How to use creativity to heal from burnout, with Kate Lynch
And how vital this concept is for tired caregivers
If Hemingway is the only model we have, then we’re thinking that it's supposed to be his way. But if we have a group of other caregivers, or people believing in a different way, then we've got those models that we can see, and that becomes our sangha. —
Last week, I shared a conversation with my friend
, author of the compassionate and pragmatic newsletter, that centered on the experience of advocating for the people we love, and then re-regulating ourselves afterward.Even after I mowed down a plate of curly fries, though — one of my preferred self-care rituals — I still found myself feeling activated, hypervigilant, and on-edge after my latest care challenge (navigating a high-stakes IEP meeting for my son, about which I shared tips with Kate in this podcast episode).
Feeling unable to rest, even when we have the rare opportunity to rest, is a daily reality for many caregivers, and it is one that has led to burnout for me far too many times.
So, now feels like the perfect time to share another conversation I had with Kate about how caregivers can access creative flow as a form of rest, and as an essential way to prevent burnout.
We also talk about some of the common challenges we face as we begin to shift from doing to being. I spoke about having to unlearn the idea that I should always be trying to climb to some new level of achievement, or to be constantly scanning the environment for threats to my loved ones instead of going inward; Kate spoke about confronting her people-pleasing habits and her inner creative critic.
We don’t demonize our deeply-ingrained survival patterns here, but we do drop into a deeper line of inquiry about how well they’re supporting our survival in the present — or not.
I grew up whitewater rafting with my family, and one key parenting metaphor I reference below is the experience of approaching a rapid, moving through it, and then intentionally “eddying out” afterwards. If you are someone who’s excellent at planning and great in a crisis, but who, like me, struggles to take time to return to yourself after life’s “rapids,” may this conversation be of benefit to you.
Note: The highlights from our conversation below have been condensed and edited for length and clarity. For the full, un-cut version (and some good laughs), I invite you to hop over to Kate’s podcast series here. Kate also has a plethora of other great tips for caregivers of neurodivergent kids on her YouTube channel, which you can find here. And if you missed my full-length podcast ep with Kate about navigating IEP meetings with some modicum of mindfulness, be sure to check that out here.
EMBRACING THE NOTION OF “EDDYING OUT”
Kate: Burnout is something I'm very interested in. Especially for parents of neurodivergent kids…When I'm feeling more fulfilled, I can show up with more presence and openness with my kid or with anyone else. I feel like what I have to share coming from that place is so much richer and more meaningful than what I have to share when my cup is empty.
I really didn't even think about it until my son was in kindergarten. I was in activation or shutdown, but mostly activation. I was in fight or flight, a lot of anxiety, a lot of looking for answers outside of myself.
It wasn't until I had a little bit of time–even though it wasn't the perfection I thought it would be, there was still a lot of advocating to be done–that I could go, “Okay, what is there for me? How am I going to find fulfillment as Kate?”
Ryan: I'm in that place now, where my child has just started kindergarten. It's a real milestone moment when there’s no other little people at home. There's a feeling that you've kind of swum across a great river with this child on your back.
That said, there’s always more to be done. He just had an altercation in line just yesterday. Something I joke about with my husband is, “There's no plateau of forever perfection that we're climbing to, and we just get to set up a whole civilization there.”
I grew up whitewater rafting, so with parents, I often talk about it in terms of river rafting instead. You’re not climbing to somewhere where you can rest forever. You’re navigating a terrain in which there are constant rapids.
With rapids, often you can scout them before you go in. You can walk the length of them. You can try to have a plan.
Then, you go through the rapid. Maybe it goes well. Maybe you flip and you lose all your beer. Tragic! And your first aid kit, or your favorite hiking boots, or whatever. Still, if you emerge with your life, it's a good river trip.
Then, there's a process called eddying out, where you float to the next calm place on the shore, and you pull up, and there’s an aftercare piece.
