A Quick Public Service Announcement

In some respects, I don't have the luxury of being able to burn out. But in others, I might not have any choice.

I’ll be 52 years old on Saturday, friends, and with the passing of the years comes a growing tendency on my part to reflect. It is not a particularly good time for me to be doing so. The coming weekend also marks the fifth anniversary of my mum’s passing, and even without that particular coincidence I have felt rather too often over much of the last decade as though I have not had much to celebrate at any time of year, let alone one the time of year when the reminder that I get more than any other is of the passing of the years.

The recurring theme of the last few weeks, months and years of my life have been that I have been on the point of burning out. I am a single dad for five days a week, and this on top of work is hard. But it’s not as hard as the worry of financial concerns as we as a household continue to bump along, barely able to make ends meet and periodically going through considerable angst over what the postman will be bringing each morning.

It’s not overwork, in a strict sense. If anything, I do not have enough work at the moment, and I certainly do not have enough paying subscribers on here. It’s the emotional work and emotional weight. I have to maintain a rictus grin in front of my children. They must not see when I am suffering. They must not see what is going on behind the scenes. They have to be protected from that.

And this weight is exhausting, even though I don’t feel as though I need more sleep as a result of it. I often feel as though I’m propping up an entire building with my shoulders. I have a degree of emotional support from afar, but for five days a week, every single week, it’s me and these two who are entirely dependent upon me. This has been further complicated by something which happened about three weeks ago which has made that weight feel ten times as great as it could or should do.

(I’m not going to go into detail about that; my closest friends are already aware of it, and anyone who does want to know is welcome to contact me. Curiosity is a good enough reason - I just don’t want to be talking about it on a public forum where literally anybody could read it since while it affected me severely, it wasn’t *about* me. I hope you understand.)

When you have little money and your resources for work are your brain, the tips of your fingers, and a keyboard, the temptation to just plough on through and simply produce more can be almost overwhelming. If I can just write that one thing that hits, perhaps that could make all the difference. Except, of course, it never does, does it? And the result of that extra pushing is simply to feel more drained, more upset, and precisely no better off whatsoever.

With that in mind, I’m taking a long weekend. There’ll be no weekend match this week, and normal service on that front should resume the week after. I don’t just need to recharge my batteries. I need a full engine refurb. I need the guys from Pimp My Ride to install a lime green plasma screen television and a mini-bar in me. I’m going to the live version of the estimable Chart Music podcast on Saturday afternoon. Will that help? Who knows? I hope so. Maybe I’ll even write that up next week.

And I do have to admit, I’m feeling burnt out with football, too. This season feels as though it hasn’t really got going for me yet. The professional game hasn’t entertained me in any single way, and even my Saturday trips to matches have felt messed up or unsatisfactory in some other way or other. I’ve been involved in this game in some way or other for the best part of four and a half decades now, so I doubt very much that it’s a permanent schism. But in the right here and right now, my feelings towards the bloody football haven’t been this ambivalent in years.

So, what to do? Well, that’s partly what I need to figure out. I need to get back into the rhythm of writing again, because for me it has one and I’ve been falling out of time with it. That’s one of the things that it feels has been missing from my life as this year has progressed. I also feel—as I periodically do—that I need to expand my horizons. I’m going to try and do more with Instagram, since that’s a medium which seems to bring others success. I’ve occasionally written about subjects other than football too. Is it time for me to explore that, as well?

And I need to do something. Numbers on here have flatlined, and I am starting to wonder whether I may simply have to put the whole of this Substack behind a paywall to try and force something, since trying to encourage anything beyond a fairly small number of people to pay for my writing doesn’t seem to have got me anywhere. I’ve also been losing freelancing work of late, which hasn’t helped. I’m not quite panicking about the future yet, but my rent goes up by £120 a month from the end of September and as of today I have precisely no means to cover that increase whatsoever.

I have one more thing that I want to write for this place, which I will try to get done before Friday afternoon because I think it’s important and needs to be said. But beyond that it’s time for me to hit the pause button and consider my options, up to and including whether I actually can write for a living or not. There have been rather too many consecutive days of late when I’ve felt as though I can't, and that old devil imposter syndrome is sitting on my shoulder again. I don’t completely burn out often, but when I have in the past it has been savage. I cannot afford to do so completely at the moment, for just about every reason that you could imagine. I hope you all understand.