Creative working in 2023? You may be overdue for serious renewal

The first signal from the Velvet Ditch is subtle.

As usual, I misread it.

Gradually, I notice my morning writing is bogged down in tedium. I’m not progressing at my usual pace. Checklist items remain unchecked. The growing list fills me with dread instead of excitement.

After a few weeks, opening my current file each morning requires an immense act of willpower—and I’ve structured my life to create that gift of time.

So, why am I squandering it?

To be clear, the pattern I’m describing isn’t depression or physical exhaustion. I’ve experienced both and would seek clinical attention should they recur.

How can I be sure?

For starters, my depression usually comes with a walloping dose of persistent pessimism where any positive feelings flatline. That isn’t happening. Work with clients is proceeding. I’m meeting my deadlines on that front.

Physically, I’m fortunate to also feel fine: I have no body pain, fatigue, or atypical reluctance to get out of bed. I sleep well. My commitments at home, with my family, and with friends are being met. When I fulfill these obligations, I feel joy.

But there’s a definite spark missing.

Concurrent signals:

• Reading way less than I normally do and watching minimal movies or television.
• Developing a sudden, voracious appetite for immersive video games.
• Wanting to be outside, preferably in water (I love to swim).

“What is happening?” becomes the undercurrent in conversations with peers and mentors.

Gradually, I realize that my creativity has stalled out. And, thanks to my friend Jeff, I even have a name for this recurring pattern.

I’m back in the Velvet Ditch.

What is the Velvet Ditch?

Jeff Wetherhold is a fellow consultant in a different field; we met through Growclass.

We first talked about the Velvet Ditch during a call in February 2023. The holiday festivities were firmly in the rear-view by that point, but we hadn’t caught up in a while.

“How’ve you been?” I ask. “How were your holidays?”

“January was slow,” he tells me. “I didn’t climb out of the Velvet Ditch until the end of the month.”

“Climb out of what?” I ask, instantly fascinated. “Can you tell me more?”

“You know,” he says. “When you’re crawling toward the holidays and you can’t take on another single thing. And then you get there, and you do all the extra work of celebration. And after that, there’s this period where you watch movies or TV or read and relax. It’s like lying in a ditch, but you’re also wrapped in this velvet blanket of creature comforts.”

“I know that feeling,” I tell him, thinking of every December in my adult life and especially my last holiday break. Getting there had been the darkest of crawls. “You mean the unstructured week between Christmas and New Year when time seems to stop.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Only, sometimes, I stay in the ditch way past the holiday. When that happens, I don’t ask very much of myself. I do what’s needed and no more. I let myself recharge. And at some point, I know it’s time to throw off the blanket and stand up.”

I hung up the call filled with the clarity and gratitude that only a talk with a wise friend gives me.

Sadly, awareness isn’t inoculation.

Am I in the Velvet Ditch?

The Urban English Dictionary describes the Velvet Ditch as, “A place that is easy to fall into and hard to crawl out of.”

NO KIDDING.  

Talking with Jeff added his work-specific context—that the Velvet Ditch is both collapse and escape, comfort and holding pattern. That it’s a place of gentleness with your working self, something of an inevitability in the cultural landscape of late-capitalist societies, and not at all limited to the Western holiday periods.

And ditch seasons may also look different, depending on your industry:

• If you’re in accounting, I bet you fall in the ditch right after you finish filing every tax report in existence each spring.
• If you teach, the first month of summer break is probably a big-time Velvet Ditch experience.
• If you’re a work-from-home parent with school-age children, having them come home for THEIR summer break may also be enough to send you tumbling into the ditch.

Depending on your profession, you can probably think of one or two high probability fields in your calendar when the Velvet Ditch looms large.

How I fell in this time

Looking back at last June, I see some obvious ‘straw/camel’s back’ risk factors:

• I lost a dear friend and colleague in 2022. While I had processed a lot of my rawest grief by the time I fell in the ditch, I was not at my most emotionally resilient. (I’m still not.)
• I signed up for a three-week virtual course that month, right after running my first in-person author event on top of the annual end-of-school madness. Until the course started, I’d been deep in a 30,000-word writing sprint on Book II of The Xenthian Cycle and enjoying great momentum. I expected the course to interrupt my streak. I didn’t expect it would derail my writing afterward.
• As a working parent with a home office, I’m on deck when my kids are on summer break. They’re much more autonomous now, but their presences (and camp-related calendars) still shift my working rhythms. A lot, as it happens.
• My consulting practice undergoes a sea change roughly every two years, usually in summer. With hindsight, guess what else often happens during that period?

While my Velvet Ditch stay eventually became obvious, figuring it out took me a good five weeks. After, I felt silly that it took me so long, especially when Jeff had given me the framing concept earlier in the year.

Had a ditch stay in 2023? You weren’t alone

Here’s the kicker.

This fall—as I talked to colleagues, went to conferences, and read other people who are insightful about working life—I realized I wasn’t the only creative wrapped in some version of the Velvet Ditch.

And I don’t think all the factors are personal.

Here’s a short list of energetic drains you may have experienced this year:

• Smelling smoke in your city for days on end or even evacuating from your community while record-breaking forest fires raged through North America.
• Watching your leadership team try to stuff the remote-work genie back into the ‘5 days in-office’ bottle.
• Understanding that we live in a patriarchal society systemically built on white supremacy and colonization, which requires variable energy to manage depending on how this framework interacts with your life, liberty, and goals.
• Continued attacks on the rights of LGBTQ2S people across North America.
• Enduring Covid-19’s long-tail impact on your work, social, and creative life. Many acute disruptions have ended, but we all experienced a mountain of change in four years.
• Caring for an elder or vulnerable relative in an increasingly broken long-term healthcare system.

I’m sure you can list a dozen more factors without breaking a sweat.

So, what’s to be done?

Getting out of the Velvet Ditch: A working guide

I don’t have all the answers for how to escape the Velvet Ditch, and I won’t pretend that I do.

Here are some patterns I’ve noticed:

1. As with grief, there is no timeline. It takes as long as it takes.
2. The lack of timeline likely pisses you off. And the Velvet Ditch does not care. Trying to force your way out may wrap that blanket around you even tighter.
3. Listen to Jeff and let yourself rest. Answer the diversions tugging at your hand. If you suddenly feel like learning the piano, give that a try. Personally, I played a lot of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. (Damn, that’s a great game.)
4. Give yourself permission to stop creating for a while. Your drive will come back. I honestly believe that.
5. If you can, take a social media break. Clearing that bandwidth can help a lot, particularly for extremely online people (my brethren, hello).
6. Spend time outdoors with loved ones, pets, and/or small children, depending on how your life is structured. They can be a balm for your soul during a Velvet Ditch stay.

I’m not entirely out of the ditch, even now. I still have days that are less creatively productive.

And yeah, they bother me.

When that happens, I have a little talk with myself about being a human being. I try to gift myself some of the kindness I would give to another.

And I trust that when it’s time to fully stand back up and run again, I’ll know.

EMW Note: Finding yourself in the Velvet Ditch is itself a marker of privilege. I want to acknowledge that.

I wrote this essay weeks before the Hamas attack that left innocent Israeli civilians dead and saw hostages taken. The attack in turn prompted the State of Israel to place over two million people living in Gaza under direct threat of starvation, dehydration, and physical harm as it cut water, electricity and bombed this heavily populated area at an astounding rate.

I am thinking of the Palestinian and Israeli people who have lost or fear for their family, friends, and homes. I’ve written to my representatives asking for an immediate ceasefire and for humanitarian aid to be sent.

If you are grieving for people you care about or in fear for their safety, please know I’m thinking of you with love.