I sat down to write an essay about making an ebook, because it’s been a fun creative adventure.
(It’s also not finished — I wanted to write from inside the process.)
But as I drafted the essay, it occurred to me that what was supposed to be a simple, practical resource from my old career was actually a creative act of reconciliation between the person I was in accounting and the person I’d always been.
This essay is about both — the book my inner accountant is proud of, and the story my inner creative wants to tell.
Bullet journaling my way through busy season
Every January since I started bullet journaling (in 2018 if you’re curious), I created a “busy season survival guide” spread to help me get through the Canadian tax season grind as a public accountant. The spreads had motivational, grounding quotes, little self-care ideas, and some new routines or mindsets to try. Each year’s spread built upon the last by carrying forward what worked and leaving what didn’t.
My “busy seasons” ran from February through April each year (although I would argue through June), plus some bonus burnout from surprise deadlines and workload pileups throughout the rest of the year.
There are no “tax emergencies,” I used to say, but we often acted like it.
In the last few years of my career, I realized that although it seemed to be culturally normalized, treating work like an emergency, being nearly always-available, and saying yes to everything then scrambling to find a way — those were choices, not mandates.
As my busy season survival spreads evolved, they became less about new routines and self-care checklists and more about questioning existing patterns and hidden beliefs that were driving me to make the choices that were leading to cyclical — and sometimes chronic — burnout.
(I know, fellow accountants, public accounting technically isn’t “corporate” — but in the context of my writing, there’s enough similarity and “corporate vibes” are more widely relatable.)
The greatest shift started when I became a mother. Having two little girls two years apart during a pandemic while I had just been promoted and my spouse had just made partner at a public accounting firm fanned the flames of burnout immensely.
Yet suddenly, burnout wasn’t just about me anymore. I had to manage it for my daughters.
Motherhood, creativity, and the recovering burnout queen
I promised myself that I wouldn’t let work get to me so much while my body was doing the precious work of growing a tiny human from scratch.
Of course, easier said than done.
The real shift began after a particularly rough busy season while pregnant with my youngest. I found myself in tears one afternoon, a puddle on the kitchen floor while my 1-year-old was napping. I was flooded — not only because I was still overwhelmed by the job, but because I was so deeply disappointed in myself for allowing that much stress into my life while my body was trying to perform a miracle.
Motherhood should have been enough, I thought. Why could I not just let the work stress go!?
In hindsight, there are many reasons:
I couldn’t see past the status quo.
I couldn’t say no and truly mean it.
I couldn’t see the intrinsic beliefs that weren’t mine.
I couldn’t untangle my identity from my career.
It felt unsafe to sit still and rest, so even if I could pull back, I had nothing to fill the space with.
That is when I picked up a paintbrush in earnest. Creativity allowed me to rest — and to take my identity back.
Motherhood was a motivator to stop burning out so hard, but it was also a new identity that I was still learning to inhabit.
Creativity, on the other hand, felt safe.
No little lives depended on painting. Making art felt familiar, since I had done so much of it growing up. There was no pressure, no management.
Just me, reconnecting with who I’d always been.
Writing the path to a better busy season
Motherhood and reconnecting with my creativity helped me take back a little sovereignty, which led me to start digging deeper. To figure out how to truly keep my head above water throughout the year — but especially during busy seasons.
What I found:
Meal prepping helped.
Regular exercise helped.
Maintaining my creative practice helped.
Meticulous schedule coordination with my husband helped.
But they only helped because I also found ways to challenge the status quo, uphold my own boundaries, examine inherited beliefs, and finally disentangle who I am from what I do.
The transformation was so powerful for me that I wrote about it. A lot. (And that’s my blog in a nutshell.)
And then it finally happened: I made it through a busy season feeling relatively intact for the first time.
Even with two young kids at home. Even with my spouse now working as a partner in the same industry.
In fact, I did it twice. Imperfectly, but impactfully.
Naturally, I had to write about it, and that’s when this little mini-series was born: The Busy Season Survival Guide
I wrote it not knowing if it would actually help anyone else, because I didn’t feel like there were a lot of people like me in public accounting.
But surely there were others out there navigating cycles of intense work and trying not to lose themselves in the process. What if they could borrow from what I did?
As I built the blog, I started thinking about resources that might be useful for others (and honestly, I was also hoping to grow my email list). So I thought, why not make “The Busy Season Survival Guide” into a free ebook? It’ll be a conveniently packaged collection of all of my Busy Season Survival Guide posts, with some edits to make it more cohesive as a book.
Easy peasy — or so I thought.
My corporate swan song
After I left public accounting, my writing naturally gravitated more toward topics like the creative process, embracing the beginner phase, my own adventures in writing and hobbies, and of course, my own creative becoming.
This gave the ebook new significance. It felt like the last thread of the fabric I’d spent 13 years weaving, and it needed to be tied up before I could truly move on.
Before I forgot the visceral details and nuance of what it was like.
In my career, of course we needed to be technical and logical, but being who I am, I always leaned more naturally toward the aspects of public accounting life that were creative — and human-first.
