Do You Spend All Week Waiting for Friday Evening to Do Your Real Work? Beyond creative burnout.
- Ben Hickman
- Oct 7
- 7 min read
We're Done Pretending, A Reflective Rebels Podcast. Season 1 Episode 6
Do you spend all week waiting for Friday evening to finally do your real work?
Not the emails. Not the meetings. Not the operational stuff that keeps everything running.
I mean the work that actually matters to you. The creative part. The bit that made you start this whole thing in the first place.
If you're nodding along, Beatrix's story might be for you.
The Friday Evening Problem: When Your To-Do List Eats Your Life
Beatrix's favourite time of the week is Friday evening. Not because work stops. But because that's when she can finally shift out of email-and-phone mode into what she calls "mythological time."
"It's not time of the here and now," she explains. "It's the time of a completely different scope."
That's when she can lose herself in her studio - drawing, painting, editing, making. When her imagination can roam free instead of responding to everyone else's demands.
The problem?
The to-do list could now fill seven days a week.
Twenty years ago, she could contain admin to one Monday. But technology changed. Communication demands changed. The operational work started crowding out everything else.
So Friday evening became the moment she protects with what she calls "pure stubbornness." Because if she doesn't defend it aggressively, the demands will eat everything.
Sound familiar?
How Creative Burnout Starts: Wearing Uniforms to Fit
At eight years old, Beatrix watched Franco Zeffirelli's Brother Sun, Sister Moon and something shifted. She sat down afterwards and wrote the whole story down, losing herself completely in the act of writing it.
"I think stories and visual stories have always been at the centre of my life," she says. "But I didn't necessarily recognise that when I was younger."
Growing up on the border of Derbyshire and Cheshire, three things kept her sane: Manchester Youth Theatre, punk rock, and roaming the moors on ponies for days on end.
That instinctive, spontaneous creative energy. That bond with nature. The freedom to react from your gut.
But then comes the bit where you have to bridge into earning a living. And that's where the shape-shifting starts.
"You've got to conform to all sorts of other things whilst retaining your personality."
Beatrix went to film school, worked on international features in London, always trying to get her own things made.
But something wasn't quite working in British culture. People would ask what country she was from because of her Northern accent.
Then in her late twenties, she went on a European filmmaking course. Everything changed.
"As soon as I met these European colleagues, I showed them a short script I'd written and immediately somebody else wanted to make it."
In Europe, she was taken at face value. The quality of her work was what mattered.
But even then, she was still wearing uniforms. Still playing roles.
"I'd say I have been quite a shape-shifter. I have put on quite a number of different uniforms over my life in order to enable certain things or because I felt pressured to do it."
The Turning Point: "What's Happened to Your Soul?"
The question that changed everything came in Siberia.
Beatrix was producing a documentary in Russia. She was the only woman with a crew of five Finnish filmmakers. She slept every night with her head on a leather satchel full of cash. That's when her first grey hairs appeared.
They interviewed an Orthodox priest who had been going into one of the still-operating labour camps. After the interview, he looked her straight in the eyes.
"'But what's happened to your soul?'"
"And it went right through me because it was like, he's dealing with people... why is he saying that to me? And it really made me think and stopped me in my tracks."
Sometimes a stranger sees what you've been ignoring - that you've drifted so far from yourself you don't even notice anymore.
She saw a picture of a thatched cottage on the wall of a plywood factory where they bathed. Completely unexpected. She felt a bit homesick.
When she got back to London, her mother sent her an advert for a thatched cottage to rent in Cornwall.
"After what that priest had said, I just decided I'm moving to Cornwall, going to live in that cottage."
The day she started editing the documentary in Soho was the day she decided she was leaving.
How to Find Your True Voice: Stop Waiting for Permission
I asked Beatrix how she found the courage to make such a big change.
"I didn't see there was any choice. I just didn't see there was an option to continue where I was because it wasn't for me anymore."
This becomes a pattern in her life. Build something, realise it's not for her, pull the rug. Not because she's flighty. But because when the frustration reaches a certain point, staying isn't actually an option anymore.
If you're feeling trapped by your own success right now, this might resonate: Sometimes the bravest thing isn't a decision. It's recognising you can't keep going the way you've been going.
In that thatched cottage, Beatrix got a horse and a dog. She began a flood of writing - stories from her own mind rather than commissioned work. She moved from screenwriting to documentary, learning a completely different way to tell stories.
