Breaking Patterns
Finding balance between work and rest, overcoming burnout, and embracing creativity in a new artistic direction.
While I’m writing this week’s newsletter, wearing my RESIST t-shirt that I bought from a local artist, I’m reminded that I chose resist as my word of the year. In January I said that I wanted to resist the push to maneuver at breakneck speed, and admittedly I’ve done a poor job of heeding my own words.
Survival mode and our culture’s tendency to guilt and shame people about productivity affects me greatly. When I was creating collages, I very rarely said no to any paying work. I was participating in art fairs, providing inventory to galleries and retail stores, and doing A LOT of commission work, all while working a part time job.
Saying yes to everything was responsible for both my stress and debt yet I was convinced that the problem was that I wasn’t working hard enough. When I finally realized the only solution was to quit making art and then quit my job, it took me several years to recover from the immense amount of burnout.
As much as I’d like to say that I learned my lesson and things have been great ever since, I can’t. When a design client that was on retainer ended their contract with me nearly a year ago, causing me to lose most of my income, I immediately started working nearly every day and berating myself as not deserving time off because of my precarious financial situation.
While I’m very happy that I landed on mandalas and projection mapping as my next artistic endeavor, finally choosing a direction only compounded the feeling that I wasn’t allowed any breaks. Rather than relaxing with a book or going out for a walk, I’d watch tutorials. I’d scroll Pinterest for hours looking at animations and projection mapping, trying to get ideas. When I decided to post the mandalas to YouTube, I did hours of research on what makes a channel successful.
Posting every week was highly recommended and it did create some momentum. After every post I was seeing a steady increase in subscribers and the amount of views. However each video took me an entire week to create and right after I posted one I’d have to start working on the next one. I felt like I was getting better, but the animation still wasn’t quite right. I knew I couldn’t focus on improving the animation while staying on that weekly schedule, so I decided to take extra time. When I finally felt great about what I had made and was ready to post it, 19 days had passed.
My viewership tanked, bringing my views from around 200-400 per video down to well under 100. The video that I spent extra time on took several days just to reach 50 views.
There are many reasons for why that happened, such as the algorithm and who was viewing my videos initially, but none of them are all that important. What is important is that taking longer to create brought more ideas to the surface and helped me to feel more confident about what I was sharing. That confidence gave me the ability to push back against the old pattern that was shouting, “I told you so!” when my views dropped. I was able to remind myself that momentum that is dependent on me exhausting myself isn’t worth it.
If you also struggle with feeling like you constantly need to be working, I’d recommend Laziness Doesn’t Exist by Devon Price, Ph.D. I recently started reading it and it resonates deeply.
Since I’m slowing down my mandala work so I can focus on graphic design in order to keep things afloat, I’ve decided to stick with a monthly newsletter that will go out at the beginning of each month and be a summary of my work and insights from the previous month. Paid subscribers will continue to get biweekly newsletters, both the monthly summary as well as an additional behind the scenes update on how things are going and what I’m working on.
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Until the next newsletter, be well!
Giesla
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