Phase 2
Updates & Other News
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It’s incredibly awesome to discover that U.S backers are now receiving their copies of Metropo. Magnus will be issuing a full update on it all next week.
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The fourth chapter of Ganzeer’s excellent The Solar Grid is now ready for you to purchase. Heartily recommended!
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Frequent subject to my edit-fu, Ryan K Lindsay, has recently started a Patreon to produce comic book study guides for classroom or personal use. This is a pretty excellent idea for a Patreon and plays wonderfully to Ryan’s strengths as a creator - always thinking about structure as well as being a highly proficient teacher. Click through now and become a patron!
Phase 2
I was going to just put this link to a piece in The Guardian in the Links section and have done with it, but I feel it probably merits dicussion, especially as it hits so close to home. It also made me think of this blog post, ‘Good Enough’, by Corey J. White.
The Guardian piece is entitled ‘My brain feels like it’s been punched’: the intolerable rise of perfectionism. As the article states, currently perfectionism is classed as a personality trait, not a mental health condition. Reading the article though, you have to wonder:
“He defines perfectionism as “a fear of failure”. His fear is all the greater not only because he believes in perfection, but also because he thinks he has experienced it. In 2014/15, Nicol had what he calls “my quote unquote perfect year” in which he lived perfection so thoroughly that he could tell it by the minute. Each day, he hit the gym at 8am, worked from 9am to 6pm, fixed his food for the next day and went to bed. He did this five or six days a week. On the seventh, he graded his consistency and productivity by calculating the completion rate of his to-do list. The reward for all this endeavour was a score of 86% in his master’s dissertation (although his sister has just got a 95).
However, since starting his PhD, Nicol has been unable to replicate the conditions that underpinned his success. He is sleeping poorly; he cannot hit the same stride.
“Every day feels suboptimal,” he says.”
I include that quote because it captures the contradiction at the heart of perfectionism so well. The fear of failure is not a lone spectre in the ordeal but a twin to the other notion (also completely fictious and self aggrandising I should add) that you may already have achieved such perfection and everything from here on in is chasing an echo of all you once were.
I’ve made no secret of my own struggles over the years, mostly with depression and I’ve even alluded to battles with perfectionism in the past. You won’t find much mention of the latter, because those posts are deleted. They’re gone, dear reader, because despite having clarity on my own perfectionism, despite months of therapy (a few years back now) concerning it, I’ve been completely unable to defeat it.
“Linda Blair, a psychologist, recommends that her clients try “the best friend test”: offer yourself the advice you would offer to a friend with the problem. For Schafer, this is easy: a close friend also has perfectionist tendencies and Schafer knows exactly what to say. “‘Your best is your best.’ That is the only advice I would ever give.” Her friend says the same to her. “And it doesn’t work! We laugh about that. We think: ‘I could really do with listening to that advice.’ But … it just doesn’t go in.” Schafer thinks perfectionism is “a disease of the self. Although ideals and the media feed into it, it is ultimately controlled by me. And that silly little voice in my head. The worm.”
The article argues that perfectionism can also have its advantages. One quality described is incredibly useful for something like editing a comic book or prose.
“Nicol knows that one of the reasons he excels – not a word he would choose – in chemistry is his ability “to pick things apart conceptually”.
Over the last few years my productivity in relation to producing my own creative projects has dropped off a cliff. I saw so many of my peers ascending through their respective creative planes and felt completely ill equipped and frozen to follow.
This lead to the chaotic cycle of producing and working 100% on projects, completing them, and then cycling them back around to the start because they didn’t fit some contrived ideal in my head. Eventually this lead to burnout.
Editing was a happy accident, something I found I was competent at that didn’t involve me freaking out about my own shit, but helping others with their own. If you’re shepherding other people’s work then the highest you can aim for is your best. Anything beyond, anything approaching an ideal of perfect, is stepping on far too many livelihoods.
I did other things to keep my head above the water. I wrote a one page comic script every week for a year. For the past year or so I’ve written a 1000-2000 word flash fiction prose piece every week.
