Today has been a very emotional one for me. It’s been an emotional month, truth be told, filled with lots of exciting (and yet, scary) decisions.
Sometime around October of 2018, I realized that I was more than just tired, and spread like too little butter over too much bread (to paraphrase a certain Hobbit) – I was genuinely burned out.
I had been heading for a Burn Out for a long time, but it took this article on Buzzfeed this past January to really solidify for me what I was experiencing. I was working six days a week for ostensibly three employers: my dayjob, as the guest entertainment correspondent at Accessible Media Inc., and giving workshops, convention appearances and all of the marketing/editing/revisions that comes of being a professional writer. I’ve published seven novels in the last eight years and it’s been very consuming.
I needed all three jobs to make ends meet and to keep my writing career afloat, and it wasn’t doing my sleep schedule, my mental health, my physical health, or my fatigue levels any favors. And it was affecting the quality of my work in all three areas, most severely in my writing.
Something had to give before I did.
Coupled with a few fortuitous new opportunities with my wring career – winning the TAC grant, signing The Skylark’s Saga to a shopping agreement, and signing To A Stranger with Divine Paradox films – it became clear to me where my focus should be concentrated. I needed to free up bandwith to provide my writing the attention, clarity, and focus it deserved.
Therefore, with no small amount of hand-wringing I made the difficult decision to change dayjobs and say good-bye to Accessible Media Inc.
While it is my choice – and the right one – to depart Live From Studio 5, it wasn’t done lightly, and I can admit to a large amount of melancholy with today’s final broadcast. I was asked to be a part of the show from it’s very inception, working with the producers and the hosts for a few months before it actually hit the airwaves in February 2016. It was the first time my skills as a voice actor and pop culture scholar could be used in tandem and moreover, the team at AMI completely and honestly valued my contributions, which at the time had been a rare and wonderful thing for me.
I have learned so much from working with AMI these past three years – about the Accessibility community,a bout advocacy, about myself as a scholar and speaker, and about how radio (and later television) are made. There are so many hardworking people behind the scenes, and so much passion and intelligence working hard every day.
I definitely wept as I said my goodbyes after the show today. Then a long-time listener sent me an email letting me know he was happy to hear I was pursing my passion and to let me know that he’d always enjoyed my segments, so I bawled all the way home.
To everyone at AMI – thank you for inviting me to be a part of this wonderful project, for your patience as I learned the ropes, and for asking me to help you touch and change people’s lives every morning. I wish you, and the show, only the very best things going forward.