For a while, I had a schedule.

Not a loose one. A real one.

Twice a week. Sometimes three times, if I was being “on brand.” Because that’s what you do when you’re trying to be a cozy whimsical woo woo life coach tarot content creator — you treat it like a job, because it is one, even when nobody’s paying you yet.

That was The Whimsical Arcane.

A professional account, in my head at least. Educational content. Fun content. Trending content. Whatever the algorithm wanted that week or month, I tried to hand it over. Because that’s how you grow, right? That’s how you get more followers. That’s how you become the thing you were trying to become in order to get bookings or sell your own merch and products or promote deck or book reviews.

And for a while, it worked. Or it looked like it worked.

Then in 2023, I burned out.

Not dramatically. Not one bad day that broke me. Just a slow accumulation of always having something due. A caption to write. A trend to catch before it died. A “content calendar” that started to feel less like creativity and more like a second job I hadn’t agreed to the terms of.

I got disillusioned.

And I went on a hiatus.

What Burnout Actually Looks Like

Nobody tells you burnout doesn’t feel like exhaustion. Not at first.

It feels like resentment.

Resentment toward something you used to love. Toward the pretty flat-lays. Toward the captions I used to actually enjoy writing. I’d sit down to post and just feel… nothing. Or worse, dread.

That’s when I knew something had to change, because I did not start an account about whimsical, cozy things to feel dread every time I opened the app.

And that’s the thing about social media, isn’t it. It has manipulated us into posting more, performing more, at the expense of our rest and our sanity. It feeds our need to be recognized, dresses it up as “growth” or “consistency,” and calls it a strategy — when really it’s just asking us to hand over our peace, one caption at a time.

So I stopped.

No announcement. No “taking a break, be back soon!” graphic. I just quietly stepped away from the schedule, the metrics, the professional-account version of myself.

Then I Made a Second Account

Here’s the part that probably sounds backwards: my solution to burning out on Instagram was to make another Instagram account.

eiselcore.

But this one had different rules. Actually, it had almost no rules, which was the whole point.

No posting schedule. No “educational, fun, trending content.” No performance disguised as passion.

Just small wins.

Slow living. Soft living. No-rush content, purely because I wanted to document it, not because a growth strategy told me to.

I made eiselcore to discipline myself into slowing down. Which is a strange sentence — using discipline to force yourself to relax — but that’s genuinely what it took. I had spent so long optimizing every post that I needed a whole separate space just to prove to myself that not everything has to be optimized. That a small, quiet win still counts as a win even if it doesn’t get engagement.

I’m Not Behind

It’s crazy, actually — my phone gallery is full of photos. B-roll. Videos I was “supposed” to turn into a reel, a post, something. And I just… never did.

I keep forgetting to upload. Keep forgetting to post.

Because I am just… living.

And for the first time in my life, actually enjoying it. Not performing it. Not staging it for later. Just living it, in real time, with no one waiting on the other end for the edited version.

I’m not being rushed.

I’m not expected to perform.

Here’s what I’ve been sitting with lately.

I used to think if I wasn’t posting on schedule — or anything, for that matter — I was falling behind. Behind the algorithm. Behind other creators. Behind the version of myself who used to post three times a week like it was nothing.

But I don’t think that’s true anymore.

I wasn’t behind. I was living.

Slowly, and on purpose, without a content calendar attached to it. Making small wins that didn’t need an audience to count. Learning that “professional” and “meaningful” aren’t actually the same word, even though I spent a long time treating them like they were.

The Whimsical Arcane taught me how to build something consistently.

eiselcore is teaching me how to just… be, consistently. Which, it turns out, is the harder skill.

I’m not behind.

I just got busy living.