Meet Emily Woo Zeller

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Emily Woo Zeller. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Emily Woo, thrilled to have you on the platform as I think our readers can really benefit from your insights and experiences. In particular, we’d love to hear about how you think about burnout, avoiding or overcoming burnout, etc.

While the details may be different, I know that I am not alone in dealing with burnout. I hope that my story can help inform anyone following in my footsteps. I do like to think it’s possible to exist in a capitalist world and as a performing artist without burning out. But we really must take care, especially if you’re like me and didn’t have a lot of resources starting out, whether financially, socially, or in the baggage you carry. What I have to say probably isn’t really revelatory at this point, but it is another story to corroborate how important taking care is in this culture of ours.

I want to start by talking about time. I’ve been in a burnout phase for ten years. Does it still count as burnout then or does it become Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? I don’t know. Burnout is not a medical term, as far as I know, and I haven’t had a doctor diagnose me with CFS. It took me a long time to even understand that I was burned out. It took me about four years to see that, and then it took me about five years to try and turn the ship around before I actually hit a bottom point and really, truly incorporated changes that were needed. And I’m still recovering.

So how did I get here? I am a high-achieving, highly motivated individual. I worked extra hard beginning in middle school and then high school and college and then out in the world. I didn’t even know I WAS working hard. It was simply a way of being. There were no such things as weekends. Ever. Sleep was for the dead. When I wasn’t directly working or connecting with people, I wanted all the experiences now and to squeeze every drop out of life. I was immersed the worlds of music, dance, and theater and I soaked up everything I could. I left my hometown without ever looking back and I moved apartments almost every year. Carpe diem *and* carpe nox! Can’t stop won’t stop. Work hard, play hard. I could push to the limit with the best of them. You get the picture.

We live in a culture where time equals money and everything is about optimizing and being as effective as possible for the sake of being the most productive. I wholeheartedly subscribed to this way of living, and even the idea of pursuits outside of work were framed relative to how they would enable better productivity. There are also stark economic realities for most of us that mean that we really must work all the time, as efficiently as possible, to make ends meet and live the American dream of supporting activities that bring happiness and fulfillment.

As a young person, I made the choice to pursue performing arts as a profession. I thought the enormous amount of effort I put toward everything, all the time, was normal. Correct, even, and I was really good at being correct. Add in the layer that in the world of the performing arts, that amount of labor is reinforced as being necessary to continue to participate. I did not have the financial or cultural advantages that I saw in some of my more successful peers, which made their efforts more impactful, but I did have the incredible work ethic borne from the daughter of an immigrant mother and father from a small farming family who started with very little. And I did have my parents’ blessing to attempt to “make it” as a professional performing artist, but they were far from me and our relationship was distant. The competition is so incredibly fierce for so few resources in the performing arts, that, unless you can afford not to have to have a “day job” or social support to help you with the nitty gritty, overworking and barely getting by is the norm and you’re grateful just for the opportunity to be able to express your passion. I spent my first real entire day off and indoors when I was 28 years old. And didn’t do it again for a good long while again afterward. Every moment was an opportunity to create and network and build. I lived and breathed “making it work”. Thankfully, I was able to reap many benefits from all that hard work and from a bit of luck. But I didn’t understand its true cost.

For better or worse, I am deeply sensitive and reflective by nature – as is the case for many artists and creatives. And I cared a lot about being healthy, but I was still missing some pieces and I couldn’t see it. While I was still blind to plenty of elements of my life, I have always had a journal, for instance, and the performing arts (music, dance, theater, etc) were practices I DID have. I was also a yoga, movement, and fitness teacher, loved to exercise all the time and do big, challenging things and face fears, and I had studied nutritional sciences in college. I had the tools for contemplation and expression and nourishment and joy of all kinds. I knew what care looked like for other people. It just started to get twisted when those practices for self-reflection and empowerment were always in the name of progress and productivity.

In my 20s, I’d get sick with a cold of some kind probably about once a month and when I turned 30, I realized that I’d probably not be sick as frequently if I started to sleep more than 4-6 hours a night. Maybe sleep was valuable? Meh. We’ll try it, kind of. I’d also just started to make just enough money at that point to make ends meet by every other paycheck instead of month-to-month. I continued to work and go hard right through the exhaustion, though. I was sleeping-ish now, what more could I need?

But I was also getting migraines every two weeks. And I was still exhausted. My doctor said that’s just life, so I just needed to deal with it. There wasn’t anything medically wrong with me in allopathic terms. Acupunture helped a little, but I couldn’t afford to do it regularly. So, I started to try some other things. First, it meant making even more time for sleep (at the expense of other activities), then putting myself in environments that felt nourishing to me (at the expense of opportunities for work advancement in other places), then finding and working with a therapist who was right for me (yep, at the expense of my bank account), then practicing kindness to myself, adjusting boundaries, adjusting relationships with everyone…

Then I had to slowly decouple all my beloved activities I had once had true passion for from the hustle. I had to find and rediscover other activities that replenished me, off the clock and just for me, and maybe to share with only a very small handful of people. This was key, and also a long, nonlinear process.

I have had to redefine success, many times. I had to learn where and how my body was storing trauma, and how to move through it. COVID hit just as I was deeply feeling the need to cocoon, and I was able to take advantage of the isolation. But work never stopped for a second because I had already been working remotely for years.

So here I was, able to keep the absolute implosion at bay, but I was still exhausted and still working hard, only now I was also working even harder at being healthier and taking care of me. And then finally! The world had opened up again and I decided I needed some real time off and I’d saved up enough money to do it. When I turned 40, I took an unpaid two months off working, to travel (I’ve been a freelancer for fifteen years, and, if you count all the weekends in a single year, that’s about 104 days, or the equivalent of three months!) Ironically, or perhaps predictably, it was then that I bottomed out.

