Jennifer Bray

That's how you know you're succeeding.

So somebody would ring you, you know, a trusted contact and say, from Monday, we're going into level five.

And it wouldn't be out anywhere.

And you'd be just like,

level five and you'd be typing like so fast yeah and you wouldn't even be absorbing the information that would just hit you later on at night but like typing it out and trying to get it out before your competitors so those all of this pressure at the time um and it was a lot and the longer the pandemic went on I think the more burnt out I got and I feel like I feel like it's not a negative thing nowadays some people think to say that you're burnt out yeah someone actually said to me recently oh well you know

obviously they were talking about themselves and they were like obviously I didn't use the phrase that I was burnt out and I thought like why are we so afraid of admitting that we we are like and I think a lot of us were after the pandemic yeah and for me the book was born from um wanting to think about something different wanting to escape the same thing that I felt when I was a kid yeah and a teenager you know the sense of awe I needed that back I needed some joy back

Yeah, like, that's exactly it.

It's kind of... I mean, look, I don't want to sound, like, poor, pitiful me.

Like, people working in hospitals and in healthcare settings and in nursing homes, they had it the worst.

Yeah.

Hands down.

But, yeah, like, it was a really, really stressful time.

And...

just the competitive nature of it too like after a while the like there's this it's kind of lame actually like as journalists you have this kind of buzz when you get a really good story yeah you have this kind of hit where you're like oh my god and everyone's sharing it and blah blah blah and you're like you know you've got this kind of 10 seconds of woohoo actually used to last around a day and then throughout the pandemic you just stop feeling any joy from writing any of these stories or breaking them and it just

it changed the game a little bit for me.

And it actually took me a while afterwards to kind of love journalism again.

I think I fell out of love with it for a while.

And yeah, I remember just lying awake and being like, oh God, what does tomorrow hold?

Blah, blah.

And then instead I'd be like,