Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. How long has it been since my last confession? Jesus, it’s been about 3 months!
Well, look, a few things have gotten in the way of my Substack, mostly moving home.
Actually, it’s more than just this Substack that has suffered - I’ve all but stopped my personal creative output, and whilst I’m still chugging along at work, I am questioning whether this personal switch off something I should be seriously concerned about.
Stress List
Some sources suggest that moving home is the third most stressful thing you can experience after the Death of a Loved One, and Divorce. But I’m sure being caught in a bush fire would top both of those examples. I actually almost got caught in a bushfire recently, and I think that was far more stressful than the death of Peanuts, our family dog in 1999.
But sure, Moving is up there, and this particular move was exceedingly stressful. I’ve moved more times than I’ve been to the dentist, sometimes relocating to countries I’d never even visited before, but for some reason, despite this move being just 500 meters up the road, it was one of the toughest ones I’ve ever experienced.
Most of the challenge revolved around two things - firstly moving from a house and into an apartment, and secondly moving from a house that was way too large.
Not way too large for us, just way to large for an average family of four, plus dog.
Sadly, we’re far from average. We have successfully bred a group of hoarders, and I was also working from home in a sort of annex we called the Studio - a space large enough for a desk each, several printers (including Bianca the Risograph), and more equipment than an well stocked art store.
Our downsize meant losing a huge volume of stuff, everything from furniture (who needs two sofas anyway?), clothing, toys and games, stuff from the garden (goodbye BBQ, picnic bench and trampoline), but after no less than SEVEN trips to the OpShop with our estate car full to the gunnels with the seats flat, we finally managed to squeeze what was left into a space half the size of the old house.
Yes, we do still have a studio! Of sorts. Well, ok, it’s a massive compromise - our Studio 2.0 is actually more of a crawl space than a room, and whilst there are a few desks up there, there is the constant threat of knocking yourself out on the low beams, and worst of all, sadly Bianca the Risograph did have to be sold, because there was no way her huge girth would go through the rather tiny doorway.
As moving day drew ever closer, I found myself more and more tied up with the details, and due to timing, I found all extra curricular creative fun had to stop.
A Change Is As Good As A Rest
They say a change is as good as a rest, but honestly, I felt it necessary to do both in this instance because boy, was I was burnt out! Once we moved in, the focus that had been spent squeezing everything into small brown boxes was reversed, as we tried to work out how to unpack it all. Suffice to say, we really didn’t unpack it all - much is still packed up because we ran out of space, leaving us in a bit of a pickle.
The apartment was certainly a change - and in a strange sort of way, a good one, because I finally seemed to have an excuse to ‘not bother’ with the stuff I didn’t have capacity for. I was in no mindset to be creative, both exhausted physically (we’d moved most of the stuff ourselves, untrusting of clumsy removalists), but also mentally, having downgraded so much stuff.
So I slipped into a sort of creative coma - certainly on a personal creative level anyway. My work still gets done, but when it comes to drawing my own fun stuff, it’s all but stopped.
I’m drained. And if the truth be told, I quite like that feeling.
Connecting With Calamity
We’ve got a Fox Terrier called Calamity. She’s 4 years old, and when we got her, the breeder said we’d struggle to trust her off leash until she was about 4 years old.
The new apartment complex has communal gardens, and taking her for a wee before bedtime, I found myself just not bothering with the leash. She was a bit baffled by this at first, a sort of new found freedom that she’d never had before, coupled with the ability to sniff to her hearts content.
Instead of dragging her away from lamp-posts or other dogs in the street, I was finding myself just sitting on the bench and watching her be herself. And then once she’d finished sniffing, she’d stand and watch the world go by. She seemed happier than usual, and would occasionally spring into her killer mode if a bird fluttered down, and then back to being relaxed - taking in a deep breath, nose in the air, and generally just looking chilled.
It got me thinking that what she was doing was what I liked doing - being distracted now and then, but basically just watching the world go by to try and make sense of it. And over the next few weeks, whenever she saw me going to the bins downstairs, she’d sneak out of the front door behind me, off leash, sticking to me like glue.
Then I started to do it at the park - letting her off leash for short bursts, and calling her back. She seemed to be really connecting with me by looking at me for permission to go and run with the swallows, but more or less always coming back on command. And it’s changed our relationship.
I think I’ve become more dog-like, namely, someone who actually quite likes being more lazy. But feeding my creativity hasn’t been easy with this new found love of lounging around. I actually don’t ever remember being lazy like this before, so I’m still figuring out how it works. But I’m watching the dog for more clues.
Bed, it seems, is a good way to relax. She’s always been allowed on the bed, and disgusting as it is, I actually quite like the connection with her; she wakes me up almost every night to get under the duvet by prodding me with her little paw, front leg outstretched, giving me the death stare until I lift the doona for her. She then wriggles down and curls up, usually on my feet. It’s like I’m 10 years old again. And I don’t care what people think.
Not caring what people think is actually becoming quite a nice way of existing for me. I don’t mean in a grumpy old fucker type of way - although I’ve always been a bit that way wired - I mean in a more modern Social Media sort of way.
