muir Award.

In 2011, before I got around to the third year and the Sport and Active Leisure Award, I crashed and burned. Big time. I had excruciating back pain, couldn’t walk and was in a deep hole of depression. I went off sick for a year, but my teaching career was over. I didn’t go back.

However, not one to sit around idle, I started to write a blog. I wrote about sustainable living and making the most of what we have. It was called the Bridge Cottage Way. I wrote every week, and my following grew. Someone asked if I could make them a pair of armwarmers, like ones they’d seen the American artist, Katwise, make using recycled sweaters and an overlocker/serger sewing machine. Oh, good idea, I thought, bought myself such a machine and made a few pairs of armwarmers. By the autumn of that year, I was selling at Christmas markets.

In 2012, I registered as self-employed, and The Woolly Pedlar was born. I then branched out into clothing and soft furnishings. I made deals with textile recyclers and got shipments of recycled woollens. I went up to the knitwear factories in Scotland and bought boxes of seconds which I hot-washed, before cutting up and making them into new creations. My following grew and grew.

In four years, I not only had a successful business employing four people, but I was also earning a decent living. I went to festivals, markets, Christmas fairs and joined a cooperative, helping to run a huge festival, Woolfest. I would sleep in my campervan at music festivals or in the car parks of agricultural marts, then run a huge stall single-handed, selling my woolly wares for sometimes four days at a stretch. Who knew, it turned out I was ruddy good at selling, too!

However, my lungs were filling with fibres from the serger, and I was like a cat, threatening to cough up a fur ball. I was working all the hours there were, marketing the arse of this business, doing Facebook lives on a Friday night, and got to the stage that I no longer had to do craft fairs, as whatever I made sold on social media. I was working every day there was, sewing sweaters under the heat of the Velux windows in the attic, and one of my biggest regrets is that family time with my kids evaporated. And then … I crashed and burned.

I got seriously depressed, had fatty liver disease from overeating, and ended up in therapy. My therapist suggested I write to release the pain and trauma that I had been stuffing down all my life. I discovered you could get a student loan up to the age of 60 and went and did an MA in Creative Writing at 58. By 61, my first novel, The Rewilding of Molly McFlynn, was published, and this year, I’m publishing the next in the series, Molly McFlynn Goes Rogue.

I work hard on my writing and my marketing, but am I headed for another burnout? I think not.

I now know the warning signs, and more importantly, I now understand why. I was diagnosed with combined ADHD last year, at the age of 63. I can see now how my creativity comes in glorious bursts and sometimes knows no bounds. My neurodiversity means that I have new ideas and inspiration flashing in and out of my brain like a silver ball in a pinball machine. I’m also really good at marketing – it’s a strength many of us neurodivergents have.

I’m learning to watch for the signs – the five in the morning leaping out of bed, unable to sleep because new projects and ideas have taken over. I’m learning to take a break, to doze in the hammock, to read books in the daytime. I factor in days off and write them on the calendar, so I stick to them. I love that I am learning and writing, understanding why I crashed and burned so spectacularly from my teaching career, and from The Woolly Pedlar.

I celebrate my creativity, but like a packet of fags, it comes with a health warning on the side.