Forty-two hundred miles of driving for three weeks took my family and me from Kansas to the Adirondack mountains. It was a crazy amount of driving for any summer vacation, but all that beauty and time away did two things: they enlarged my creative focus while also narrowing it.

Here are 10 things that kept me from caving to creative burnout in 2021. Instead, I found sanity, and quite miraculously, ways to thrive, even in the midst of a pandemic and starting grad school.