Dealing with Burnout for Student Workers

We’re past midterms, past spring break, and in the final stretch of the semester. As someone who is taking five classes and working two jobs plus club commitments, burnout is a real issue for me, as it is for a lot of people regardless of how many commitments they have. Here are some of the strategies I’ve come up with for dealing with burnout.

  1. Make time for self care, a.k.a. treat yourself in small ways. Self care is probably the most crucial detail in keeping yourself going through hard times, and you can do it in quick and easy ways. My favorite thing to do for self care when I’m pressed for time is to take a shower, use my favorite scented body wash, and then use my favorite scented lotion when I get out of the shower. I need to shower anyway, so adding a bit of luxury to the experience isn’t much of a stretch. It takes a grand total of fifteen to twenty minutes for this whole process, so I can do it as a quick relaxation technique during a study break or even in the middle of my day/afternoon/evening. When I have more time, I like to paint my nails, but when I’m in a hurry the shower-and-lotion technique works well, too. It helps me take just a few minutes to take care of myself as a reprieve from my busy schedule and to remind myself that I’m worth the effort.

    2. Take breaks. I can’t stress this enough. Working for six hours straight on a project might seem “necessary,” but you’ll probably produce subpar work–and your boss or professor will be able to tell. It’s much better to take a quick break in the middle to grab a smoothie or chat with a friend or watch a couple of YouTube videos. This will also probably make you resent your project less and will keep you from hating what you’ve produced by the end. As a writer and artist, I have plenty of days when I work for hours to produce a piece and then hate it once I’m done–probably because you just can’t stare at something for that long. Just take a break. Avert your eyes from the project. Allow yourself a few deep breaths, send a text, enjoy some juice.3. Don’t drink too much caffeine. I’ve recently cut down on caffeine on a recommendation from a nutritionist, and it’s honestly made a huge difference. I’ve gone from two to three cups of coffee a day to one, and while it took a few days of adjusting, I think it’s worth it. Not drinking too much caffeine has regulated my eating patterns and makes it easier to relax and get some sleep at night.

    4. Work in time for friends when you can. Mealtimes and study times are great for this–try to grab meals with friends when you can, or spend some time studying in the same room with your friends if you won’t distract each other too much. Otherwise, try to integrate friend time into your errands or other things you have to do anyway. For example, do you have to run to the pharmacy downtown? Invite a friend, get some iced teas at a cafe while you’re down there, and make a little event out of something you have to do anyway. Spending time with friends keeps you out of your own head, I think, and can really help me cut down on my tendency to worry. It’s also fun to hang out with people I care for.

    5. Take some pressure off yourself. Ultimately, that C- you got on your midterm is not a big deal. In fact, I think a C- is a great grade. If you messed up something at work, it’s okay. You’re a student and an employee and a person–that’s a lot of aspects to manage at once. If you need someone to tell you that it’s okay to relax, then I’m doing that right now. Just don’t worry too much; cut yourself some slack in the way that you would cut a friend some slack. It’s going to be okay. Good luck.

My #1 Piece of Career Advice

In my last blog post, which you can read by clicking this link, I shared that I had sent in a pitch to a small publishing company that publishes gay fiction, Dreamspinner Press, and was waiting for a reply from the company about whether or not they’d be interested in publishing my gay romance novella set in Nicaragua. Well, I got an email back, and…drumroll please…they said yes! Now, I have until August 30th to write a fifteen-thousand-word to fifty-thousand-word novella based on the concept I pitched to them. I’ll make sure to keep you all updated on how it goes, and try to figure out a way to make my experience writing this novella into a list of advice for other writers.

In other exciting career-based news, a blog post that I wrote about being a trans Latino in the gay dating scene was picked up by a queertransmen.org, and will be published on their site within the next few weeks! And I self-published a four-poem excerpt from my upcoming poetry collection–the four poems are collectively titled Fair Youth and can be found on my writing blog.

All in all, it’s been a very productive couple of weeks for me in terms of my writing. However, two weeks ago I started taking some important steps for my own health, which require being off campus for three hours every weeknight. These hours have seriously cut into the time I use for homework, writing, and just relaxing, so I had to drop some hours at my job at Denison Library. I’ll still be working about six hours a week, but that’s opposed to the ten hours I was working, plus whatever hours I picked up from coworkers who weren’t able to make their shifts.

