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The Terrible Photographer is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative humans trying to stay honest in a world that rewards pretending
There's this moment from an interview with musician Phoebe Bridgers that has always stayed with me. In 2023, she was everywhere. Festivals, collaborations, touring with Boy Genius, her indie supergroup with Julian Baker and Lucy Dacus. She was being hailed as a defining voice of her generation, and her schedule was relentless. Back to back appearances and press junkets, headlighting shows, fleeting rest, if any.
Patrick Fore:And from the outside, it looked like she was living the dream. She was on top of the world. She was making money. She was a rock star. However, these are the words from Bridger's about the contrast of how she was feeling on the inside.
Patrick Fore:Quote, I felt like I was always on the verge of a panic attack, she said. I didn't know how to say no. I didn't know how to stop. Bridgers wasn't just tired. She was burned out, emotionally evacuated.
Patrick Fore:By early two thousand twenty four, she had to step back again, quietly, intentionally, not with some grand big announcement, just space. She needed a pause, not because she didn't love the work or love performing, because work had started to erase her again. She talked about how she couldn't write. She couldn't be in the studio. She couldn't feel that spark that used to guide her.
Patrick Fore:So she stopped. Not forever. Just long enough to remember what silence felt like. Long enough to hear herself again. And when she came back, she didn't just chase a hit.
Patrick Fore:She wrote slowly, privately. She reclaimed her voice by listening for it. And that always stuck with me, because for a lot of photographers, the burnout doesn't look like a breakdown. It looks like checking boxes, delivering calories, feeling numb. The spark doesn't disappear in a blaze.
Patrick Fore:It just fades quietly. This episode is about that fade and how you can find your way back. This is a terrible photographer podcast. I'm Patrick Four, and today's episode, dim, not done, is part two of a larger conversation. If last week's episode was about staying, staying in the creative fight, staying alive in the mess, this one is about reclaiming something that burnout tries to take away, your power.
Patrick Fore:Because burnout doesn't just drain your energy. It strips away your autonomy. It convinces you that this work isn't yours anymore. So today, we're talking about what it means to take it back. In September of twenty twenty two, I reached a new level of burnout I didn't even know existed.
Patrick Fore:I find myself behind a corporate building in East County, San Diego, crouched behind a garbage dumpster, throwing up carne asada from a taco shop down the street and trying to breathe through what I later found out was a panic attack. I never had one before, never knew what it felt like, but there I was doubled over in the wood chips between two bushes, heart pounding, body shaking, dry heaving like I was hungover from a bad party that I never signed up for. I was a lead photographer for Taylor Guitars. It sounded dreamy on paper. And for me, it was.
Patrick Fore:It was my dream job. Beautiful instruments, good budgets, photographing amazing artists. But behind the curtain, was underwater, overworked, underpaid, and carrying the expectations of hundreds of moving pieces with zero control over any of it. I found that everyone could give me directives. Everyone had feedback.
Patrick Fore:No one could give me any margin. I didn't know how to say no. I didn't know how to push back. I couldn't afford to. San Diego rent, family to support, a job I convinced myself that I was lucky to have, and I was.
Patrick Fore:So I said yes to everything. And I watched my sense of self shrink year to year, month to month, and day by day. And that day, the final straw wasn't some massive crisis. It was small, a photo my art director didn't like. I was trying to knock it out late on a Thursday, scrambling to hit a deadline before he went on vacation.
Patrick Fore:The thought of a vacation was so foreign to me. I hadn't taken a real break since the COVID lockdowns. I was actually terrified to take time off, afraid to miss meetings, afraid that if I stepped away, someone would make a decision that would make my life harder. So I took Zoom calls on the road, answered emails and Slack messages at all hours of the night and weekends. I took phone calls from waiting rooms during my daughter's doctor's appointments.
Patrick Fore:And at one point on a day I took to go meet a friend in LA, someone dropped the ball and there was a sales deadline where they needed a photo. So I dropped what I was doing. I had to find an Apple store and use one of their display computers to log in to the system, to email a file to them. I let myself be stretched to the point where even rest felt like a liability. I was a yes man because I thought that was the only way to survive.
Patrick Fore:And slowly, then all at once, I stopped recognizing who I was. I was short-tempered, wound really tight, bringing stress home and punishing the people that I loved most for a job I could no longer control and was no longer fun or fulfilling. So when I find myself behind that dumpster, shaking, sick, alone, something broke. That night, just before everyone left, I walked into my boss's office and quit. I didn't have a plan.
