Honestly, that fish is a whole mood.
Whether it’s the current world situation, your work-from-home schedule, stressful family events, or any number of other possibilities, there’s plenty of things in all our lives to cause us to feel overwhelmed. This is a miserable situation for anyone, of course, but particularly so for people who regularly engage in creative pursuits. It’s difficult to enter a flow-state when our minds are rushing with worries and distractions.
Personally, one of the hardest things to overcome has been having a full house. I live with three other people, but since two of them typically work out of the house, I’m used to large swathes of uninterrupted time where I can sit and think in silence, working out creative problems. Now, those silences are broken by a near-constant stream of Zoom meetings, phone calls, and even full middle-school class lectures.
It’s exhausting.
I’ve been practicing giving myself grace, as all of us should be. However, there comes a time when we simply need to accept the new normal (temporary as it is), and pull ourselves up by the bootstraps.
Gently.
My default mode tends to be “all or nothing,” so when I decide that I need to get back into gear, I typically try to do everything at once. So, in the interests of not ignoring my facets, I tend to say “I will write three pages every day, and I will also draw every day, and I will also work out every day, and ooooh, look at this new focaccia recipe…” This always backfires, and I end up accomplishing nothing.
Don’t be like me.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, piling five more things on top of yourself probably won’t help. Instead, break it down. Make a list of the things you want to accomplish, and schedule them as you would any Zoom meeting or conference call, but DON’T pile them all in at once.
For example, I want to be creative every day, and as both a writer and a visual artist, I don’t want to let either of those pursuits fall by the wayside. So for this month, I have planned to write on three weekdays, draw on the other two, and take the weekends off (apart from blogging and other bits of busy-work). This way, I will be producing things regularly, but won’t be contributing to stress-fueled burnout.
Every creative person has different goals, so you are the only one who can set your own schedule. If you are a part-time writer, and you want to write daily, start small. Maybe that means only writing on weekends, if they are your free days, or maybe it means writing daily right from the start, but only writing for half an hour, or until you hit a specific word count. If you’re a full-time artist, but you’ve been distracted and unable to produce good work, go back to the basics. Practice some warm-up exercises. Get outside (following your community’s social-distancing guidelines, of course) and make some thumbnail sketches, without pressuring yourself to turn them into paintings right away. You get the idea.
I feel like there was more I intended to say on this topic, but I’ve hit some kind of Saturday evening wall, and my brain doesn’t want to work any more. There may be a follow-up blog next week, or there may not.
If you have any thoughts to contribute to this discussion, I’d love to hear them. Hit me up in the comments, or send a tweet my way (my profile is over on the right sidebar, if you don’t already follow me).
TTFN.
elisabeth anne writes things 