Looking Forward
For the past 10 years or so, if and when a friend of mine would be going through a rough spot in their life, I would suggest that they remember any positive event coming up. Not in a toxic positivity sort of way - just, something fun to anticipate to keep them going. Maybe it would be a new season of a favorite show. Maybe a new book. Maybe a birthday, or a vacation. Maybe something as simple as a favorite snack at the end of the day.
Remembering the positives has been something I have had to do for myself this year. In my last blog post, I expressed how difficult my 2022 has been. (It’s worth mentioning that I started feeling better almost immediately after making that post public. It was cathartic.) Thankfully, the last half of the year wasn’t as arduous; though, in all honesty, I’ve been conditioned to be even more cynical and skeptical than I usually am, by way of, “it seems okay now, but when will it fall apart again?” I choose not to dwell on the question. But, I digress.
As dark as I felt from April to July, I know myself and I knew where to place my priorities in order to lift myself back up. I took the advice that I have given to my friends over the years, and made note of things to look forward to in my life. Most of the things - let’s call them beacons - were surface-level: the first season of Andor, Tales of the Jedi, a couple of new games for Nintendo Switch. I won’t lie: the escapism helped.
Navigating this moment in my life led to and required a hefty amount of deeper self-reflection. While the beacons were helping, they weren’t enough to lift me up all the way. This was critical for a few reasons:
I realized that a majority of my pursuits and accomplishments were sourced externally, which meant I wasn’t creating my own happiness. My progress, my growth, my accomplishments - it had all become reliant, over time, on other people.
My work/life balance was… not balanced. I had placed too much emphasis on my own creative pursuits that I was burning out. It became a vicious cycle of feeling pressure because I wasn’t accomplishing goals and I wasn’t accomplishing goals because I was feeling an ever-increasing amount of pressure.
Both of the first two points, I realized, culminated in what was the most critical of all: I had lost sight of what I want from my creative career. What creative works will make me happy? What projects do I want to create? What kind of art do I want to see out in the world? Those questions fell to the side and I had lost my way.
It was that final point of self-reflection and realization that shifted my focus from chasing external happiness to creating internal assurance. I was at a complex crossroads of relinquishing control of my peace to others, giving up on my career, or taking back what should only ever be mine: my happiness. Selfish? Eh, maybe. But maybe not. There’s an important difference between selfish and self-preservation. And I think the two can have considerable overlap, which isn’t bad.
Over the past six months (and through to this day), I have been revisiting what I want my creative career to look like in one year, in five years, in 10, 20, 40 years. I’ve been prioritizing my plans for the many projects I have in the pipeline, and organizing the steps I need to take to see them through across the finish line.
2023 is fast approaching, and I have many beacons on the horizon.