With her husband, she took on a Duchy farm in Cornwall for ten years. Part-time farmers alongside creative work. Breeding native breed animals, learning about soil and seasons.
"Really, really hard work. Physically gruelling. But I was also really just responding to that in drawing, writing, doing video all the time."
When the rent trebled, they looked for alternatives. That search led to the Outer Hebrides - a croft where they could build a house, start again with animals, but with a different economic basis.
Over about ten years there, she made multiple documentaries and short films. She evolved into a self-shooting director - working with smaller crews, filming on her doorstep.
Breaking Free from Gatekeepers: Four Years vs. Four Weeks
After moving to Dumfries, Beatrix was working on a feature-length documentary in the borders.
For four years, she tried to get institutional funding. Complete brick wall.
"There's a room in my house which is full of boxes of what I think of as my unborn children - the films or stories that have never got out into the world. And I couldn't bear that this most recent project was going in that room."
So she decided to finish it anyway. Found ways to get parts of the edit done. Then launched a crowdfunder.
In four weeks, she raised completion funding.
Four weeks to get support for something she'd "singularly failed to raise anything for from conventional sources for four years."
The film became the first she self-distributed. She's been screening it at cinemas and festivals, getting direct contact with audiences.
"When you go to the big organisations, they tell you what audiences want. But what if I'm doing rare-breed beef and they're looking for McDonald's hamburgers?"
She draws the parallel to her farming life deliberately. She used to direct-market rare breed animals - grown for longer, grass-fed, organic. A completely different product that needs a completely different route to market.
If you have work gathering dust because gatekeepers said no, this matters: Their "no" doesn't mean your work isn't good. It might just mean you're asking the wrong people.
Integrating Your Creative Identity: The Radio Dial Metaphor
I asked Beatrix how it feels right now to be working on her next project - one that integrates film, book, exhibition, all the artifacts she's collected.
"It feels like a radio, an old fashioned radio with an analog dial button. It feels like I have had my hand on that dial all my life trying to find where's the channel, where's the bit where you actually get the clear signal."
She's getting rid of the rubbish in her head. All the "you should be" and "what will so and so say." Getting out of her own way.
"And then just thinking, what do I want to do with this? And getting on with it."
That Friday night feeling - mythological time instead of to-do list time - is becoming almost every day now.
When I asked what she'd say to that eight-year-old who'd just watched Brother Sun, Sister Moon, her answer was clear:
"Stay true to yourself and don't try to people please. Carve your own path and find a way."
She paused, then added: "What I have found on that last film is that I really did follow my gut. This is a strong story. These are fantastic people. And the audience response has really affirmed that that gut instinct is a correct barometer to create work and live by."
"I am a filmmaker, I am a farmer, and I am a creative person. I write and I paint and I don't think there's an easy label on that. But that is me."
What This Means If You're Tired of Doing What Everyone Else Wants
If you're reading this and recognising yourself - if you're spending all week waiting for Friday evening, if you've been shape-shifting to fit what others need, if you have projects gathering dust - here's what matters:
The to-do list will eat everything if you let it. Protect your mythological time with stubbornness. The operational work will always expand to fill seven days. You have to decide what matters more.
When someone asks a question that goes right through you, pay attention. That Orthodox priest saw something Beatrix had been ignoring. Sometimes it takes an outsider to point out you've drifted from yourself.
The bravest thing might be admitting you can't keep going this way. Beatrix didn't have courage to leave - she just ran out of choice. When the frustration reaches a certain point, staying hurts more than leaving.
Gatekeepers saying no doesn't mean your work isn't good. Direct audience response can validate what institutions reject. You might just need a different route to market.
Finding your true work isn't about choosing one thing. It's about integrating all the parts of yourself you've been told to keep separate.
Beatrix has spent a lifetime tuning that radio dial. She's getting close now, not by becoming one thing, but by finally bringing everything together.
Maybe it's time to stop listening to everyone else's static and start tuning into your own frequency.
Listen to Beatrix's full story in Episode 6 of We're Done Pretending: "I Keep Doing What Everyone Else Wants: Finding Your True Creative Voice"
Ready to find your own clear signal? If this resonates and you're ready to move from doing what everyone else wants to trusting your own gut, coaching might help. Email ben@reflectiverebels.co.uk
Join the newsletter for more honest conversations about creative burnout, finding your voice, and building a life that feels like yours: reflectiverebels.co.uk/newsletter
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