A combination of underlying factors was exacerbated by my decades of overdoing it and powering through burnout, not least of which were perimenopause and covid, and I suddenly experienced a constellation of health issues all at once. I think they used to call this experience a nervous breakdown, though that isn’t a technical medical condition. And it was certainly my nervous system, but it went far beyond that. My body had been telling me for years that something was wrong and I needed to change, and I’d been working at it, but it wasn’t until I started having regular shortness of breath, more severe allergy sensitivities, more severe asthma, heart palpitations, panic attacks and generalized anxiety, sudden weight gain, and exercise intolerance (I couldn’t use my most trusted “healthy” stress relief, what?!) amongst other things that I actually had to stop. Truly stop. Was I dying? No allopathic science detected anything catastrophically wrong, though I was able to get some medication for hormonal imbalances and allergies and asthma. If it was long covid, there wasn’t anything they could really do. I started more supplements, acupuncture, herbs…

But it was in this stopping point that I got to the most important – DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Learning what it means to rest. For rest’s sake. For a good amount of time, regularly. Unproductive. Unstructured. Not actively reflecting or meditating or anything. Time OFF and neither asleep nor stimulated, with no obligations to anyone else or to myself except to ride my own waves. Then I was able to pay attention to what actually stressed me – physically, emotionally, mentally – only very deliberately engage in the elements that were stressful in more manageable amounts. Let me be clear: it has cost me. It has cost me work. It has cost me money (the doctor’s bills and medications!) It has cost me time with people and seeing things and going places. But I’m grateful I still have my very human body, even if it looks different than I thought it would.

Everyone’s path is different, and I recognize the elements that helped me find my way may not be available to others who are facing similar challenges. And it is likely that others have some resources that I didn’t have. But we all have something, however small. Practicing acknowledgment of what we do have, and practicing it as much as possible, is the path to finding other elements and people that are available for us to connect to. I’ve also found that continually re-evaluating what I need to feel cared for and what I need to practice at any given time has given me peace at different stages along the way, so that I could enjoy what was available when I had it, even if it wasn’t quite the ultimate goal.

Looking back, I might actually have had some time for rest, but I was so disconnected from real empathy for myself and the demons I was running from, let alone the fact that I was running, that I couldn’t see that there were opportunities for rest. I didn’t even know how to rest; I’d never had any practice.

The body keeps the score. Perimenopause and getting older is painful and humbling. COVID sucks. Hustling all the time doesn’t work for our animal bodies, and “making it” for me did not buy me the ability to ever truly stop working entirely for any significant length of time. I’ve never been flush with cash, but I have had a relatively successful, consistent career and I have really loved most of my work. I have interesting experiences that I am so grateful for, and – this is really important – I’ve met some amazing, fantastic, inspiring people along the way without whom I couldn’t have done any of it, and I’m lucky to have both made some good choices and been in a position to eventually slow down a little without losing my housing or access to nutritional food and healthy environments.

It has taken so much time. More time than I was comfortable with, and at the cost of things that were painful to lose. I still love to do creative work, but I can’t work double time anymore, ever, and I don’t want to. How I approach work has had to fundamentally change. How I approach being in the world and connecting with people has had to fundamentally change.

I have gained so much wealth in health as a result and I am so grateful. The demands of our culture are great, but we can always take care and be kind. I am not the first to go through this ringer, but the world would be a better place if I were one of the last.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I am a performing artist. I am a trained dancer, singer, voiceover artist, actor, yoga and movement teacher, and I love teaching fitness to older adults. I love physical theater – seeing it and creating it. The majority of my work in the past twenty years has been in audiobook narration, with over 650 titles, and video games (including Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077, Borderlands, The Last of Us Pt 2), as well as other voiceover. I have also started a couple of small audio companies:

Queer Crush Audio – an audiobook production company focused on queer work by indie authors. We love to help authors expand their audience with audio. queercrushaudio.com Partnered with Ronnie Butler and Gabra Zackman.

Love Bytes Originals – another arm of the partnership with Ronnie Butler and Gabra Zackman. We write and perform original serialized comedic romance. Available anywhere you can get audiobooks and available for support on Patreon at Patreon.com/lovebytesoriginals. LoveBytesOriginals.com

I am available for private voiceover coaching/consults and also teach some group classes at Narrator.Life.

Bio and other info at EmilyWooZeller.com. Agent: SBV talent.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Adaptability – Persistence does not necessarily mean doing the same thing over and over. Pause, re-evaluate if something isn’t working, and try something different. Step away from it for a bit. Then come back and try again.

Endurance – Build slowly. Be consistent in regular, smaller practices. Build your overall capacity and don’t worry about hitting a big mark as fast as you can. Take breaks and don’t push it to the limit every time.

Reliability/Integrity – Show up when you say you will. Do what you say you will. Communicate with integrity and empathy. It’s that simple. If you have trouble committing to things for fear of disappointment, start small. Commit to something that stretches you just a little. Then do it again. We are all humans behind the screens and technologies that connect us.

Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?

At Love Bytes Originals, we love heart, heat, and humor… and support! If you want sneak peeks, exclusive mini-series, updates, and personalized stories and messages, please join us on Patreon!

We’re looking for illustrators right now to help us build some imagery for upcoming series and our company. Please reach out!

If you’re a writer and you have some stories you want to share, or if you want to collaborate and build on the stories we’ve started at LoveBytesOriginals.com, please reach out.

If your work is queer, let’s also talk about how Queer Crush Audio may be able to work with you.

If you’d like some voiceover coaching or guidance, email me at [email protected]

If you’re a body nerd, I love to be weird and nerdy, too!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: zwooman
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• Linkedin: zwooman

Image Credits

William Callan (headshot)