33. I Burned Out. Here's What I Learned.

I'm back

After 14 months away - and zero apologies for it - here is the episode I had to live through before I could record it.

This isn't your standard "how to avoid burnout" checklist. We goes deeper, calling this particular cycle something closer to a creative identity crisis: a period of losing clarity, coming face-to-face with the question of who she is without music, and having to choose - intentionally - who she wants to be on the other side of it.

In this episode, we walks through five practices that actually moved the needle:

• Learning how to rest: not distract, not pivot, but actually stop and restore
• Marrying myself - a formal, private commitment to our own sovereignty and self-worth
• Detoxing from music - three weeks of intentional silence t
• Letting the pivot happen - leaving the "cave" and discovering a world beyond the music industry bubble
• Training like an artist-athlete - building the mental and physical foundation a long creative career actually requires

This is a field report, not a formula. And it's one of the most honest episodes I've ever recorded. 

Love y'all 

Transcript

I Burned Out. Here’s What I Learned

INTRO

Hey Music Executives, this is The Music Executive podcast where we talk about what it takes to build a holistic & sustainable music career — one that addresses all of the ups and downs that we face as music industry professionals. 

Today’s episode is sponsored in part by the Austin Live Music Fund. I am your host, Cinnamon Denise.

PREMISE 

And, y’all, The Music Executives podcast is back. Now, before we do anything else - girl, guys, theys, and thems, yes, I know it's been a minute. Fourteen months, to be exact. 

And to completely honest with you, I feel good about that. In a world where we are pushed to do quantity over quality. I chose neither. I chose a nap. 

What I am here to do is tell y’all thank you first and foremost. 

Because during my time away, the podcast did not stall as far as downloads. In fact, it grew. The Music Executive grew like crazy actually and I appreciate y’all for that. I am returning the love right back to y’all tenfold. 

I am here today to share why that pause existed, what happened inside of it, and why every single one of those months, in hindsight now, was absolutely necessary.

One thing about building a sustainable music career - I can’t sustain what I refuse to honestly examine and experience for myself. 

And I had some examining to do. A lot of it actually. 

If I’m speaking about something on here - especially on these solo episodes - it’s because I have done it. I didn’t read about it on a blog, I didn’t think about it and craft this episode. 

I didn’t ask ChatGPT what was trending. 

What I share here is real and true to me and I hope y’all feel that authenticity.

Today’s episode is a field report from someone who went deep into my own burnout, sat inside of it for a while, and came out with five things I genuinely think are worth talking about. 

Alright, let’s do this music executives.

LESSON 1 - I Had to Learn How to Actually Rest

Ironically, one of the most popular episodes on this podcast is called “How to Avoid Burnout” - so of course, I would experience burnout shortly thereafter. Because that’s how the universe works. 

But this particular burnout cycle was a little different than what I was talking about in that episode. Not all burnouts are created equal. This burnout felt more like a mid life crisis than it did a spiral, if you will. It felt more existential and trippy, like “how did I get here?” So I paused because I didn’t have enough clarity anymore - which even saying that out loud right now feels scary. 

Regardless, for the sake of this episode, we will call this experience burn out but maybe I’ll do another episode on the importance and acquisition of creative clarity and vision. Y’all will have to let me know if you want to dive deeper into that but to get out of this burnout - the first thing I had to learn sounds so simple: I had to learn how to rest.

Not rest as in - okay, I'll take up pottery. Not rest as in - let me engage my brain in a different direction. Let me distract myself. 

I mean actual, genuine, restorative rest. I'm talking about both rest and sleep.

I stopped filling my schedule with things and started resting. Now, this was not a big motion. This was not a big act of rebellion. This was, “oh, I have 5 minutes before I need to go into this meeting, I’m gonna sit here and think happy thoughts and regulate my nervous system.” 

This rest was “oh ok, I need to focus on getting this production done but in order to engage in deep work, I need to be fully open. I’m gonna just sit here with my Sondog for 10 minutes and observe. 

And rest is meditative work. Because what I’m really describing is meditation, essentially. Presence. Awareness. Stillness. 

So, call this first point whatever you want, but the intent is to slow your life down wherever, whenever, however there is an opportunity to do so. (Music break)

I started taking my sleep seriously in a way I never had before. I used to work so intensely and at one point I called myself “the machine” because I would work endlessly.  I am not a machine.

