Vlog! August 2020 (Patreon)

Time for another vlog! This month hasn’t been the most productive on record, but I spent a lot of the time doing “internal work”. This is probably going to be very hard to explain, but I’m going to give it my best shot anyway. 

Creativity is a funny thing, and very many people have written on its fleeting, fickle nature. I’ve been struggling to generate creative ideas lately, and from reading around various articles on the internet, I’m not alone. It’s easy to throw your hands up and wallow in the face of something like this, but I’ve faced things like this before. I know the solution is one part patience, one part framing, and one part practice. 

Practice is probably the easiest to understand and the most dreadful to do… the muse visits those who show up every day and invite her. So no matter what, I continue to “show up” and dedicate myself to some kind of creative practice. I still work at my tablet every morning before work, and this has allowed me to make progress on Shenzhen Fast. (Exciting to see the final pieces of that one falling into place!) I still try to draw every night as well. At times like these, however, I’ve found it helpful to switch gears. So, “showing up” has meant being creative in different ways. I’ve been writing a lot more in my journal, solving sticky little problems around the house, learning new recipes, and doing découpage with my old sketchbooks.

Framing is the part that I’ve been the most focused on this month, and I think it requires the most work. The challenging thing is that it’s a lot of work that is completely invisible. “Framing” is writing (or re-writing) the story that you’re telling yourself. In my case, I spent a lot of this month changing my head from feeling very terrible about the state of things and all the uncertainty, to centering myself on the known. Nothing has changed externally, of course. Things are still very terrible, and overwhelming and uncertain. But I realized two things.

The first thing that I realized (or internalized) is that my dwelling on the terrible-ness of it is not going to affect the reality, or my place in it. On the one hand this is a very “ho-hum, well that’s very nice for you” thing to say. I’m not saying that we should accept what is happening or ignore it. I very much believe the opposite, and getting through this will require a tremendous amount of effort from all of us. But I have a tendency to get stuck in information-gathering loops. I think it’s a symptom of my hyper-vigilance. If something happens I want to know absolutely everything that can be known about it. But at a certain point, more information stops helping. It fails to add detail, or context or nuance, and it only serves to keep one from action. By understanding that the action is the true priority, I allow myself permission to detach from the data-gathering. 

The second thing that I realized is that I had become hyper-fixated on survival, and had lost sight of what I wanted to survive for. I’ve been stuck in this loop before, when I get very fixated on the means and forgetting the ends. In my case, the point of surviving… is to create. That’s what I love to do more than anything else. So, again, if the fixating on the means is keeping me from the action it’s time to take a step back and rebalance. 

The last piece of the puzzle is patience. Maybe you could also call this one faith. It’s the knowing that my love for comics hasn’t left, and it hasn’t diminished. I still love drawing, and I know I have more comics in me. When the time is right, the stories will return to me. I just have to make sure my pen and my heart are ready :)

So that’s why this month I spent a lot of time riding my bike and staring at the ceiling and doing every mundane thing slowly and mindfully… and have very little to show for it. But the showing will follow, and I’m grateful to you all for sticking around for what there is to see :)