All of this has allowed me to continue to create in a low key way, to keep those muscles active, even if it’s at a much lower setting than before.
During this time I’ve had to radically rethink the way I work, how often I work, and what I do when I’m not. I’ve had to learn the concept of forgiving myself when I miss a day earmarked for writing because something completely unforseen knocked it out of rotation. I’ve had to learn to let other people in to help me with problems that I’d previously dealt with alone. I’ve had to learn, forget and learn again that meditating every morning is easily the best life-hack ever created.
The struggle is real as they say. I’ve had to reset almost every aspect of my internal life in the process but I feel like it’s all been worth it. In another bit of serendipty this week I also read this blog post entitled The Key to Happiness Isn’t What You Think by author Autumn Christian. In it she talks about her own journey back to happiness and the phases that entails.
“In phase 1 I was so disconnected that every day I spent focused effort connecting with reality. I’d meditate, spend time outside touching the earth, spend days ditching work to go swim with my dogs and hike around Austin. If I didn’t want to work, I usually didn’t. I’d go eat ramen and sake in the middle of the day. I’d play video games for four days straight. What was important in phase 1 was that I allowed myself to be happy.”
Relatable.
“In phase 2, I took everything I learned in phase 1, but also began to integrate more discipline, specifically in writing, and also learning a martial arts.
The martial arts was an important part of me becoming my best self. It was the most demonstrable idea of body and mind converging as one. It was how I knew I was going to structure my life to give myself the mental space to accomplish what I wanted.
I’m currently in phase 2.”
In the end it all comes back to structure, specifically building the scaffolding around yourself to provide the arena for your best work. Not perfect. Just your best. I’m getting there.
Here’s to Phase 2.
Links
1) I’ve been reading a lot of speculative sci-fi and horror poetry recently. Here are some favourites:
As a bonus, here’s a pretty awesome list of some of the best translated speculative fiction this year (so far). NexHuman in particular is a title I’m really looking forward to.
2) I somehow missed this piece by Tom Engelhardt over at TomDispatch at the beginning of the year. The piece focuses on the findings of the Costs of War Project, particulatly this map that shows the U.S war on terror now involves 39% of the world’s countries.
Somewhat related is this piece in the The Intercept.
3) I’d never heard of the concept of ‘weeknotes’ before, but they make perfect sense, especially in the context of some newsletters. The structure/idea is something I may borrow here, especially from a transparency and accountability point of view.
4) No deal Brexit sounds fun. No really.
5) Geoff Manaugh, like Douglas Rushkoff, is one of those thinkers whose work I will always read. His latest post on the excellent BldgBlog is about architecture and espionage which is essentially the Venn diagram to my soul.
In the post Manaugh chats about a class of grad school architects in the U.S:
“According to this story, a graduate class at a school somewhere in D.C. had set out to collect as much architectural information as it could about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. This meant, at one point, even flying to Europe on a group field trip to visit engineering firms that had done work for Saddam Hussein.
Given the atmosphere at the time, the students most likely thought that their class was an act of protest, a kind of anti-war gesture, meant to help record, document, and even preserve Iraqi architecture before it was destroyed by the U.S. invasion.
Ironically, though, unbeknownst to those students—possibly even to their professor—the seminar’s research was being used to help target U.S. smart bombs. Or, as I phrase this in a new article for The Daily Beast, “there was a reason U.S. forces could put a missile through a window in Baghdad: they knew exactly where the window was. Architecture students in Washington D.C. had unwittingly helped them target it.”
The post is a precursor to this piece over at The Daily Beast.
6) Finally, I’m currently experimenting with Micro.Blog. I was a backer of their Kickstarter because I truly believe in the concept of the the IndieWeb. So far I’m really impressed and I like the platform’s agnostic approach to posts being small (like a Twitter update) or something longer (an essay say). There isn’t really much on mine at the moment as I’m still settling in, but I’d encourage others to check it out.