endings, beginnings and adrift middles

draft

This is a post from my blog archive (which used to live on my website) I wrote it almost exactly a year ago, at the beginning of last May. At the time, I had just finished the MA in Children’s Book Illustration that I had been doing for the last two and a half years, and I was feeling that I was probably at the beginning of my new life as an illustrator. It was actually part of a post about a hashtag I hosted on Instagram called #meanderingmay - feel free to check out the hashtag, and join in if you fancy - it would be rather wonderfully meandering of you if you wanted to do it not actually during May! I did consider doing it again this year, but time ran away from me. Anyway, I have edited out the part about #meanderingmay, and expanded it quite a bit with some new thoughts and created some themed headings. I hope this resonates with some of you. I know some of the students I was teaching over the last few terms will be facing what could be seen as a bit of a daunting summer ahead, where they have been asked to keep working, but they also have to juggle ‘normal’ life as well - summer holidays, and for the parents, their children will be off school - plus, there’s no teaching, and therefore no structure, and it can be easy to put off the work, just for a bit… and before you know it, it’s nearly the end of the summer. So this is partly for them and for anyone working independently, or struggling to create without a commission or immediate deadlines…

I hope you enjoy reading!

On endings

Endings can be a strange beast. A potent mix of emotions that can leave you unsure where to go next. When I finished the MA, I remember it left me feeling at once exhausted and energized; with a feeling of mourning, and that tingle of excitement you get at the start of something new. I also felt completely lost - dizzy with the array of possibilities ahead of me. Where would I start? What to focus on first? I am easily distracted at the best of times, but with nothing to focus on at all for the immediate future, I felt untethered and woozy with possibility. If you were filming it as a moment, the camera would pan upwards away from me, overhead, and then spin out of control until everything blurs, like that shot at the end of The Matrix, where Keanu shoots up into space, except I am not Keanu Reeves, and I stay on the ground while the camera shoots upwards without me!

with all the projects and books I created on the MA at our graduation show!

Finding focus

Suffice to say, I needed something to focus on, and I decided that, for the time being, I would focus on the day-to-day.

Step 1: eating, sleeping, taking walks, and generally looking after myself.

Step 2: find something creative to focus on. Although I had just spent some of the most creative years of my life doing the MA, the last few months had been filled with admin tasks around the MA graduation exhibition and participating in the MA Bologna Bookfair stand.

I knew it needed to feel like a project with forward momentum, so I decided to start a #50dayproject. I had done a #100dayproject the summer before, which had been a project I set for myself during that summer period on the MA (that I mentioned in my introduction). It was the perfect summer project, as it kept up my daily sketching habit, so I didn’t end up too rusty by the end, and it actually was part of a huge breakthrough I had on the MA - I’ve written about it here. So I thought: hey, I’ll do a #50dayproject, that will see me through this weird time! And it worked, in part… but these projects aren’t always straightforward, and as I discovered when I did the #100dayproject, the beginning is always particularly tricky.

finding fluency

I felt immediately out of my comfort zone, oscillating between resistance, negative voices in my head, telling me what I was producing was crap - and what sort of artist did I think I was anyway! And feeling generally timid and unconfident. But that’s the thing about working every day - it works as a method of practice, quite literally, and you swiftly begin to improve. I found I would have days of creeping along, making timid work, and then suddenly bound ahead in confidence and ability, then crawl back again and hide from that feeling of, dare I even feel it…success…and then when I felt brave enough, tiptoe out and try again, until, suddenly, I found I was in the Zone (oh yeah, the Zone!), and I began questioning things less, doubting less, thinking less… I think of it as being more fluent. Like you would be if you practiced fingerpicking on the guitar every day.

some of the artwork from my #50dayproject

endings…and beginning again…again…and again…!

