Guys… it’s been a hot minute. Although somehow, the last two months have felt like an eternity.
Slow Burn has been quiet over the last two months, and I’ll tell you why.
At the end of July 2026, I started a new job. I took it thinking it was a great fit and a sensible way of offering myself a stable, fixed financial footing after what had already been a challenging few years of family upheaval, grief, unemployment and various personal bridges to cross. On paper, the arrangement made sense. It was a creative. part-time role that would give me a reliable income while allowing me to continue my work as an artist and build Slow Burn and Slow Burn Studio as they got more firmly off the ground.
Unfortunately, the reality of the new role turned into something very different.
Although the job was technically part-time, the amount of energy and mental space it required from me made it feel all consuming. Over the course of those two months, my mental health took a fairly dramatic turn downwards. I found myself waking up thinking about work, going to sleep thinking about work, carrying conversations and tasks around in my head long after I had left the building, and gradually losing the capacity I had previously had for my own work. Continuing to write Slow Burn, teaching classes or creating the resources I had planned were unthinkable at the end of the day. My own emails piled up. My studio practice became something I was trying to squeeze into whatever mental space remained.
I won’t name the organisation here because I genuinely wish them well. Ultimately, I’m not writing this to focus on the role or the employer, but because the experience itself matters. It has brought a number of things to the surface that have really made me reflect on how I’ve been living my life and approaching my career.
The onboarding process was challenging, particularly as I was the sole employee trying to navigate a considerable number of open tasks, changing instructions, constant communication and an expectation to switch quickly between completely different kinds of work. I also found the level of monitoring and oversight difficult to work under, and some of the concerns I had experienced during my trial shifts became more apparent within the first few weeks. After about a month, I was already questioning whether the role could work for me. Six weeks in, I knew I needed to hand in my notice.
There were certainly aspects of the working environment that I found particularly difficult, but as I got closer to leaving, I realised there was another question underneath all of that. Even if the role had been structured differently, did I actually want to spend my days working in this way, particularly at this stage of my life?
For most committed artists, I think the question of employment elsewhere can be a tricky balance to get right. I’ve been doing some version of it for years. I’ve worked in restaurants and cafés, where one of the advantages was being able to leave work at the door and not care very much about it once I stepped outside. I’ve worked remotely for creative companies where I had lovely, like-minded teams around me and enough financial stability to structure my studio practice alongside the job. I’ve taught regular art classes, which I enjoy, although teaching also takes physical and social energy away from painting. I’ve worked in high-end commercial galleries where I was giving more than forty hours a week to somebody else’s business yet, strangely enough, once I had settled into the role, I was still able to make artwork consistently, in part because the day job was also stimulating and kept me connected to the wider art world.
Although this recent employment experience brought so much more to the surface. I don’t think the lesson from the last two months has simply been that I am incapable of being employed, or that artists shouldn’t have other jobs to preserve commitment to their work. I know from my own experience that some combinations can work and create an excellent balance of stability and freedom.
What this experience has made me question much more seriously is the kind of person I actually am, the conditions under which I can do good work, and how much of myself I am prepared to continually suppress or rearrange in order to function within somebody else’s preferred system.
When I was younger, I think I was much more inclined to judge myself when something wasn’t working and immediately begin making adjustments. Could I learn faster? Could I process information differently? Could I organise myself better? Could I become more efficient, more responsive, more detail-orientated, better at holding lots of different things in my head at once? Similar patterns of self-doubt within the work-place was not lost on me this time either.
However, this time, something felt different. I started to feel almost rebellious about continually pushing my natural way of being down. Instead of automatically asking how I could change myself to fit the environment, I started to ask myself whether some environments were simply a very poor fit for the way I naturally work.
Having thirty different open tasks competing for my attention, being constantly available, switching rapidly between things, responding to messages throughout the day and having somebody monitor how I carried out relatively ordinary tasks was exhausting for me. It’s really made me realise that I don’t want to build my working life around being continually switched on, available and responsive to other people as fast as humanly possible. It doesn’t feel natural to the way my mind works.
That doesn’t mean I don’t want to work hard. I do, and I can. I can work for an extraordinary amount of time when I care deeply about something, but I like depth, being able to stay with something for long enough to understand it and process it in my own way.
At one point, I started to worry that there was something fundamentally wrong with my executive functioning. I even began questioning whether I might be neurodivergent (I am not diagnosed, and if I were, that would be absolutely fine). But no other job has ever made me question myself quite like this one did.
Maybe that says something more about the role itself or just the stage of life I find myself in, but now that I am on the other side of it, I don’t think it really matters. What matters is that, however challenging the experience became, it has made me realise how much I want to embrace my truer nature when it comes to work.