Patrick Fore:I didn't know what was next. I just knew that I couldn't keep doing it. And as I walked out of that building, something strange happened. A weight that had been on my chest for over a year started to lift. All that fear of failure, financial ruin of losing the job, it just suddenly seemed smaller, manageable.
Patrick Fore:The feeling of the weight lifted was almost tangible. And I'll never forget that feeling. For the first time in over a year, I felt like I could breathe again. I came home that night and collapsed in exhaustion. In reality, I'd been living in fear of a monster that turned out to be only three feet tall.
Patrick Fore:And I spent the next three months healing, sleeping, playing with my border collie Loki in the backyard. I took naps on Tuesday afternoons on the couch with the patio doors open. I read a fucking book. I took a course in copywriting just because I wanted to. I was trying to feel human again, relishing in the fact that I can control my time again, learning that I could take my power back.
Patrick Fore:My wife, who's a goddamn saint, never questioned it. She never rushed me. She just let me unravel and reassemble. I owe her more than words can hold. And it was in that space I remembered something important.
Patrick Fore:I was still creative. I was still capable. I was still me. That spark hadn't gone out. It was dim, but not done.
Patrick Fore:And that's what this episode is about. Burnout isn't weakness. It's your body saying this isn't sustainable. And sometimes the bravest thing that you can do is to listen, especially if you want to find your way back to the work that matters. This begs the question, what actually is burnout?
Patrick Fore:Before we go any further, here's a quick breakdown of burnout from somebody who actually lives in the science every single day. Doctor. Michelle Hagel is a naturopathic doctor based in Calgary, Canada. She specializes in integrative medicine with a focus on hormonal health, chronic stress, and emotional burnout. Her work blends functional science with practical strategies, and I think the way that she explains burnout cuts through the noise better than most.
Dr. Michelle Hagel:So, burnout is when the body has been exposed to a lot of stress and is no longer able to cope. There's a physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. A
Patrick Fore:lot
Dr. Michelle Hagel:of people complain of a reduced sense of accomplishment and a loss of personal identity. That is one of the best ways to define burnout. From a more scientific approach, what happens is when we experience prolonged stress, specifically our adrenal glands in our body release stress hormones, cortisol, norepinephrine, adrenaline in response to stressful situations. When these stress hormones are released, this engages kind of a fight or flight sense. Now, when those happen, we're meant to fight or flight out of that situation.
Dr. Michelle Hagel:But what's happening is people are often experiencing this for a prolonged period of time, leading us to burnout because the body is not meant to experience it for a length of time. It's supposed to fight or flight out of that situation and then go back to a relaxed state.
Patrick Fore:What Doctor. Hagel said about the body being in a constant fight or flight, that hit me. Because that's exactly where I was, just living in the red, not for a week, not for a month, for years. And when your nervous system never gets a chance to stand down, eventually it stops asking for permission. It just starts shutting down.
Patrick Fore:That's what happened to me behind the dumpster. My body wasn't overreacting. It was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. It was waving the white flag. The problem was I'd ignored every earlier signal it tried to send.
Patrick Fore:Segment one, What Burnout Really Looks Like Here's the thing about burnout. It usually doesn't start with a five alarm fire. It starts slow, quiet, long before you're behind a building throwing up tacos, long before you make any dramatic decisions. My burnout started months earlier, maybe even years. In emails, at dinner, saying yes to things that I shouldn't, the tiny moments that I told myself just pushed through.
Patrick Fore:Burnout turns out doesn't show up with a warning label. It shows up as normal. It shows up as reasonable, just how things are. So if you're not throwing up behind a dumpster, good. But that's not the metric.
Patrick Fore:The real question is, are you starting to feel disconnected from your work? Do you find yourself not caring like you used to? That's where it begins. And here's what nobody tells you. You can still be producing great work while being completely burned out.
Patrick Fore:You can hit deadlines, you can please clients, and still feel numb or worse. According to the World Health Organization, burnout isn't about productivity. It's an emotional exhaustion and detachment, a diminished sense of accomplishment. You still might be producing, but you stop caring. Segment two, control rats and levers we can't reach.
