"Aching"

originally created January 17, 2022 ✦ republished February 9, 2025

(Originally posted on Instagram. This retroactive post is copied from the Instagram post.)

This is something I made last night(oops, wrong date in the image! 😬). My body & brain feel like garbage rn, so I figured I'd draw because I've heard it helps you release your feelings.

For the past 5 days, I've been struggling to recover from what I believe is school burnout. I'm so sick of living in a perpetual miasma of mental fatigue and confusion; and yet, every day, I feel like I'm coercing myself to do something, anything, like it's a compulsion. I have a list of strategies to help, but it usually takes me much longer than even the 6 days off I have right now to ease off that state of mind.

It's too much to unpack in 2,200 characters, and my brain is too dead to write it out anyway, so hopefully this little drawing expresses it accurately. When I was making it, I first thought about every little detail of how I felt, and it became this metaphor of hanging by your brain, writhing in a straitjacket in midair, while desperately fumbling with a stupid fiddly buckle that's too tiny and sharp to release. The feeling that my brain was stuck while the rest of my body was twitching and reacting is what decided the colors. I didn't have any plan as to what the pattern of the colors would be: I basically just scribbled, used the Fill tool, and then used a ton of blending tools. I figured that if I just let my hand do whatever, it would better reflect what my brain is feeling.

Some thought experiments:
I'm interested in knowing what you think of this piece. Do you relate? If so, when have you experienced this? If you could draw what burnout looks like, how would you do it?