Goodbye Social Media
Wow, did I really stop the infuriatingly hungry Instagram algorithm from stealing my focus? Well, kind of, yes. I’m sure it’ll be very short lived - it wasn’t a proactive choice by any means - but in the world of fast paced interactions, ducking out means basically having no real connection at all. So I’m sure I’ll be back eating it’s poisonous berries again soon.
What has happened, certainly for now, is I’ve stopped giving a shit about its relevance to my life. Without the capacity to actually produce anything to feed it with, I’ve found there’s nothing to worry about - no comments to respond to, no anxiety with the lack of likes.
I’m still doom scrolling - that’s a dirty habit to break - but for the time being, I’ve stopped caring about being held captive by it. I’ve stopped caring about trying desperately to keep up.
And have people missed me? Erm, no, of course not. No one has even noticed, because to most people, I’m irrelevant. I’m only relevant to me and those real people around me like my family and close friends. So that pressure we place on ourselves to be involved online is just that, self inflicted pressure in a fake world.
There was one person who did message me, to ask how I was and if I was ok, and it didn’t come from a source I would have expected at all - so some people clearly DO notice when you check out, and maybe do care. But most don’t, let’s be honest.
TV In The Bedroom
The new apartment had one of those nasty brackets on the wall for a TV. It had some power points above it, deliberately placed to plug the screen in without having trailing wires, and it kept saying to me “Steve, buy a TV and hide this mess”.
The last time I had a TV in the bedroom was when I lived at home with Mum and Dad - a necessary investment to have personal space and freedom, so I wasn’t subjected to endless nights of Coronation Street and Newsnight.
My wife thought it was a terrible idea, and still does, but I didn’t care, so I got one, stuck it up, and suddenly found an even deeper connection with Calamity as she was far more comfy upstairs in the bed next to me, than in her own tiny dog bed alone.
And my daughter did too - a 9 year old who’d never seen such luxury as a TV in the bedroom before. She was baffled about this change just as the dog had been about the lack of leash - a seemingly amazing new way to up her screen-time allocation, from the comfort of a super-kingsize bed.
We started watching action movies together, with the dog curled up at our feet, fast asleep. It was like we were on holiday at the Ritz Carlton, lapping up every second of things we didn’t usually get to do. But you can’t lie around in bed all day… there’s work to be done, right?
More Fun At Work
Could it be true? Am I having more fun at work because of a lack of creativity outside of it’s confines? Well, yeah, maybe.
It might be the work I’ve been doing; in the last few months, a lot of it has been less ‘blue sky thinking’ of big brand creation, and more of the technically challenging stuff like setting copy heavy documents and range rollouts, all following set templates. All still challenging design work, but not work that uses the wildest parts of my mind.
But whereas in the past, I might have found this sort of work a bit boring, I’ve genuinely loved it. I’ve found myself taking more time to really consider everything with a deeper level of detail.
There’s a part of me that analyzes this apparent happiness at work being connected with the real need to rest my head - yes, it’s challenging, but it’s far more mathematical than creative, requiring a very different part of my brain to process the briefs. Am I missing the really open design briefs to push my creativity? I’m bound by a code that says the answer is ‘yes’, but then again, if I’m being honest with myself, perhaps that answer is more of a ‘mmm, maybe?’.
What It All Means
I think where I net out is that when things are different, we live our best lives - a change really is as good as a rest, and a rest helps us understand what it is that we really want to do. Turning the noise down on the bullshit I face every day helps me see that there’s a whole world out there.
Whilst it might appear that I’m being lazy at the moment, and not being particularly creative, what I HAVE started to notice is magical connections with things that I hadn’t stopped to really notice before. Or that just didn’t happen at all.
Things like how my 9 year old daughter seems to have quite a passion of quite gory movies I would never have thought suitable for her; we watched Jaws together last week - a movie I was terrified by as a child, and to some extent still am, and yet that she thinks is clearly ‘fake as, Dad!’.
We also watched ‘The Brain That Wouldn’t Die’, a 1962 black and white B Movie about a doctor who managed to keep the decapitated head of his fiancé alive after a terrible car accident, and I know she’d never have endured that if we hadn’t been tucked up in bed. She was intrigued not only by it’s random storyline, but also by how powerful imagery and story telling could be without CGI or fast paced action. My daughter, who only knows an online existence in a hyperactive world was reminding me about just how creative the world was in the past - in simpler times.
And going back to Calamity being off leash at the park, chasing the swallows, and generally just loving her new found freedom - it was such a simple thing to watch and be fed by - the way the birds would tease her, coming close, and then zipping off quickly. Her looking across at me as if to say ‘I nearly got that one, did you see’. It was, and still is, beautiful, and something we now do every day.
And it’s feeding my soul so much. Which of course, is the very fuel that I need to feed my creative mind.
Maybe I’m just getting old - sitting here in my pyjamas? Should I be worried about falling too far from the machine we’ve all been so brainwashed to feed? Mmm, right now, in this very moment, I seriously couldn’t care less!
Over to you!
I’d love to hear from you if you relate to anything written in this post.
Have you ever turned off your creative taps, and was that a deliberate action, or something forced by outside influences?
Have you ever suffered from creative burnout?
How is Social Media ruining your day?
What advice can you offer to help people find their mojo again?