Snuffing out burnout

Or: How Myra Hess nearly killed me #2

There are things that writers don’t talk about. One of them is ‘burnout’.

My excellent colleague and friend Hattie Butterworth, editor of the magazines Opera Now and Choir and Organ, used to have a podcast called Things Musicians Don’t Talk About (do follow/subscribe to her Substack here). There she and Becca Toal discussed issues that are often suppressed because we in the music industry always fear that revealing illness, injury, abuse, mental health challenges and more will adversely affect perceptions of who we are and what we do.

When we don’t articulate and deal with those issues, they can fester and do us more harm. Hattie and Becca have wound up the podcast, but it has certainly got me thinking. It does not apply only to performers...

Loving your work doesn’t mean you can’t burn out

This is not necessarily burnout in the classic sense of hating your job. You can still suffer from it if you love what you do – not wisely but too well. You are human and humans are not necessarily made to work 14-hour days, seven days a week. Admittedly, the ever more abusive employers in the gig economy are probably, and shamefully, demanding even longer stints from desperate workers who have no control over how they are treated.

The problem for writers is that often we are doing this to ourselves.

On the one hand, we have little choice. Opportunities are diminishing. Income has plummeted (I was paid £10,000 for my first novel 20 years ago, which back then didn’t seem much for four years’ work, but today most of us can only dream of such sums). If we want to eat, we have to earn, yet some ‘outlets’ have scarcely raised their fees in two decades, while prices out there have virtually doubled.

The burnout issue, however, goes further and deeper. I first bumped into it before it even had a name.

In 1997, when Tom and I first met, I was editing a piano magazine, for which my pay, for editing six issues a year single-handedly, was based on a proportion of the publication’s advertising revenue. As the work never stopped, it did not amount to a living wage. I consulted the Society of Authors about this weird system and was told by their surprised and helpful lawyer that while it was distinctly irregular, it wasn’t actually illegal.

Of course I should have told the company where to shove it; but that magazine was my idea, a long-held dream and the first independent piano magazine in the UK and I was stubbornly determined to see it through. To make ends meet, I also edited a newsletter for the British Council, did sub-editing for BBC Music Magazine under the M40 in White City, and freelanced for whoever would have me write. Oh, and I wrote a book about Korngold. And then started another, about Fauré.

Stop this, or it’ll kill you

Tom could see how I was working - and being an orchestral musician, he wasn’t exactly unaccustomed to antisocial hours, underpayment and the exploitation of one’s musical good will. You have to stop this, he said, or it’ll kill you.

As soon as I did stop, the exhaustion struck me. I was so wiped out that I couldn’t work for a year. It didn’t help that in the past three years both my parents had died of cancer and my sister had become terminally ill with it too. It had been hard to see, given all that, how damaging the work situation was. Take a step back and - crash.

Time out helped, as did the Fauré book, a passion project that paradoxically helped to restore my sanity (his Requiem was curative too, given the family situation). We moved house and had more space and a garden. We got a cat. Then various other curveballs came along and the death of my sister in 2000 knocked me out for another year. After a gradual revival, by 2004 things were turning around. That year, the arts editor of the Independent scooped me up; and also I sold my first novel.

Twenty years and nine books later, it was 2024 and I was working on another passion project: Myra Hess. Talking about Myra Hess, National Treasure in a book festival last summer, my interviewer asked me what I had learned from my heroine. I learned, I think, how not to look after myself. And the importance of doing something about it.

Sometimes I wonder how much was the indirect influence of the great pianist herself. Myra looked after her playing, her career, her friends, family, students, sponsors and (sometimes) colleagues, but not really her health. Her former pupils told me what a demanding taskmaster she was. The Contiguglia twins, who came to study with her after attending Yale, said they’d never had to work so hard in all their lives. She demanded the earth from everyone, including herself. Perhaps that work ethic and those astronomically high standards made her into the musician and indomitable person that she was.

