Tag: anxiety

Not Getting Things Done

Matt

Raise your hand if you’ve done something like this.

You have an idea — a story, a melody, a character, a color — that takes up residence in your imagination and starts redecorating the place. You love this idea; it is, perhaps, your greatest idea. Now you just need to find a way to introduce the idea to the world, so you take a seat at your desk and…

Start making lists. This idea is so good, you absolutely must execute it properly — perfectly, even. You write down all the areas of your craft you are weak in and start finding books and websites to teach you to improve those skills. Days go by. Weeks. Months. For every hour you spend working on The Idea, you spend ten hours in study, learning about different techniques.

One day, you decide to take a look at your progress… only to realize that you haven’t made as much progress as you thought.

That’s where I am with my current The Idea. I started writing a comic, and somehow fell into an infinite rabbit hole of drawing tutorials, theoretical analysis of the craft of comics, and dozens of hours spent drawing shitty hands in the hope of one day drawing less-shitty hands. Learning has been awesome, and I can’t say that I regret anything I’ve read about the process of creating comics in the last several months, but I’ve focused so much on Making The Idea Perfect that I’ve neglected The Idea itself.

I’m sure my anxiety plays into this. In the era before medication, I would get so bogged down in “learning” that I would eventually despair of ever having the skills I wanted and give up. It was the standard fear of rejection, multiplied by a billion. At least with medication, I’m better able to see the anxiety in play and take steps to minimize its impact on my work.

Mental illness aside, I’ve had perfectionist tendencies for as long as I can remember. I often find myself struggling to call something “Done”, instead finding fault after fault and lamenting how much I’ll hate it in two years if I don’t get everything just right. It’s not accompanied by the panicky feeling of anxiety, just irritation at myself for not being better.

(Aside: I could probably write a series of posts on how the “gifted kid” label has affected my self-perception and ability to share my stuff with people.)

So! I’m saying this publicly in the hope that it will stick: I am rebalancing my priorities when it comes to making stuff. I am going to start spending more time working on The Idea, even if it sucks for a time and requires massive rewrites, and less time studying up on abstract concepts related to the idea. Learning is good, and has done a lot for my confidence, but no amount of learning is going to cause my stories to get written. That requires picking up my pen and getting to work.

Schmesolutions

Matt

Picture Sizes

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions, at least not in the hyped-up, designed-to-fail sense. Any time a segment of the calendar rolls over — new year, new month, new week, new day — is an opportunity to take stock of life and figure out if anything needs to change. That said, I’m not standing with the Internet Smartass contingent that likes to remind us that designating a specific moment in the earth’s revolution of the sun as the starting point is arbitrary and human-made — no shit. I happen to like humans and the way we make cool things like years and seasons and weekends.

What I like about the start of a New Year is that even the name itself says, “Big Picture.” Day-to-day concerns tend to be small-picture, short-term stuff like making grocery lists and figuring out if anyone has a birthday this week. Monthly stuff is longer-term. Something about the New Year makes it easier to look back on the Old Year and reflect.

2015 Rocked

So, what did I like about 2015?

  • I made an EP with two of my favorite musicians.
  • I moved from Michigan to Virginia, and my employer kept me on remotely so I didn’t even have to do the job search thing.
  • My wife and I adopted the sweetest calico cat.
  • I was prescribed Prozac, which does a much better job of managing my anxiety than Celexa was.
  • I took better care of myself overall, with doctor visits, physical therapy, counseling, and so forth.
  • I joined a gym, which I still attend somewhat regularly.
  • I took up drawing again, and this time I worked extremely hard on improving. It was a blast.
  • I learned to enjoy reading and playing video games without feeling like I should be doing something more productive.
  • I ate a lot of good food with a lot of good people.

That’s good stuff. I worked hard on being mindful about how I spent my time. I have a tendency to commit to leisure activity that makes me miserable — if I watch the first episode of a TV show, then I need to watch the whole season; if I’m playing a video game, I am damn well going to play it on Normal or Hard difficulty, even if it means dying frequently and replaying the same sections over and over.

No more of that. I’m good at turning things off and playing on Casual or Easy mode now, and I’m much happier for it.

2015 Sucked

Some stuff didn’t quite go according to plan. There was some chaos in my family that required an extra trip to Michigan shortly after I moved to Virginia. Our adorable new calico needed all of her teeth out right after we got her; later, so did our dog. Pets can be expensive. Good thing they are so cute and cuddly.

