Friday Question – Burnout

NOTE: We haven’t had one of these in a little while, because most of our team had to unexpectedly go on hiatus, including me. Now, I can pick these up again for the foreseeable future. If anyone is interested in volunteering, we could really use the help! You can volunteer as a writer or a moderator. I have set up a new volunteer thread for prospective mods on our forum. If you’d like to volunteer as a writer, please feel free, but know that our writing team will only pick back up in May, so we will not begin reviewing applications until then.

The Friday Question: How it works

Every Friday we will pose a question for you all to discuss or privately consider. You can engage with it publicly here on the RFAS blog, or you can join our forum (details below) for a more private discussion. You can write it down to think about later, journal about it, or bring it in to a therapy session with you.

If you would like to volunteer to become a moderator and host future Questions, please email us at volunteer@asexualsurvivors.org—or join our forum and post in the (NEW) moderator volunteer thread. If you just have an idea for a future Question that you want to share, we have a brainstorming topic on our forum.

Something to Ponder Today

Recently at The Asexual Agenda, Laura wrote a post about burnout which really resonated with me, many of the other writers, and, it seems, much of the ace community. Burnout in general is hard to deal with, but there is something about writing about asexuality, doing activism about asexuality, and trying to form community as an ace person that is particularly exhausting. And from the comments section of Laura’s post, it seems quite a few people are really not sure how to combat it. With that in mind, I want to provide a place to pool ideas, especially since survivors—and even more so with survivors directly engaging in work like the kind we do here—tend to burn out more easily.

How do you deal with burnout?

• Do you personally have a way that works best for you? Have you tried anything that hasn’t worked out well for you?
• Do you think that the way that you typically handle burnout is healthy, or do you feel that you tend to resort to unhealthy coping methods?
• Does burnout, for you, feel triggering in some way? If so, is it an overt (or obvious) trigger, or a covert trigger (one that you do not or had not realized is a trigger)?
• Are there triggers that come up for you when you’re feeling burned out that aren’t directly related, but are heavily influenced by being burned out in some way?
• What is it that you think makes the ace community more prone to experiencing burnout?

You don’t have to answer every (or any!) question, of course. These are just different ways to approach the topic which might be helpful to consider. You can share as much or as little as you like.

On the Forum

• You can discuss this question privately after registering at the forum
• Here are instructions for how to join the forum
• Here’s the invite request form
• You can also still discuss previous questions as well. There is no time limit for joining the discussion.
• Please abide by our rules in both comments and forum posts.

Please note that we are still working things out in the forum, especially technical issues. We are gradually letting people in now who are not moderators or volunteers, but it can basically be considered “in beta” for now. So if you do join, please excuse our forum being a bit of a mess while we get everything tested. There may also be a little bit of a wait time for sending out invites.

Here are a couple of things you should know about posting to the forum:

• All posts are private, and can only be viewed by members
• It is against forum rules to discuss any personal stories shared on the forum with anyone who is not a member without permission of the person who shared it
• You can post as anonymous, once you are a member

The Spoiler Tag

You can hide especially triggering details behind a spoiler tag—which also works in blog comments. Here’s an example:

[spoiler title=’Triggering stuff’ collapse_link=’true’]Explicit/triggering material would go here.[/spoiler]

To make one, just type…

[ spoiler ] ... [ /spoiler ]

…without the spaces. I hope that this helps everyone safely navigate this conversation.