And I say to the dear Universe, I take that shit back. I am not a machine I am a human. I need rest. I need sleep. 

Sleep is not a suggestion. Good sleep is not a mantra. It is a basic human need. I am no sleep expert but there are plenty of accounts and pages where you can look up ways to improve your sleep hygiene. 

What I learned is that the quality of your rest and sleep directly determine the quality of your output. Not just your energy. 

Your ideas. Your emotional resilience. Your creativity. Your art. Your capacity to focus intensely. 

And Music Executives, you cannot and you will not have a sustainable anything if you're running on three hours and a deadline. Figure out your sleep. Figure out your rest. It will change everything. And it helped me get out of burn out. 

LESSON 2  —  I Married Myself (Yes, Really)

Okay. The next thing I did, y’all gon laugh but ion even care. I married myself. Laugh and then just try it. 

So there was a post on Threads where the user asked “what's the most unhinged thing you did to get your spark back? No judgment.”

And I commented:

“I married myself. Proposed to myself. Had a private ceremony. Bought myself a ring. Wrote and recited vows and I celebrate my anniversary every year by buying myself a bigger/more aligned rock. I’m still open to love and partnership but I do not play about my spark no more. Never again.” 

That comment got shared by Upworthy on instagram. It went semi-viral. And the response was...mostly love. A tiny handful of people did not love it, and that's fine. But the majority of people saw themselves in it. And that told me something.

What I actually mean when I say I married myself - and I want to be clear about this - is that during this period, I made a formal, intentional commitment to myself. To my own healing, my own authorship, my own worth. My own sovereignty. 

And part of that process involved a really deep and uncomfortable exercise. 

The TL;DR version of this is: I became sovereign over my life. And I committed myself to self love. 

I pictured my life without music.

Not as a loss. Not as a tragedy. I just... sat in it. Who am I without music? What do I have? What do I bring to this world?

What is my dharma?

And the answer I arrived at was: everything. I am still everything without music. And really that’s why my music feels more alive now, in my opinion. 

Because I’m not suffocating it with my ego and need for external validation anymore. 

Music is not my identity anymore. It is something I do. Something I love. But it is not the sum of my worth. It’s not even a fraction of my worth, baby.

And once I really sat in that truth — and I mean really sat in it - my relationship to music completely transformed. The outcome of my career stopped having power over my self-worth. I stopped measuring my value by streaming numbers or opportunities or who called back. I just...let go.

Partially because I was tired. But also because it was time.

And I think that is one of the most important things any of us can do as creatives. Separate your identity from your output. Separate your worth from your results. Because the moment you do that, you get to create freely again.

This brought me so much life and energy to recover from what I had been going through. 

LESSON 3  —  I Detoxed From Music

Ok, now this next lesson - once a month, I cleanse my palette. I eat really bland, simple foods. Like unseasoned salmon, and dry lettuce, with just cooked beans. It is nasty. Yes if you were wondering. 

Y’all hear me out ok. Don’t make me laugh. 

I clear out the noise of flavor so I can come back to food actually tasting like something.

I had to do the same thing with music.

I stopped listening to music. Completely. For about three weeks.

And I want to be honest — that was not comfortable. Music is everywhere. It's in restaurants and waiting rooms and every piece of content online. Actively choosing silence in a world that is constantly sonically stimulating is its own act of discipline.

I wasn’t over the top - like if I’m eating out and there’s music ok. But I made an effort to not sing along. Whew, that was hard. 

But what I noticed in that silence was how overstimulated I had been. 

How overworked. How much noise I had been living inside of without even registering it as noise. A lot of music industry professionals do this - we are surrounded by music constantly, consuming it constantly, creating it constantly, and we never stop to notice what that accumulation is doing to our hearing. Not just our physical hearing. Our creative hearing.

When I came back to music after those three weeks? I heard everything. I heard differently. Songs I'd listened to a hundred times felt new me. My own ideas felt cleaner. My ears felt reset.

If you've been feeling creatively flat or like you're not responding to music the way you used to - Ima gently suggest: try the silence. Even just a few days. Let that palette clear.

LESSON 4  —  I Allowed the Pivot to Happen

With this next  one - I talked about it a little bit in the hobbies episode, but I want to go deeper here because it really was a significant part of this pause.