I think of this transition to kindergarten as more of an eddying out than, “Ah, I've reached the plateau of forever perfection.” In this eddy, there’s really an existential questioning of, “Who am I now?” It can feel hard, though, to have the mental space or the practices to sense into, “What do I want? What do I most need?”
I had the good fortune to have to attend a training at the Omega Institute recently, which included a lot of silent meditation. This allowed me to digest the big meal of the last five years. Particularly those of us who had children during the pandemic. There's a lot to process!
I know that it's not within everybody's ability to go away for five days, or to go on retreat. I will put a plug in for Omega because you can camp there very affordably, and sometimes bring your kids. But I grew up the child of two broke social workers, and often, creating space for this kind of exhale was just about throwing our stuff in a pickup truck, and going out camping, and just experiencing some quietude on a patch of public land.
Kate: I worked at the Omega Institute for a season, and I actually was married in the sanctuary there. So that's a very special place for us. I used to go back every year and teach yoga for a while. I love the idea of having a retreat, and really having time to digest that experience of getting to that point.
UNLEARNING THE HABITS THAT STOP US FROM RESTING
Kate: There's so much lack of control and uncertainty in parenting. The upside of parenting an atypical child is that we get kicked off the hamster wheel of achievement. Because there's no such thing as perfection.
Ryan: There's no such thing. And I think that there's a grief in that, in recognizing how much we sacrificed for the sake of that mission before awakening to this truth. There's a lot of letting go of the habitual patterns of achievement. Patterns that might still be in place, even though we don't believe that there's somewhere to climb to. Because that's still what I've been training to do my whole life.
And so this time in our lives is also about learning to rest, and wait, and fill ourselves up.
I think that awakening has come through my motherhood journey, through parenting an atypical child and experiencing pregnancy loss, and I am grateful. I see a similar process unfolding with friends who are moving through divorce. I don't believe in having to find a silver lining for grief, but I do think that this awakening comes for many of us in one way or another. And the conversations to be had on the other side of it are so beautiful and so different from the ones I was having before.
This is how In Tending really came to be, as a place for us to have those kinds of conversations.
Kate: When you were talking about habits, I was thinking about my people pleasing habits, and how I've done so much work to deconstruct those patterns, and they keep coming back. It's this real reactivity.
Ryan: I'm so glad that you named people pleasing as a kind of reactivity, because I think that it is. It’s often a trauma response. And there's so many good reasons why we would people-please. My partner and I talk about that all the time. I think that's another lifelong unlearning.
Kate: It's another thing that really can lead to burnout.
Ryan: Yes. Absolutely. And I think it can also be driven by the guilt we were talking about before, of not being enough as a parent. “I should be doing something more, so I can't turn towards myself. I need to be turning towards these other people.”
For me, when I was growing up, that was true. I was very much a caregiver for my little brother. It was not imagined. I very often needed to make us food, or we would not eat.
Kate: Not optional.
Ryan: Not optional. I think many caregivers have this lived experience, and an embodied sense of, “If I let down my guard and I go inward, something bad could happen on the outside.”
Kate: Or if I choose myself. I will be shunned.
Ryan: Yes. I'll be seen as selfish.
Kate: Yeah. And “selfishness” is worse than any of the other bad words. Because at least I know for me, being “selfish” meant not having connection. Being deprived of connection.
Ryan: Absolutely. And connection is vital. So many of these things that we've done were in service of belonging.
Typically, I find that if people define themselves as caregivers, they have a background very similar to the ones we've just talked about, where there was a real need for care within our families of origin, a need that we stepped into. There was a skill-set developed there, that then became a career, or a vocation, or an orientation towards parenting.
That is something that can become very challenged if you experience infertility, or if you experience pregnancy loss, or if you experience having an atypical child. Those are moments of awakening, as we’ve said, where you are not only trying to figure out how to live into a future that you never imagined, you're also casting that light of awareness backwards, reflecting on your story and how you got here.