I definitely don’t love that I’ll be losing money for the hours I’m not working at Denison…but I think it’s more important for me to focus on my health and my schoolwork. I’m a student and an employee but I’m a person first and foremost and I have to make sure that I can actually get through the rest of the semester feeling as healthy and happy as possible. Not to mention that I think I’ll be spending enough time at Denison over the summer, since I’ll be interning there and living in Claremont all throughout the summer, until I start RA training in the middle of August.

I think the advice that I’d give to anyone is you’re not an employee first, you’re a human being. I absolutely understand that I am in a privileged position when I can drop a few hours at work, but I think that my #1 piece of advice, whether it’s about life, careers, or writing, is to always remember that your first priority should be your own health, whenever it’s possible for you to prioritize that.

Wishful Thinking: Dreams and a Potential Publishing Contract

Sometimes I like to picture that, in ten years, I’m in a beach house at Pochomil or Montelimar in Nicaragua. I would go during the dry season, so it isn’t too rainy while I’m there, and spend the rest of the year at another house on the beach just south of Puerto Peñasco in Northern Mexico.

I don’t want to own these houses or anything, I just want to be able to stay in them and spend all my time writing poetry, essays, memoirs, novels, short stories, and anything else my brain can cook up. My dream is to spend my days running, swimming, and kayaking at the beach, and then write when it’s hot at midday and also at night. Maybe I’d make a friend with a catamaran and go sailing, because I really love that, and learn to scuba dive, since I’ve never done that. I also imagine I’d invite friends to stay in my lovely little beach cottages, and we could take day trips around and eat good food.

This isn’t an entirely realistic goal, and I don’t plan on relying on my just writing for a living, but I would like to someday, maybe after graduation, treat myself and rent out a beach house for a few weeks or a month of writing and living near the ocean. I’ve been feeling that burnout since my junior year of high school, and I really would like just a break from everything and time to focus on my writing with no interruptions.

More realistically, what I’d like to do is become an editor at a publishing house or a literary magazine. I’ll probably start off as a slush reader and work my way up. Though it’s not just writing without a care in a beach house (which is less of a “career goal” and more of a “lifestyle goal”), it’s really my dream to read for a living. And I would, of course, continue to write and publish on the side. I think I’ll live in Phoenix or Los Angeles and have a pool in the neighborhood that I can frequent, which will stand in for the ocean when I’m not on vacation.

I’ve actually been making some progress towards my “writing on the side” goal by submitting a pitch to Dreamspinner Press’s World of Love project, which is a project that will publish gay romances based in countries around the world. Of course, I picked to write about Nicaragua, since I spent the first five years of my life there, and my dad’s side of my family is from there. If my pitch is accepted and my story is contracted, I could make money off of a novella sold as an ebook! I’ll be sure to write a blog post about it once I find out if my pitch has been accepted.

In any case, I think that being an editor and writing on the side sounds perfect, even if I can’t live at a beach house full-time. My current goal is kind of a distilled version of my bigger daydream. But, who knows? Anything can happen…maybe you’ll find me publishing my fourth book, which I wrote at my Nicaraguan beach house, in the year 2027.

Source: https://myinkycloak.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/day-trip-to-the-beach-at-pochomil/

Pochomil. Source.

Making Money Writing: The Tough Stuff

What writer doesn’t want to be able to make money off their writing? Sure, we might all have other goals just in case our novels don’t make the New York Times bestseller list, but I think we can all admit that being able to write as our primary job would be a dream come true. Even if we can’t write as a primary job, though, writing can be a great way to make supplemental income.

Personally, I haven’t made a ton of money off of my writing, but I’ve been paid for six pieces of writing: a poem, two essays, and three fiction pieces. You can make money from writing contests, literary magazines and blogs that pay to publish, writing commissions, and by self-publishing work and selling it somewhere online like Amazon. I’ve also, along with my paid writing jobs, done unpaid volunteer writing, like for this blog and also for newspapers.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few obstacles to being able to make money just writing, or even just volunteer writing–writing as a commitment, rather than just for fun, can be a struggle. Now, I don’t exactly have solutions to all of these problems, I just wanted to identify them so independent writers out there know that they’re not the only ones struggling, and maybe so they can put a name to obstacles that they couldn’t completely identify before.

