For about two years I got up on Saturdays without wanting to go to work. I'd arrive at the wedding counting the hours until it was over. I'd deliver the gallery on time, technically correct, and feel absolutely nothing.
My calendar was full. I was empty. It took me a long time to admit those two facts were related.
Burnout isn't tiredness
This is the part I wish someone had told me earlier, because I spent months treating the wrong problem. Tiredness goes away when you sleep. I slept, and it didn't go away.
The shape of it was always the same. Saturday I'd get up with no desire to go. Sunday I'd recover. Monday the editing sat on me like weight, and at some point I stopped wanting to look at the pictures at all. Not "too tired to edit" — genuinely not wanting to look.
What you lose isn't energy. It's desire. And desire doesn't come back from a week off, because a week off doesn't touch the thing that drained it.
It started well, which is what makes it hard to see
I started shooting weddings because I liked it. There's a quiet adrenaline in telling a real story, and I was chasing that, not a business.
Then the money came. Timidly at first, then properly. I bought a new car. I was proud of it — I was achieving things, and the proof was parked outside. Around that same time something changed inside that I didn't notice for years: I stopped asking whether a date excited me and started asking only whether it was free.
I became an assembly line. Five weddings a month, sometimes more. I was financially solvent and creatively gone, and from the outside those two things look identical to success.
The psychology has a name for this
What helped me most was learning that this isn't a character flaw. It's a documented mechanism, described decades ago, called the overjustification effect.
The short version: when something you did for its own sake becomes a paid obligation, the payment can crowd out the original motivation. Edward Deci ran the first experiments in 1971, and Lepper, Greene and Nisbett the best-known one two years later. The design is almost cruel in its simplicity — take someone who already loves doing a thing, promise them a reward for it, and watch how much less they choose to do it afterwards. I've written about the research and what it actually supports separately.
That mattered to me for one specific reason: it meant I wasn't being ungrateful. I had a working business and I'd stopped enjoying it, and I'd read that as a personal failing. It isn't. It's what happens when payment becomes the only stimulus.
And the fix isn't the obvious one. The answer is not to stop charging. There are bills, and pretending otherwise is a luxury most of us don't have.
Money in your pocket isn't the problem. Money in your head is.
This is the distinction that actually changed things for me, and I'd offer it to anyone in the middle of this.
Money isn't the enemy. But when it becomes the boss of your calendar — when it decides for you, when it books you into weddings you don't want just to fill a slot — you've stopped photographing. You're selling time. And the bill for that arrives late and costs more than any of the jobs paid: you stop loving the work.
The question I started asking before accepting a date wasn't "can I afford to say no?" It was "if this were unpaid, would any part of me want to be there?" Sometimes the honest answer was no, and I took it anyway because I needed the money. But knowing which one I was doing changed everything about how it felt.
What I actually did
Not long ago I went to the forest alone. I took a tent, some wine, and a voice recorder. I was in a complicated stretch and I needed to talk, but not to anyone in particular.
I recorded a message that was supposedly for my students. It wasn't. It was for me. I talked about how much I love this work and how tired I was, and somewhere in the middle of it the answer showed up on its own: yes, it had been worth it — because even after all of that, I still loved making photographs. The exhaustion was real and so was the love, and they'd been sharing a room for years without either one leaving.
What changed afterward was concrete, not spiritual. I cut the calendar down. Today I shoot one or two weddings a month instead of five, and I turn down dates that a few years ago I'd have taken without thinking. I earn less in a busy month and more across a year, because I stopped burning the thing the work depends on.
If you're in it right now
A few things I'd say to the version of me who was still pretending it was just a busy season.
Count, honestly. Of the weddings you've booked this year, how many did you accept because you wanted that particular day, and how many because the date was open? That ratio tells you more about your situation than your revenue does.
Saying no isn't rejecting anyone. It took me years to stop reading a declined inquiry as a moral failure. Saying yes to everyone is saying no to yourself every time you compromise the way you see just to deliver.
Don't wait for a dramatic break. There usually isn't one. It's a slow leak, and the danger of a slow leak is that every individual day is survivable.
Keep something nobody is paying for. This is the one I'd insist on. Shoot something on a day off that has no client, no deliverable, and no audience. It's the only reliable way I know to find out whether the desire is gone or just buried under invoices.
And if you need the money right now — do what you have to do. I'm not going to romanticise turning down work from a position you may not be in. Just don't stop making photographs that are only yours while you do it.
Where this left me
There's no method at the end of this. I didn't find a system, I changed a relationship: the camera stopped being how I proved I was worth something.
I wrote a book about this eventually — about ego, money, the persona you build to avoid falling apart, and the discipline of not intervening in what's in front of you. It's called The Word Became Image, and the chapter on money is the one that cost the most to write. You can read the opening of it on that page before deciding anything.
If the way I work interests you more than the way I unravelled, I've also written about how I document a wedding without directing the scene — which is, in a sense, the same argument pointed at the craft instead of at the calendar.