A lot of the work that I do with caregivers now is in that place.
on Substack calls it The Portal.There's a specific awakening experience that many people with caregiver identities move through that involves really evaluating: what is a balance between self and other that feels sustainable? And what's the difference between that and the messages that I've received in the past? And then, how do I use mindfulness to create a tiny bit of space between the conditioning that I've received, and the balance that I need?
I'm almost 40, so my goal is to live at least another 40 years. It makes sense to ask: How can I survive now?
Kate: Yeah, and if, not for ourselves, then for our kids who need us.
REDEFINING CREATIVITY FOR SELF-CARE
Kate: You once wrote to me that you see creativity as “preventative care for caregiver burnout, particularly for preventing the burnout that is so common among people who love and work with atypical kids.” As you said, “[Parenting atypical kids] can be a grind. We can't snap our fingers and feel self regulated and present all the time. They can have big feelings, and sometimes the way the world relates to them gives us big feelings. So we need community, but we also need support in cultivating the personal practices that help us recenter, because the work of loving atypical kids will knock us down time and time again.”
Do you have something else to say about your creative process that you'd like to share to help parents find their own? Because I think it's such a scary word for a lot of people. My experience has been extremely fraught, with creativity.
Ryan: Tell me more.
Kate: There's the stuff that's just for us that comes out. But then if we want to get it out in the world, there's so much shame around it. With this process of writing this book, and then trying to get this book out in the world, I'm unable to control the outcome at this point.
I know for other parents, it's like, “Somebody when I was three told me I was bad at drawing and so by the time I was in middle school, it totally fizzled, and I've never drawn since.”
Ryan: That makes me think of the Bluey episode “Dragon,” where the kids are drawing, and the parents are invited to participate, and there's a pretty big difference in terms of how one parent was socialized over another around art, and the episode is really all about that.
Kate: Ooh. I've been determined to watch Bluey. [My teenage son] Ocean's too old, but I’d just watch it on my own. I've never seen an episode.
Ryan: I have actually used Bluey episodes often in my teaching with adolescents, because the episodes are so short and so rich. I am also totally that parent that will not stop talking about how brilliant Bluey is. I'm really annoying in that way. People have said it's a show for grown ups about parenting, and kids just happen to like it, and I tend to agree.
Ryan: I’ve learned to become much more granular when I define and talk about creativity, through teaching kids how to write. Often, they get really overwhelmed with even writing an essay. For us, a five-paragraph essay is another day in the office, but for a sixth grader, you might as well tell them to climb Mount Everest. They're really struggling with it, some of them, and so we break the process down into brainstorming, drafting, revising or “adding on,” editing, and pre-publishing preparation.
When I think about being in a creative flow state, I think about it as doing work that's primarily in the brainstorming or drafting phase, with no necessary connection to publishing. Even revising is still, I think, often connected to being in a flow state too. It's about having an idea like, “Oh, maybe I'll add a flashback to that passage,” or “What if I changed the narrator?” You're still in that “what if” space in revising. You still have access to beginner's mind. It's more like play.
Kate: Like Morning Pages?
Ryan: Morning Pages, yeah! Though for everybody it's different. The way that I tend to think of it is, it’s more about how it feels than what it looks like. It's more about the somatic experience of flow.
When we talk about flow, it's that sense that time vanishes. Our brains are in this joyful getting-bathed-in-happy chemicals kind of place. There's no sense of clenching. We could do it forever. It's like, you wake up and it’s time to go get your kid from the bus. And that's a really beautiful state. That’s the kind of creativity that can help to heal burnout.
Being in a creative flow state is a very restful mind state—that doesn't look to the outside world like rest. So it also feels safer to many people than actually resting. Even though we need that too, and our bodies crave it, the fact is that I can be sitting at my computer in flow state, and I look to the rest of my household like I'm quote-unquote “doing work.”
This often makes “creativity” a more accessible stop on the journey to self regulation for parents that have been going like 100 miles an hour, versus sitting and meditating for 15 minutes. Particularly people that are already in the burnout phase, where it's like, “I just quit my job. I just Jerry Maguire’d it out of there.” And then those people are like, “Now what?”
