Joanna Gaines, star of the hit tv series, Fixer Upper, opened up about her experience with “burnout” in a personal essay for her winter issue of Magnolia Journal, available on newsstands and online starting Nov. 11.
Gaines began by expressing her gratitude for the life she has created over the past twenty years.
Gaines explained that her career and personal success she has had come with a cost that she is still in the process of working through.
“I looked around at what I’d built with equal parts gratitude and exhaustion. I love my life, and I love my family — deeply,” she wrote. “But some of the ways I’d gotten here, some of the qualities I’d always relied on — like being really productive, superefficient, always running at high capacity — were beginning to turn on me,” she explained.
Gaines admitted to feeling burnt out and said that the lows have been in step with the success-driven highs.
“The past 20 years have been a heck of a ride, but I knew I couldn’t keep going the way I have. It’s hard to explain how I was feeling. I was grateful beyond measure but exhausted. Loved, but feeling unworthy. Full, but running on empty. And because my world kept me busy, I could still feel the wheels of my life humming. What became harder to tell is where they should be headed,” she explained.
Gaines’s memoir, The Stories We Tell: Every Piece of Your Story Matters, is set to release on Nov. 8. Gaines stated that through writing her memoir, she has been able to reflect on just how much of the past 44 years have become integrated together in her memory.
Gaines went on to say, “But the moments between some of those milestones — that’s where things got hazy. Anything else I’d start to remember felt so far away. I could only see it in shapes, blurred once by too much time and again by too much distance. It was like I couldn’t get close enough to separate them from one another, to know what I should write down.”
Gaines described how grateful she is that writing has allowed her to lean deeper into present feelings while simultaneously reminding her of the past.
“I know I can’t go back to those early days of motherhood, but I can look out for moments that remind me that I’m a mom — and I’ll let those take my breath away. I can look Chip in the eye next time he makes a joke, and let myself sink into how much I love his humor for a minute or two. I can pull my mom a little tighter every time we say goodbye,” she said.
Gaines continued saying, “I ended up discovering a lot in my story: clarity, healing, deeper truths I didn’t know I could get to. But mostly, these pages brought me back to myself, back to those tender little moments I thought I’d lost. In writing down my story, I had the chance to relive some of the very best chapters of my life.”
Gaines stated that she is now intentional about being present and recording the moments and feelings she’s experiencing so she is able to reflect affectionately and precisely in the future.
“I don’t know about you, but when I look back next time, I don’t want to see a kind of kaleidoscope life — out of focus and jumbled — were the moments I swore I’d never forget become difficult to discern amid the chaos of thoughts and memories unresolved. I want to live the next season of this beautiful life in focus,” she said.
