Weekly Update - 145 (Patreon)

First major snowstorm of the year here! Actually had to go out and shovel today.  Nearly died on the neighbor's driveway because it was so icey. It's beginning to feel a lot like winter.

Comic This Week? Yes (It's mostly text this week, but it's important text, I think)

Drawing: Page 162

Playing: Dwarf Fortress and a little bit of WoW

Ramble:

Well, I've written eight paragraphs of rambling and I've deleted them all.

It's an odd thing. Clearly, I have stuff to ramble about, but when I reread the words I've typed I just feel like none of it is actually good enough to publish. I think that might be why I'm not posting sketches any more either, and perhaps why I'm so scared to draw all the character sheets I'm supposed to draw. I just feel like none of it is good enough. I feel like my readers and my patrons deserve better than what I can do.

I thought I had bested this feeling a long time ago. Me holding myself to these impossibly high, imaginary standards that are probably far higher than anyone ACTUALLY expects me to achieve. The silly idea that I can somehow do better than my best, and that idea is actually what's holding me back, keeping me from trying to do the thing I want to do. It's bizarrely paradoxical. Obviously if I want to do better than my best, I need to improve my best, and that requires continuing to try my best, all the time, even if my best right now isn't as good as the imaginary best of future me.

See why I call this the Ramble? See why I hate words? Words are awful! "Best" is an oversimplification of a very complicated and nebulous topic, a topic that I could probably ramble about on its own. If my "best" is defined as the absolute pinnacle of ability I can achieve in my lifetime, how can I ever know what that limit is without having lived my life to its completion and then analyzing it posthumously? So long as I still live and still think, my "best" is potentially still ahead of me. I can always improve. So where do thoughts like these even come from?

More importantly, how do we fix it? Because I know I'm not the only artist/writer who struggles with this sort of thing. It requires a change in mindset, I think. Trying my best to draw the greatest thing I've ever drawn every time I put my pen to tablet is not a sustainable ask. Some days I simply won't be feeling up to it. Some days I might put in my best effort but for a number of different reasons my hand simply won't cooperate with creating the thing I want to make. Some days the thing I want to make just doesn't turn out right and I don't have the knowledge or expertise yet on how to properly fix it. I need to be okay with art that might not be the greatest thing I've ever drawn.  I need to be okay with sketches that might be actually kinda bad, by my recent standards (albeit surely not bad by my standards from four years ago when I was a far less practiced artist). But I need to be okay with the idea that my sketches might be subpar some weeks, knowing that they won't be bad EVERY week, so long as I keep posting them consistently.  CONSISTENCY is the most important thing. Consistency is the thing that will help me improve, because the more consistent I am at drawing in general, the more consistent I will likely be at drawing better. I am consistent as posting comics, mostly. But I am far less so with creating other art.

But I said I need to change my entire mindset, and changing ones' mind isn't an easy thing to do. We fall into these patterns of habitual thinking, IE. My sketches/rambles aren't good enough, so no one will be interested in seeing/reading them. That habit of negative thinking must first be recognized and identified, and then it needs to be rejected. By that I mean, if I recognize that thought bubbling to the surface, I need to beat it down with some other, more positive reasoning: When my brain starts to go "my sketches/rambles aren't good enough to post-" I can cut it off and go "so what? Draw it anyway, because it's good practice. Do it for you, not because you want people to shower you with more likes and praise than the image you posted last week. Then share it online because there's always the chance it might brighten someone's day. You never know!"

Once you start countering the habitual thoughts with a more positive form of reasoning, I've found that the habitual negative thoughts tend to fade and lose their potency. Eventually they become easier to ignore, and ultimately a new, more positive form of habitual thinking might take its place: "This isn't the best thing I've ever drawn, but that's okay, maybe someone will like it." This is a process that takes time. It takes effort. It takes consistency. It takes the systematic dismantling of a habitual way of negative thinking and twisting it into a more constructive form.

While it is true that you guys deserve better than what I can do, you also deserve me continuing to put in the effort to improve myself, so that maybe some day I can write and draw well enough to deliver what you all deserve.

And now here I am, having written all this, thinking it's all just a jumble of incoherent shit and I should delete it and replace it with some more uplifting or wholesome take on something...

This is when I should just IMA DO THE THING BYE.