By her last years, however, just about anything that could be wrong with her health had gone wrong. She’d had a stroke, a heart attack, arthritis, longer ago appendicitis and then a gall bladder operation; still longer ago, a double mastectomy that turned out to have been unnecessary. It was largely the arthritis in her hands that forced her into retirement from the concert platform about three years before her death. Given the choice, she would never have stopped at all.

Burnout is a real thing

By autumn 2024 I’d gained an unconscionable amount of weight in the years since lockdown. I was at the desk, either Myra-ing or doing actual paid work, which couldn’t stop because paid. Besides, if you stop, it won’t only affect your bank account, but also people will forget you exist, won’t they? The idea of an exercise hour, other than a short walk when it stopped raining, was anathema. I was comfort-eating, hoping that extra sugar meant extra energy [dear reader, it doesn’t], and ignoring the fact that nutritional benefits in mixed nuts hide vast calorie counts. Mentally I felt I was being stretched on a medieval rack, yanked in all directions, while Dame Myra swung the handle.

After finding I was at the doctor’s surgery every two minutes - unexplained bruises, sleeplessness, rashes, migraine and the perpetual sensation that I couldn’t breathe - I asked about mental health support. Hooray, our borough had a free Talking Cures service! But it was in groups, which didn’t much appeal, and there was a looong waiting list… so I worked through a DIY online programme. It seemed mostly designed for Gen Z with anxieties about body image, rather than middle-aged people who found worrying about body image pointless because if your workload is killing you, why would you?

Finally I found a friendly burnout counsellor, Francis Norton, who convinced me that burnout is real, it is a thing, a real thing; it causes all these problems, and you do have it and you need to STOP. Because what is the alternative? The idea is to prevent you from careering full on into the kind of brick wall that could hospitalise or medicate you for weeks or months, and that could indeed land you with life-threatening physical health conditions.

Part of the problem is admitting that this really is happening to you. With the book just about completed, I agreed. I shut down. I will be eternally grateful to Francis because he absolutely saved my bacon.

Learning a crucial word

You can’t necessarily bring out a book and give yourself sick leave at the same time, but we did go to Australia for a fortnight to see my wonderful aunt, who has just turned 90 and does yoga every day. I put on an Out Of Office message and stopped journalism for six weeks. Guess what? My various clients did not after all write me off forever. And speaking of bacon, I joined a gym and downloaded an app for counting calories and challenging modus operandi around food, using CBT techniques. It’s not about ‘body image’ or ‘loving yourself’; it’s about being healthy.

That was a year ago. I’ve now reached the weight I last shrank to when I had whooping cough in 2014. A note for women of similar vintage: you may be, as I was, bombarded with ads on social media telling you you’ll find it impossible to lose weight after you’re 50, therefore you need X, Y or Z, which they alone can offer. Baloney.

Things aren’t back to normal. After all, ‘normal’ was what got me into that mess. Now the water seems shallower - when you dive, you hit the bottom much sooner than you used to. I’m trying to pace myself and to prioritise health. In London you can be at any one of dozens of different events every night and still regret missing the others, but I’m trying to be cautious because late nights leave me shattered. I miss loads that I want to hear and see and I only wish I lived next door to Wigmore Hall. (I’m speaking on that hallowed stage about Myra on 23 May, 1pm, in conversation with her great-nephew Nigel Hess, and I can’t wait.)

I’m beset by a constant, debilitating sense of guilt. If I turn down a request for an article or notes, a nice invitation to a concert or opera, or people thinking I can wave a magic wand, which I can’t, I fear I’m letting everyone down. But that’s nothing compared to how I’d let them down if I went back into burnout. The important word to learn is short, but difficult to say. It is spelled “N-O”.

Nevertheless… I’ve no intention of stopping. I do want to write more books (maybe shorter ones) – and I don’t regret one moment of my devotion to Myra. Besides, we shouldn’t play victim. Occasionally things are other people’s fault, but we make decisions for ourselves, we take responsibility for that and so we can also take responsibility for fixing things. We only have one life and we have to use it well. There’s a difference between looking after your health and wasting your brief time on earth sitting around feeling sorry for yourself. So I’m off to the gym. Over and out.