December 17, 2024

Digging through the Rubble of 2024

Reflecting on 2024, I disentangle my creative struggles.

I think it’s fair to say that 2024 has been a rocky year for almost everyone. While I had a few personal and professional bright spots, the lows were pretty significant. I find myself sitting with a considerable amount of grief, and while the personal grief has a clear source, the professional grief is more muddy.

To gain a better understanding of the muddiness, for my end of the year review I decided to cast a wider net and look back on everything I’ve created since I relaunched this newsletter in August of 2023.

Because my writing tends to shed some light on my thought process, I dug into 3 places where I write things down: a journal (free writing), a notebook (lists, brain dumps, and various notes), and my Notes app (ideas, drafts of writing, and things I want to remember).

First up, Patreon. (October 2023 - December 2023)

My notebook shows that I did some planning, but it was mostly a lot of lists and big picture thinking. Specific details, like a schedule of what I’d be posting and when, are absent. I recall having a lot of hesitation about jumping into making videos because I’m much better at writing than speaking. I chose to downplay my feelings of concern as being nervousness about doing something new.

When the struggle of making videos didn’t lessen with practice, in my third Patreon post I wrote:

“All this week I chose to ignore a feeling telling me to skip making a video and write a post instead. It felt a lot like procrastination and I wasn’t about to get sucked into it. I wanted to prove to myself that I can knuckle down and follow through when things get hard. I wanted to win the battle against my intermittently dysfunctional brain. That was my mistake. Instead of using one of the many tools I have to figure out where the resistance was coming from, or in this case, why the feeling was telling me to write a post, I ended up getting unreasonably angry at myself for an entire week.”

My assessment: The Patreon was born out of a state of panic after I lost my main source of income and at no point was I thinking clearly. In hindsight I can see that what I had dismissed as fear of doing something new was actually my intuition telling me that what I was trying to create didn’t play to any of my strengths and therefore wasn’t sustainable. The idea wasn’t bad, it just need a lot more consideration. I was focused on what I thought I should be able to do and not what I was actually capable of.

This photo of notes I wrote around 2 months after I launched demonstrates how little I planned in advance as well as how stress combined with ADHD causes me to think I can bend space and time to my will.

The time to brainstorm and create a content calendar would have been before I launched, not 2 months afterwards, but that’s not what’s most surprising about this photo.

What stands out is where it says “Patreon creation time…will likely need to be blocked in several days than one ‘Patreon Day.’” I apparently at one point I thought that I could accomplish everything I needed to do for a post in ONE DAY. Not only that, after I discovered that isn’t possible, I maintained my delusion by writing that time will likely need to be blocked in several days. There’s not a doubt in my mind that a part of me thought that it really could be done all in one day if I just tried harder and was more efficient.

Next up, this newsletter. (August 2023 - Present)

My increased resistance to writing was a topic that came up several times in my journal this year. I’ve considered that maybe I was wrong about reviving this newsletter and that I actually don’t enjoy writing very much.

I tried to think if there was a time when I did enjoy writing, and I remembered my Substack. I decided to go back and look through the posts to see if they could shed some light on why I’m having trouble writing.

I was astounded by the difference in tone and style of the writing compared to this newsletter. It was almost like they were written by two different people. I decided to dig a little deeper and go back to the first email I sent after I merged my Substack and art newsletter subscribers together into one list.

At the very end of that email, I said:

“I fully admit that I’m still on shaky ground here and likely won’t be writing on any sort of regular schedule for a month or two. I will be developing some sort of schedule, though, since that helps me keep track of time. Without a schedule months go by and eventually I realize I haven’t done anything. There’s a pretty good chance I won’t be sticking to a specific theme initially. While sometimes limitations are helpful, with writing I’ve found that exploring different topics tends to keep me motivated.”

My assessment: I have to give myself credit for showing up authentically in that email and admitting I didn’t have a plan, but reading that back is painful. That paragraph boils down to, “I have no idea what I’m going to write about and no clue what the schedule is going to be.”

My resistance to writing this newsletter isn’t because I don’t like writing, it’s because I don’t have any structure for it that would make writing it a bit easier.

And finally, mandalas, YouTube, and projection mapping. (January 2024 - Present)

This is honestly the only thing I think I’ve done right this year, however I acknowledge that like everything else, it’s been completely all over the place. I loved posting the mandala animations to YouTube, but once again I overestimated my capabilities and underestimated the amount of work involved. Posting one video a week was incredibly difficult. As soon as I was finished with one I’d have to immediately start planning out the next in order to stay on schedule. It wouldn’t have been too much of a problem if I was getting paid for the work, but I wasn’t, so I had to take a step back.

I’m proud of myself for not only taking a leap and projection mapping for the first time at Greenway Glow, but also for diving into 3D modeling to try to make the mandalas more engaging. Below is a little practice piece I did to see if I could apply what I’ve learned so far to a small mandala section.

My overall 2024 review and thoughts on where I need to make changes:

I need a different brain. The end.

All joking aside, it’s difficult to put all of the pieces together and see that, in the words of Taylor Swift, “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”

I’m the source of my professional grief, again.

The good news is that even though I find myself in a familiar space, unlike when I was stuck here over a decade ago I now know that I’m here because of my neurodivergence. I can only do my best to adapt in the hopes of not ending up here again, but I simply can’t change how my brain is wired.

As I mentioned in the snippet of the Patreon post above, I have a long list of tools to help me work through things when I’m struggling, but that requires having the energy and the presence of mind to notice that I’m struggling and to remember that I have that list. I’m simply not always that self aware in the moment, especially if I’m under a lot of stress. It’s usually only in reflection after the dust has settled that I can look at my behaviors objectively and see where I needed help.

With the dust of 2024 settled around me, I’ve been more slow and deliberate with my 2025 planning. I’m using my word of 2024, resist, to resist the invisible pressure to announce something immediately at the beginning of January.

I’m still being hard on myself, but in a good way. I introduced a restriction that any ideas I come up with have to tie into the mandala work and this newsletter. If it doesn’t bring those two things together and add form to them, it gets discarded. I’ve also been asking myself a lot of questions and frequently challenging my ideas with “why” and “how.”

My ADHD brain HATES this, but the rest of my brain is loving it. I’m excited that I’m finally taking things that I can easily do for others, like creating a structure and plan to follow, and trying to do them for myself.

I will never stop saying how grateful I am that you’re here. It means the world to me that I can be an absolute tornado in my business and people still show up. Your support truly keeps me going.

Until the next newsletter, have a wonderful holiday season!

Be well,
Giesla

^{As part of my acknowledgment that I tend to get in my own way, I’m looking to sign up for some coaching to help me work through what I’m developing. If you’re looking forward to what I’m planning and you’re in the place to help alleviate the cost of the sessions, make a donation!}