I had grand plans for music — continue teaching myself piano, record a new EP or two, maintain my voice. However, something caused a shift in my brain. It may have been the move, or the Prozac, or even just the sheer number of comics I was reading, but suddenly I found myself wanting to draw and write comics. I felt guilty at first, like I was betraying my inner musician, but it wasn’t long before I was able to embrace it.

My wife sprained both of her ankles. I don’t think I need to elaborate on why that sucks.

2016 Will Be Amazing and Terrible

This might be Star Wars talking, but I think I want 2016 to be about finding balance. Most of the time, I’m either all-in on some creative project, or else completely checked out and binge-watching TV shows. I need to learn to pace myself and make time to get out and see friends — or stay in and play online games with friends, depending on who is around.

Part of this process is going to involve figuring out milestones for the creative work, which I hate doing because it feels so corporate, but knowing whether I’m ahead of schedule, on track, or falling behind will help minimize the “I should be working” feeling I get whenever I’m not making stuff (or, you know, amp it way up if necessary).

As much as I hate making phone calls, I need to find a dentist and an optometrist this year. Despite great strides in taking care of myself after the move, I never did get around to replacing those particular medical professionals in my life.

Stuff What Helped Me

I’ll end with some tools I found last year that I’ll be carrying into the new year.

  • Bullet Journal. First off: This is FREE. They have journals you can buy, but Bullet Journal is a system, which is described in detail on the site. I’ve never been good about keeping a planner, but somehow this works pretty well for me. This, by far, has been the most helpful tool in my box. I highly recommend checking it out if you have trouble getting stuff done.
  • Xmarks. I thought I was done using browser bookmarks back in 2009, but I’ve never been able to get the hang of web-based services like Google bookmarks or Delicious — I usually forget about them. I gave Pinterest a go, but that ended up being more of a distraction than an aid. Now, if I stumble upon something useful, I just bookmark it and let it sync to all my browsers. So far, so good, but we’ll see if I’m still using it in six months.
  • Scrivener. I’ve barely scratched the surface of all the things Scrivener can do, and it has helped me immensely as I’ve been developing this comic idea. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically a program that lets you create digital Trapper Keepers for all of your writing projects. I love it.
  • Aeon Timeline. I won’t lie, I haven’t used this yet, but my wife loves it.

Self-Honesty: I Don’t Care

Matt

“I don’t have time.”

This is one of the many phrases that English-speakers have developed for saying “no” without actually saying “no”. For whatever reason, we as a society have agreed that a simple, “No thanks” is too flippant — borderline aggressive, even — and requires a further explanation that implies, “I would, if only…”

“Sorry, I already have plans that night.”
“I can’t — I haven’t slept well and feel like shit.”

The worst part is when we internalize this idea and start lying to ourselves about why we’re not doing things we say we want to do. My personal lie, for many years, has been “I don’t have time.”

I want to get better at drawing, but I don’t have time.
I’d love to record more Christmas music, but I don’t have time.
I want to read this stack of books, but I don’t have time.

There’s a resentment that comes from believing reality is structured specifically to prevent me from engaging in everything that catches my fancy. Time is a finite resource, but my fascination is boundless! Surely the greatest tragedy in life is that I won’t be able to watch everything available on Netflix in my lifetime.

Recently, I learned a magical incantation that reshaped reality to my benefit: “I don’t care.”

Look at this stack of books… eh, I don’t care.
I keep hearing that I should watch Orange is the New Black… I don’t care.
I still haven’t tried all of the games I acquired through Humble Bundle… I don’t care.

Revolutionary, I know.

Like “no, thanks,” the phrase “I don’t care” seems to have negative connotations. I get it — it can feel judgmental when someone shrugs and admits they don’t care for something you feel strongly about. It’s certainly not a phrase I’m about to deploy against other people.

But, when I use it on myself, it cuts through the nonsense and shows me where I’ve been lying to myself. Sometimes, saying “I don’t care” rings false. Over the summer, I tried to tell myself I didn’t care about working on my drawing skills. It backfired — I realized I do care; I care enough that for the last six months I’ve made time to draw almost every day.

However, I was getting stressed out about the fact that I wasn’t writing music. I love writing music! It’s amazing! One of my favorite things! Why was that particular interest gathering dust if I loved it so much? Cautiously, I tried out my incantation: I don’t care about making music.

It rang mostly true, but I had to amend it to “I don’t care about making music right now.”

That felt great. It felt like giving myself permission to focus on something I was excited about without feeling guilty for not doing everything that I was interested in.

On top of the mental improvement, learning to say, “I don’t care” has made it possible to delete a ton of stuff from my Netflix queue.