So here are some of the obstacles, according to me and to my writer friend, KC:

“In addition to whatever obstacles there might be in different businesses, there is the fear of starting out…the insecurity that stops people from putting themselves out there,” KC told me. Writers can be very protective of and insecure about our work, and that insecurity can be so much worse when it comes down to sharing our writing with a large audience. I personally don’t really have this fear any more, and it’s probably because I’ve been publishing since I was fifteen. I think that maybe the only solution to the fear of putting yourself out there is to…well, practice putting yourself out there. Before you do that, however, it can be helpful to try to build up your confidence in your own writing. Trust in yourself to produce your best work is essential.

It can be hard to self-manage and commit to a project, especially if you’re writing independently and don’t have a publisher or agent watching over your project…and even when I have had someone guiding me, I’ve definitely, at least once, started writing my project the morning it was due.

To make money off of writing, you basically have to be your own business. It’s a good idea to have social media, like a Twitter or Tumblr or WordPress account, to advertise your writing or keep an online archive. Promotion is essential–being an independent writer requires a lot more skills than just writing.

Lastly, burnout is a serious issue. When you’re trying to write thousands of words a day every day for weeks, you get tired. I know just about every writer will tell you that you have to write every day. And I know I’m young, but I’ve been writing my whole life, and if there’s one thing that I’ve learned it’s that I can’t write every day. If I do that, I burn out, I start to hate my project, and I start to hate writing. For me, it’s important to take breaks and give my brain a rest. Sometimes a Saturday off, when I just go for a run, hang out with friends, get some sleep, and ignore my writing for twenty-four hours is exactly what I need to re-energize my project.

I hope this has helped, at least, let you know that you’re not alone out there in the big world of writing! Here’s a meme:

kermit writing meme

How Navigate the Job Market: A Brief Guide for Transgender People

For my first blog post as a CP&R blogger, I wrote about what it’s like to be a transgender person trying to get dressed for a job interview, and shared some of my own experiences and anxieties about the process. Since then, I’ve talked to some of my transgender friends, and they’ve shared some tips on how to navigate the job market as a college-age trans person. Here are some of the questions I asked, and how my friends answered them!

(Note that all of these people will be kept anonymous.)

  • If you want to be out to a potential employer, should you disclose that you’re trans at your interview? The people I asked agreed that no, probably not, because it can get awkward if you come out face-to-face. However, one of them shared with me that it can be a good idea to put your preferred name and pronouns in a cover letter, even if a cover letter isn’t required for the application. “It’s easier to deal with an interview if you’ve already put your cards on the table in a cover letter,” they said. I’d add that this is probably a good strategy if you know the company is LGBT-friendly and also if you are nonbinary/genderqueer or you are frequently perceived as the wrong gender.
  • How do you structure a cover letter in which you come out to your employer? Do you lead with the information or save it for the end? My friend advised me to save it for the end of the letter. “You don’t want to shock them right off the bat or anything,” they said, and laughed. I agree with this strategy; however, if you’re really concerned that you might shock your potential employer with your gender, you might want to investigate other companies or evaluate whether or not you want to come out to them. Always be safe.
  • How do you handle it if your name isn’t changed legally? “You don’t actually need to use your legal name in your cover letter, app, or resume,” another of my friends shared with me. “Your legal name is really only needed for a background check once you’re hired. You don’t have to lead with it if you don’t want to.” I think this is a good idea if you don’t have your name and/or gender marker changed legally, but you are read as your correct gender.
  • What are some tips for staying under the radar if you really want a job but you also really don’t want to come out as trans to that potential employer? Before I get into what my friends said, I’d like to add that that’s totally fine. It’s always your choice. You aren’t a “bad trans person” or  a “coward” if you don’t want to be out. But to share what my friends said: they advised to be careful about what you’re putting on your resume. If you’ve done work in the LGBT community, like with LGBT nonprofits and school organizations, consider whether you want to put that on your resume–if you’re really concerned about an employer being “suspicious.” Or make sure to frame it by sharing that you’re an “ally” rather than a member of the LGBT community.
  • Do you have any other wisdom to share about being trans in the job market? “Keep track of what laws are changing now,” one of my friends said, “always know your rights.” Especially now that we have a new president, you should always know the ins and outs of gender discrimination laws. In my opinion, you should always play it safe: if it feels better to be stealth, be stealth. If you feel safer dressing as your assigned gender and going by your legal name, do that. Do what makes you feel comfortable, and keep an eye on your surroundings to make sure that you’re being safe.