Hello, my little internet spiders. I'm doing well, I suppose. Graduate school applications on schedule, getting things done, taking care of business. Just not art business. I can lay some of that down at the feet of the season. It's cold, so going outside sucks. The light is mostly indirect and dull, so exposures take longer even when there are sunny days to do them. It's winter, so all the plants I use for my images are dead anyway.
I can't blame everything on the season, though. I have projects I could be working on. Just out of my photo-related projects, I have a whole friggin book I'm supposedly working on and have made very little headway with. I was supposed to be putting together a guide to different papers for lumen printing, and another guide to different dyes for anthotypes, and yet another guide to different methods for cyanotype toning. All of those consist mostly of organizing existing material, formatting and writing. I can do those in the dark, so I can't blame the weather. That's not even touching the non-photographic projects I have on the back burners, like pure writing projects and a calendar I've been meaning to design and send off to a Kickstarter company that I'm a big fan of, just to see if they like the idea and would be interested in working with me.
My motivation for creativity is pretty shot. This happens every so often, and it's always a bummer. I think it's a build-up of anxiety, and it doesn't do any good since losing my creativity just makes me more anxious and unhappy with myself since there's all these things I want to do that I'm not doing. Right now I'm worried about grad school, about being able to teach this new class I've got for the upcoming semester, about being able to get students for my museum classes so I can make extra money. Not to mention worries about my elderly dog's health, making sure my Obamacare goes through properly (it isn't Obama's fault anymore, now I'm dealing with a purely private company that is underwhelmingly prepared to handle the influx of new policy holders), paying off recent car repairs, wondering how to do taxes... oh, and of course the general looming dread that even once I get past grad school, I still have to somehow surmount all the obstacles between adjunct-hood and tenured professorship.
So, yeah. Anxiety might be the opposite of creativity. Creativity is work, guys. It's really hard work, and it takes a lot of effort. For me at least, it isn't like on TV where I just "get inspired" and the creativity flows out of my eyeballs and just makes art happen. Even if I'm feeling creative as balls, it's still a massive amount of time and energy invested in the work part of creativity. Coating paper, making exposures, rigging new exposure frames, making new dyes, research, writing, planning, prepping, doing layout, formatting, researching, editing (photos and writing)... not to mention all the shooting involved in any project needing illustrative photographs to demonstrate processes. That's a lot of work. It's not easy, even when I'm overflowing with creative brainwaves.
When anxiety attacks, it drains all my energy. It's like living inside a lead suit, where even the normal activities of daily life seem like labors, and accomplishing basic human tasks like showering and going to buy food seem like such incredible accomplishments that I should earn a reward just for keeping myself going at a basic level of civilized competence. It's being exhausted, constantly. It's spending whole days in bed because just trying to plan out your day becomes an hours-long task that sends you spiraling into worry and dread.
This ended up pretty gloomy. Allie Brosch puts Depression in perspective, but I don't know if I have depression. I've never checked; Obamacare doesn't cover depression anyway. If I do have it, I can't tell and I can't afford to have medical conditions. That's extra gloomy.
Fuckit, in three days, I'll be back to teaching at the university. I'll have a whole batch of new students, a new class to teach and for at least a month, I'll be teaching seven classes a week. I always feel better when I'm teaching. Here's hoping!
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