I know that for me, when I left the classroom, doing sitting meditation then felt really inaccessible to me. I was looking for something that fell between a hundred miles an hour and what felt like zero miles an hour, which would have felt like crashing into a brick wall. Those things were writing and yoga and dancing. Things that still felt like I was “doing something.”
For those of us that are unlearning productivity and grind culture, “doing something” brings up less guilt than doing quote-unquote “nothing.” Even if we know meditation is not “doing nothing,” there are less headwinds of guilt that we have to fight against. If you're socialized as a woman, dancing can be rationalized as exercise: “Oh, I'm getting healthy.” Or whatever story you need to tell yourself, to signal to others, “I’m still following the rules.” Or at least it looks that way.
Once you’re outside your body looking at yourself doing the thing, though, then you're probably not still in flow state. So actually getting the benefits of flow also means allowing ourselves to have kind of a wall between brainstorming, drafting and revising, and everything else – where editing and publishing the thing is for mañana. If the goal is to heal from burnout, how the work itself looks to others is less important than how it feels to you.
ON THE PRESSURE TO “BE CONSISTENT”
Kate: I wonder if a lot of parents might also start to get into a shame spiral if they're not being “consistent” with something creative, or not doing something “right.”
Ryan: We've all kind of absorbed ideas of what an artist looks like at work. A lot of those images that I've absorbed, at least, are of male writers who had a lot of support. They may not have had children, and probably didn't face any social pressure to create or tend to them. Whereas, if you read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, she didn't even have children, but she still wrote about the fact that there needs to be a form of literature that's more congenial to the way that women's lives work, where you can pick it up and put it down. And it can fit into your life.
has written a lot about this as well, about embracing interruptions and thinking about what interruptions add to the creative process. They're almost their own contribution to the medium. They're another ingredient in the creative process.For example, I love Lizzo, and very often in a Lizzo song, there'll be some little outtake or some laughing, and it's clear that those are the things that happened in the interstitial spaces in the recording room. And they became part of the art.
So, can we make art that's more like a Lizzo song than a Hemingway novel? Because I don't know that that man spent very much time changing diapers. And that's okay.
Can we also ask ourselves: is this shame about consistency or work quality an indicator that I'm not doing the best work I personally could be, within the very real constraints of my life, constraints that I have already worked very hard to accept and embrace? Or is this shame actually just me internalizing responsibility for the gap between what that male writer was able to do in 1940 and what my life looks like?
It's not easy to let that go, but at least we can try to find that little space, with mindfulness, of, “This is just a thought. Is it real? Is there evidence?”
Kate: “Is that really true?”
Ryan: Yes. I think this is also a place where we can have an evidence-based conversation. “What is realistic and real about my practice, and what is stuff that I grew up with, things that I haven't really challenged?” I think that for every creative person with children, that is part of the work.
There's a lot of unlearning that happens as you're learning how to tend your creative craft. It's unlearning messages about what that craft is, how it “should” look, how it should be evaluated. It's part and parcel of so much that's happening in modern feminism: unlearning diet culture, unlearning grind culture, unlearning white supremacy. It's another aspect of liberation work and activist work, to allow your creative practice to be what it is.
Kate: Plus, unlearning the expectation that the house has to be clean.
Ryan: Also that. And if you don't carry that expectation, but somebody in your life does, then they don't get to come to your house anymore.
“I CAN’T CARE ABOUT WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK AND STAY SANE AT THE SAME TIME”
Kate: I think actually being a parent of a neurodivergent kid has really helped me care less about that external gaze, about what other people think. I can't care about what other people think and stay sane, at the same time.
Ryan: Yes. At least around things that are safe to let go. For example, a person of color being aware of how they're being perceived as a parent on the train – I think those things are not necessarily safe to let go. But I do think it's safe to let go of that gaze in our own homes, the one inside of us that is telling us, “This doesn't look like Pinterest!”
Kate: Yeah, I've had some wonderful conversations about the supermarket meltdown, and the difference between being white and being a person of color. It becomes a much different situation.