This was the part in the original post when I talked about #meanderingmay, which I set up because I had finished the #50dayproject and I was untethered again. I’ve always been one of those people who will be really good at working on a project with a deadline and goal. Like when I did the Race for Life a (fair) few years ago. I was really good at the training (well, pretty good) and I enjoyed feeling the progression from absolute beginner to being able to run for longer than ten seconds, to actually running a 5K distance. But can you guess what happened after I ran the race? I stopped!! In time, I did pick it up again, and became a sort of fairweather runner! I will have little phases, and will have periods of pretty good consistency ( I am in one of those now), but nothing like the original commitment and enthusiasm I had for the original race. And I am like that in all walks of life.

some images from #meanderingmay

A segue

I’ve been learning about the nervous system recently. I’m still an absolute beginner in my knowledge, but it’s been really useful to understand more about it. I think the two big takeaways that have really helped me are:

1. our body is programmed to conserve energy to run away from predators, so basically, it’s normal that half the time we feel resistant to doing things that require effort. I gently note to myself that it is natural to feel like that, that there’s no preditor to conserve my energy for, and I just need to push past that initial resistance.

2. Our nervous systems tend to get activated when there’s no actual danger. In prehistoric times, when we were lizards, we developed the flight/flight response, to keep us safe from predators. It was super useful then, but now we can get activated totally unnecesarily. For example, when I have a deadline, and feel behind, I can go into flight mode by wanting to avoid the work, because avoiding it means I don’t activate my nervous system more, which feels pretty crappy: racing heartbeat, racing thoughts, tensed muscles (ready to run away from the preditor!).

Finding the energy, and beginning again

So where does that leave things…? Well, when you find yourself adrift after a project has ended, or should I say, when I find myself adrift after a project has ended, I try and remind myself that I am avoiding new work projects, even lovely creative ones, because they feel like too much effort. But if I can push through, I will create a bit of momentum, and in a way, literally get the ball rolling again. And once it’s rolling, it’s much easier to keep moving forward. I think I am better now at pushing past resistance, just by noting that I am feeling resistant. I’m endlessly fascinated by creative resistence. This is a post I wrote about creative resistance last October. It’s interesting to read it, as it’s basically saying lots of the things I am saying in this post, but I’ve not linked it to the nervous system there.

Side note

I can also highly recommend mindfulness for helping you notice how you are feeling. I came across the book: Mindfulness. A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World (which had a CD in the back when I bought it, which shows how long ago it was. At a guess, it was about fifteen years ago?). It’s basically a three-month course on mindfulness. Actually, it’s another example of something I did splendidly with the help of the book - I completed the course - but I go in and out of phases of meditating now. But I’m not exaggerating when I say it changed my life! I genuinely think it helped lift me out of being IN my thoughts all the time, in reactive mode, you could say. Mindfulness helped me step away from my thoughts and helped me become able to recognise what I was feeling. The metaphor I love is that it’s like difference between standing in the rain, and being indoors and looking at the rain through a window. It’s been a game changer, learning how to notice my thoughts and feelings. Of course, these things - learning about my nervous system, and learning to meditate - don’t mean that it’s all hunky dory! I am often in a massive anxiety state or lost in my thoughts, but they have definitely become tools that help, with a fair wind blowing.

Endings

and so, in a lovely meta fashion, we have come to the end of this post! It’s time to end this piece of writing, but now I know that I will write another one, and another one, because next time I feel resistance - which I will - I will remind myself that it is my lizard brain trying to conserve energy, but there’s no sabre-toothed tiger on the horizon, and I can use that energy right now, on writing the next post!

I hope you have been able to follow along with the strange meanderings of my brain. I really enjoy thinking about creative processes, and I hope it’s useful in some way or another for you to read them!

Ella xx

P.S. Another project I created for myself after #meanderingmay was #50daydrawpeople - a commitment to draw people everyday for 50 days (it was originally supposed to be 100 days, but I began to work on the actual book commissions I had, and I was struggling to juggle them together, so I gracefully bowed out on day 50!

some images from #100daydrawpeople, aka #50daydrawpeople!

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