I often need hours to look at materials and information, process it, re-read, think, go for a walk and come back to it. Then I might work solidly and intensely for another five hours because something has clicked. Sometimes I work best very early in the day and sometimes past 11pm. I like long stretches of solitude and then particular, considered moments of collaboration. I am deeply introverted and I don’t want a working life that requires me to spend most of my week in busy rooms, attending events, talking constantly or sitting in front of screens responding to other people all day. I find myself wanting to know what happens if I stop apologising for the way I work and instead begin deliberately building my business around it.
This has also forced me to reconsider something else. As an artist, I have never particularly thought of myself as a businesswoman or an entrepreneur. For some reason, the word entrepreneur always conjured up something closer to a tech bro in Silicon Valley than anything I recognised in myself, but of course, selling artwork, teaching, creating resources, building courses and running studios is all business.
I can’t tell you why, as a creative person, it’s taken me so long to fully embrace that and still am. Importantly, if I am going to build something of my own, I don’t want to accidentally recreate the culture I am trying to escape. I don’t want Slow Burn to become another relentless job in which I am permanently available, juggling endless tasks and measuring success by how much I can cram into a day. I’d rather it grows in a way that leaves room for concentrated work, painting, solitude, good boundaries and carefully chosen collaborations.
And if in future the venture employs other people, the last couple of months have certainly taught me a great deal about the kind of working environment I would want to create for them too.
Since leaving, I’ve been reflecting on what the whole experience was for and what I really took from it. It seems to come down to a very small number of things, but poignant ones nevertheless. What I do not want, and what not to do, if nothing else.
A few days ago, I went to the library to meet with a business adviser. While I was waiting for our conversation, I wandered around the shelves and almost immediately noticed a book with the word Slow in the title. It caught my attention because this question of slowness has been following me everywhere lately. I can’t be sure if it is just burnout talking, or merely the result of a particularly difficult couple of months in a role I hated. Or if there is something about being alive in 2026 that is making many of us feel as though we are permanently trying to keep up?
I often feel physically incapable of keeping pace with everything I feel obligated to do: at home, at work, online, creatively. There is the obligation to produce, respond, be present, communicate in the right way, work in the right way, know the answer, move on to the next thing, always be growing. Somewhere over the last couple of months, something in me seems to have drawn a line and said: no more.
When I first began writing here, I was thinking primarily about art, time and the slower work of making things. I wanted Slow Burn to be a place where I could explore the questions that don't always have immediate answers, and reflect on the long, often uncertain process of developing a creative practice.
I wrote at the time:
“Here, time is not an enemy, but a material.”
At the time, I was thinking primarily about art and creative practice. I was thinking about allowing ideas, practices and artworks to unfold at their own pace, around life’s obligations, and removing the need for speed. I was thinking about how an idea can hide in the background for months before you understand why you were interested in it in the first place.
But after the last couple of months, I think I understand that philosophy differently.
Slow Burn has always felt a little like a kind of permission slip for me. A place where I can allow myself to work at my own pace and take seriously the kind of sustained, sometimes uncertain attention that creative work requires.
What I am beginning to realise is that the whole concept carries much more weight than I realised. It’s not just a name that I thought sounded edgy and kind of fitting, but something that I literally need to embody. My hope is that anything I create, whether through slowly made paintings, creative resources or classes, genuinely offers that same permission to others as well.
The world is moving somewhere that none of us can entirely predict. In a few years, aspects of how we work, create and communicate may be almost unrecognisable from what they were a generation ago. Technology is advancing extraordinarily quickly, and things that previously required hours, days or weeks of human labour can increasingly be produced almost instantaneously.
I don’t wish to make a simplistic argument that technology is bad and everything analogue is better. I use technology every day. But I am very curious about what we, as people, will hold onto as the world accelerates around us. Our attention, our relationship with the analogue and the tactile, the things we still choose to make with our hands, and anything that requires slow, laboured time.
And that brings me back to where I am now, thinking carefully about the way I want to live and work as well as what I’m trying to build over the coming years.
As I write this, I have come out of this last chapter of employment, and maybe it’s for the last time? I have some reservations, but would like to believe it to be so. I want to step into this period of my life with greater faith that I can do this for myself, and not succumb to panic about the stability offered by someone or something else, even if only on a part-time basis.
And for the first time in a couple of months, on the first morning after leaving the job, I woke up before my alarm clock rang and remembered that I had left. I smiled, knowing I was excited for the day because all of the work I had planned surrounded my own vision, and not someone else’s.
With some reservation (although I’m really working on eradicating that), I am fully here again. Back in the studio, in the beginnings of growing Slow Burn Studio, and with enough room in my head again to pay attention to what my soul is asking for.
My own pace.