I really think either way, we're aware of other people, but stepping in and being confident – like, "We’ve got this” – is more protective than being afraid, and trying to fix it, to make it sanitized for public consumption. Even saying aloud to the child, "We've got this," shows the other people around that they don't have to find a solution, because you've already got the solution.
Ryan: That connects to what you're saying about a clean house, too, versus one that may be more cluttered. I'm imagining the judgy neighbor, the in-law, or the mom from playgroup coming in, and just having that conversation with them. “Yeah, we've been having a lot of fun around here.”
Kate: That's a great way to put it.
Ryan: “Isn't it neat? Oh yeah, let me show you this Lego creation.” And just making it clear that creativity is what you value.
Kate: Yeah. Putting our values front and center, rather than someone else's values, or even imagined imposed values we're projecting.
Ryan: Yeah. And, understanding that there's very few values that are absolute. Cleanliness, hygiene, those are very important. And, what's the opportunity cost of pursuing those to the very end? Probably some creativity and spontaneity. Children feeling at ease, having a place they can make mistakes.
So, if cleanliness is a value for you personally, it might be about noticing, “Are there any parts of you that feel silenced by your tireless pursuit or performance of that value?”
It's a lot of internal conversations. A lot of mindfulness before you even get to the easel or the computer or the guitar.
EDDYING OUT WITH OTHER CREATIVE CAREGIVERS
Kate: How does gathering together, or, being in community around that conversation, help with this?
Ryan: It’s really helpful for people that are in caregiving work to let each other in, because then you're conceptualizing what's possible and what's quote-unquote normal together. “What are my other creative caregiver friends doing?” is a much more accurate measure of what my own creative practice could potentially look like, versus “What do I see in this person's Instagram presence?”
Kate: You're talking about modeling. If Hemingway is the only model we have, then we’re thinking that it's supposed to be his way. But if we have a group of other caregivers, or people believing in a different way, then we've got those models that we can see, and that becomes our sangha.
Ryan: Yes. Sangha is forming community with people traveling our path, that we've chosen. With sangha, we’re all trying to take some steps, whenever we can, towards coming home to ourselves.
Sometimes it can be really helpful just to be witnessed in your struggle along the way, too. Just to be able to say, “This week was so fucking hard,” and have people in your sangha go, “Yeah, it is so fucking hard.” Instead of “Have you tried…?”
Kate: With somebody who gets it, you don't have to explain.
Ryan: Yes. It’s not your mom who did it forty years ago, under entirely different parenting conditions, and who only has the most gauzy memories of parenting. And not Susie down the street, who isn't trying to do what you're doing creatively.
Going back to my grad school training as an educator, Lev Vygotsky was a researcher who talked about the idea of the “zone of proximal development.” Briefly, this means that as we enter into a new phase, we tend to learn most from the people that are in that phase with us, and people that are just ahead. We tend to learn more from those people than we do from teachers. Research has shown, for example, that children tend to acquire more vocabulary when they are in a mixed-age group of peers than they do from direct instruction from adult teachers.
So, in many ways, the group is the class. And thus sometimes just creating the container for those discussions to happen in the eddies of our lives – discussions like this – is enough.
Further reading/listening:
Getting off “the hamster wheel of competitive parenting” with Kate Lynch
“Before Ocean, I was impatient and insecure. I have more perspective and confidence now. Raising him has been a liberatory practice that no spiritual tradition could match. But without my mindfulness practice, it could have gone sideways.” — Kate Lynch
 | A guest post by
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Kate, I appreciate you naming that sense of never being able to let your guard down. It's something so many parents feel. And it's exhausting and debilitating.
And if you're interested, I wrote an article about parents who were young caregivers a couple of years ago: https://www.lorikwalters.ca/post/the-over-helping-parent
Loved the reflection from Virginia Woolf and the inquiry line around comparj g ourselves unfairly to Hemingway as the standard of excellence. This conversation really resonated with me, thank you!