I started to recognize that music is not the only thing I know how to do. More importantly, it ain’t the only thing I WANT to do. And even more than both of those - it's not the only thing I'm genuinely good at.

I came out of what I call the cave. And by cave I mean: the deeply insular creative space where all you do is work, consume music content, talk to music people, think about music things. The cave feels safe because everything in it makes sense to you. But nothing new gets in. No new life. It is an echo chamber of your mind’s most convenient and comfortable thoughts. 

And when I came out, I found writing. I found storytelling. I found... stand-up comedy. I did an open mic. No, I will not be sharing the video from that…at least not today. I even started officiating volleyball at a rec center in here town.

I also started meeting people who were not musicians. Which — I know that sounds like a small thing, but for someone who has spent the majority of their social world inside the music industry, that can be a genuinely expansive experience. My world got bigger. And when your world gets bigger, your music gets bigger. Your references get bigger. Your capacity for connection gets bigger.

Creativity is my pillar. Music is one of the things that lives under that pillar. But it doesn't have to be the whole structure. And allowing for that truth - allowing for the pivot - didn't diminish my musicianship. It actually freed it and illuminated it.  

Sometimes when people ask me what I do and I say “I’m a Cultural media Producer and Performer.” they look at me like what does that even mean? Which, fair. But it really just means I’m a Professional Pivoter within the industry. I make creative ideas manifest no matter what. And to be a Performer you also have to be really good at pivoting. 

So this lesson, thank you for bearing with me through that, is really letting the pivot happen. 

LESSON 5  —  I Started Training Like an Athlete

This last one is maybe the most practical, and I want to give it the time it deserves - because it honestly deserves a whole episode of its own. Which, spoiler: it’s gon get one.

But here's the core of it: I started approaching my life the way an athlete approaches their career. In every dimension.

Mentally — I developed a more intentional level of discipline around my mind. I started visualizing. Not in a vague, manifesting-adjacent way. I mean sitting down, closing my eyes, and building a picture of the life I actually want and who I actually am inside of it. And who is there with me. 

And notably, music was not the center of that picture. Creativity  and Community were the center of that picture of that ideal life. I made creativity and community my pillars and let everything else organize around those.

And every day, I created something. With no rules about what it had to be. Now mind you we are always creating as it is whether we know if or not. 

I created with no intention of anyone else ever seeing it. Some days it was a song. Some days it was a moment - a meal I made intentionally, a walk I took with full presence, a written page I put in a drawer. I romanticized my own life by taking candle lit showers. I treated myself exceptionally well. I practiced being someone worth taking care of. I married myself like I told y’all.

And like an owner of a team does for their players/atheltes, they know that their players are an asset. More over, because athletes (some of the best ones) prioritize their health and improvement. 

I started taking my physical health a lot more seriously. I love being active. Yoga, lifting weights, hiking with my sondog. I committed to having a strong body. Not for aesthetics. For resilience. For longevity. For the kind of physical foundation that lets you keep doing the work over the long haul. For the work that requires me to get through a 3 hour show and a 20 hour day because some days the days are just long.

I’m not gone hold y’all, last year had some real health challenges in it for me. And I am genuinely grateful that I had been building that physical and mental foundation before those challenges arrived. It was part of how I got through that.

I'm still in the burnout, in some ways. I want to be real about that. I'm not standing here telling you I'm fully healed and everything is peanut butter and butterflies. But I feel it rising. I feel the momentum underneath me. I feel the year of the fire horse being real present around here. I feel myself coming back - not to who I was before, but to something and someone more honest and more grounded than I previously was.

And that feels like the right place to be. My life and career are starting to feel sustainable again. They are starting to feel like me again. And it took a pause for that to be true. 

OUTRO

So, through five practices

- Resting deeply and intentionally,

- Loving myself radically and unconditionally

- Clearing my palette

- Letting the pivot happen

- And training like the artist-athlete I actually am

I am starting to come back with grace and more ease.

I don't know which one of those lands for you today. But I hope one of them does.

Next episode I'm going deeper on that athletic training piece because there is a lot of beauty to unpack there - the mental and physical practices that I genuinely believe are foundational to a sustainable creative career. So stick around.

I missed this. I missed y’all. I'm glad to be here. I don’t take this community that we’re building for granted.

That’s all for this episode, Music Executives — and yes, I know this is not easy. But it is fun. I love you.