Patrick Fore:There's a classic study from the 1970s. Scientists gave two groups of rats, the exact same amount of electric shocks, same strength, same frequency, but there was a difference. One group had a lever. When they pressed it, the shock stopped. The other group, nothing they did changed anything.
Patrick Fore:Guess which group of rats experienced more stress? More ulcers, more high blood pressure, and shorter lives. It wasn't the ones getting more shocks. It was the ones with no control. And that helplessness, the inability to change your environment, it's more damaging than the pain.
Patrick Fore:Now, I'm not saying that client feedback is a literal electric shock, although we've all had those emails. But when your entire creative life is dictated by someone else's vision, their timeline and their budget and their brand guide, when there's no space for your ideas, that same helplessness starts to creep in. You're doing the shoots, but you feel like they're not yours. You're solving problems, but you're not deciding what actually matters. And that's fertile ground for burnout to grow and to spread.
Patrick Fore:Hey, guys. Pardon this interruption, but real quick. If you're into this podcast, you're gonna wanna check out this book that I wrote, which started this whole thing, lessons from a terrible photographer. It's not about gear or how to post families or the best SEO strategies of 2025. It's about finding your voice, surviving burnout, and making work that actually matters even when you're tired, broke, or creatively stuck.
Patrick Fore:Head over to terriblephotographer.com to sign up for the newsletter. We'll be sending out chapter one soon, and I'd love for you to be on that list. Okay. Back to the episode. Segment three, shooting through the burnout.
Patrick Fore:So, that leaves us the question, what do we do? We don't wait for energy to come back. We don't wait for permission. In fact, we actually create space. Our goal is to take the power back.
Patrick Fore:So what that means is you do a test shoot, you make a weird portrait, you light with a banana and a flashlight, pretend it's a $10,000 product job. You shoot a fake ad for your favorite bottle of hot sauce. Tapatio happens to be the best hot sauce. It doesn't have to be good. It just has to be yours.
Patrick Fore:One of Timberland and Justin Timberlake's biggest hits when they work together was What Goes Around Comes Around. It actually came from just a jam session with no plan, just a beat that Timberland was messing around with and lyrics that Timberlake made up on the spot. There wasn't any pressure, just two people messing around in a studio with a beat. And that's how you get your spark back. You play.
Patrick Fore:Play is important for creativity. Creativity isn't fueled by pressure. It's fueled by curiosity and science backs this up. Chronic stress shrinks the prefrontal cortex, That part of your brain responsible for problem solving and creative thinking. Your fear center grows, your decision making gets clouded, your ability to innovate shrinks.
Patrick Fore:Burnout isn't emotional, it's neurological. So if you're feeling numb, I just want to tell you that it's not a flaw. It's your brain giving a distress signal. And the antidote is not to double down. It's to do something for you.
Patrick Fore:Some of you are waking up with a knot in your chest, feeling like you have to perform while something inside of you is cracking. I want you to ask yourself one question. Where am I still pretending that I'm okay? And then I want you to do something, anything, to shift that answer. It doesn't have to be dramatic, like quitting your job.
Patrick Fore:You know it might involve that. But you do have to take back a piece of yourself, and that starts with a small move. If you're feeling like you're in a fog, like you're stuck on autopilot, I want you to text one friend and ask if they have time to catch up. Not to vent, but just be human and to connect. If you haven't made anything personal in months or longer, I'm going to block off one hour.
Patrick Fore:No client, no audience, just you and your camera and something that sparks curiosity and creativity and imagination. And if you're feeling like you're drowning, I want you to write it down. One page. What's making it feel that way? I want you to get it out of your head and onto something that you can hold and read.
Patrick Fore:And if you were like me and if you're just completely burnt out, I want you to talk to someone, a therapist, a mentor, your partner. Don't wait until you're behind that dumpster throwing up carne asada to start the conversation. You're not broken. You're not failing. You're just a person trying to be creative in a system that often rewards burnout over balance.
Patrick Fore:You're not broken. You're not failing. You're not falling short. You're just a person trying to be creative in a system that often rewards burnout and hustle over balance. And taking one step, even one step, a tiny act of self protection or self expression is how you start to remember that this is your fucking life, and you get to choose how much of it you give away.
Patrick Fore:You might feel dim right now, but you're not done. See you in a few days. Until then, stay human, stay honest, stay healthy, and yeah, stay terrible.