I became a Chartered Business Valuator because it was perhaps the most creative specialty I could think of — it really is an art. One based in certain rules and logic and theory, requiring strong analytical ability, but also requiring you to hold space for nuance and outside-the-box thinking. (Also, you get to write reports!)
I was also drawn deeply to the people aspect of the firm, and so throughout my career I did a lot of work in recruitment, training, mentorship, and attempts to bring leadership and mental health initiatives into the workplace.
The trouble for me was that so much required approval, and I didn’t always get to choose the who, when, or how. It was logical, and it made sense, but it could also feel like a golden cage for my inner creative.
In that sense, The Busy Season Survival Guide was my opportunity to open the cage and to do it my way, from the heart and unencumbered by the system.
What if?
So when I finally sat down to look at the 30-page compilation of my existing blog posts, my creative side kept asking, what if?
What if we add a personal anecdote?
What if we make space for the reader by adding worksheets?
What if we added our own little illustrations?
Pretty soon my 30-page freebie evolved into a 90-page illustrated workbook-companion-guide to making it through busy season without losing yourself in the process.
And I kind of love it.
I’m going to be honest — I have no idea how to market it. I don’t know who wants it. And given my professional background, I’m painfully aware that this is bad business.
My inner creative doesn’t care. She’s just excited that she finally got her chance to exist alongside the corporate life she was nearly excluded from building.
She was there the whole time. And now she’s here, hoping to reach other creative souls trying to navigate busy seasons and burnout and boundaries and identity.
The book is a big hug to myself for sticking it out all of those years, and for choosing my own path in the end — even if it was sometimes hard to understand.
For not villainizing one or the other, but for reconciling the two parts of me — the one that is creative and expressive, and the one that is studious and serious.
The one that understands the business model, and the one that wants to bring the humanity back into it.
(I don’t think either of them could have made this book on their own.)
And then there’s the inner critic
Despite all of my excitement about making it, I have a lingering doubt that sounds a little like:
Wait… Didn’t you leave because you couldn’t handle the stress?
Because you weren’t built for it?
So then, who are you to make this?
-Inner Critic
One thing I’ve really had to embrace in this process is that just because I left doesn’t mean I couldn’t hack it. It means I made a choice, even after figuring out how to hack it.
But also, just because you could doesn’t mean you should.
The book never promises to “eliminate burnout”, but to minimize it and still feel like yourself on the other side. And I still have two young kids that I want to be a (relatively) calm presence for — and to be present with. So sure, I can make it through a busy season with a manageable level of burnout.
But it’s still burnout.
Some of my closest friends and family are or have been public accountants, and they seem naturally suited to this stuff. Their strengths, energy, and ways of operating were well-aligned with the work.
For me? The same career felt a little like trying to stuff a square peg through a round hole. It can be done by shaving down the corners, finessing the shapes at just the right angle, and applying a bit of force.
But I could also choose to let a square be a square. And that was my choice.
I’m not here to shave down your square corners
The other piece of doubt that niggles away is about the readers.
First of all, I have a suspicion that I’m the minority in public accounting and most people there simply don’t need it. The people who could use this are probably more like me, dealing with square-peg-round-hole issues.
So there’s a deeper unease that’s been bugging me since I started crafting the ebook in earnest:
Why are you trying to help people stay in a misaligned system?
-Inner Critic
I can think of a few scenarios (because I have been in all three).
There are those who would like to leave, but simply can’t yet — financial goals need to be met first, for example.
There are also those who enjoy most of their work, but they find busy seasons tough, and they just want to be on their own side a bit more.
Finally, there are those who are digging deep to do the work.
Sometimes we need to take the time and space to really sit in our discomfort. To choose stillness for a moment. Not to distract ourselves from it by staying busy, but to really sit with the misalignment to discover its edges.
We know it aches, but why?
What are we contributing to the ache?
What is outside our control?
Does the ache pull on our sense of self?
Who would we be without it?
This was essentially the process I went through while becoming a mother and reconnecting with my creativity: gently learning the contours of misalignment from inside my career. I would love to sit with readers while they work through the same questions.
This is also why I couldn’t limit myself to practical tips. I know — it’s ironic for a long guide written for people who are already busy and need quick tips. They are in there. But so is the introspection.
It was too easy in the past to minimize discomfort down to “well, it’s busy season” or “new tax legislation makes everything worse”. I had to discover what was really going on before I could make real change.
I also had to get comfortable with myself separate from my career and discover what I really wanted. I didn’t want to just run away from a problem — I wanted to step into a life that felt aligned, one that felt like it was mine.
A little of that made its way into the guide, too.
If you’ve been around my Substack, you can see that I still don’t have it all figured out. I don’t have a 5-year plan or a business model. But what I knew then was that I wanted the space to figure that out. To learn to express myself more fully. To create. To live slower and to feel more present. To follow my curiosity and to be open to possibility.
To make my darn ebook.
Originally published on Substack.
