I’ve been sober for six out of seven days. The first full workweek without weed in quite a while. My dreams are strange and vivid and sometimes a little bit too on the nose.
I spent Monday and Tuesday like a leaf in the winds of my ever-shifting interest. Driven this way and that, by Wednesday I was sick and burnt-out, empty. Thursday and Friday were small efforts of restraint, with small successes that nevertheless left me feeling scattered and unsatisfied.
The project I was so excited about last week has undergone some transformations, but my heart is not in it. I can no longer see the point in the larger idea. That will come back, in time, but for now it’s gone and nothing I do will bring it back by force. Like all larger projects, it needs to be prototyped properly, but I’ve been approaching it as if I was only a few weeks away from full production. Every decision was too heavy, too important to just be quickly explored.
This is the problem in general: I’ve stopped releasing small things. I have stopped finishing.
My last year was a series of exciting new experiences, constantly pulling my attention into real life. The last few months were about dealing with the various types of fallout caused by this large-scale recklessness and now, as everything has calmed down (and I am finally reasonably sober) I find myself without fertile soil from which to operate.
This is why I write these blogs. Things like this become only apparent to me as I type them out.
I have stopped finishing things. The things I have finished in the past do not grant me some sort of super-natural ability to pull projects out of thing air. It’s a sort of complacency and arrogance, at least partially born from my reflections on my creative process, from over-abstraction.
Just because I sometimes opened Construct and made some garden-prototypes does not mean that I am ready to launch into a garden project heads on. I have not finished anything about gardens yet, I have never pushed something garden-like out into the world. It’s only when I can look back on my work that I have any chance of even partially understanding it, of developing it further.
It’s time to release again, relentlessly.
Besides this realisation, the good thing about this week is that I’ve started doing serious research into narrative design again, by simply reading all of Emily Short’s blog. I have also actually managed to find the calm and boredom that I was craving so desperately just one month ago. It felt oppressive and dull, but that might also just be the lack of weed. I’m also finally starting to work out again. I want to try and become buff, just to see if I can do it and how that feels.
There is something to be said about my inability to just exist calmy, about my need to always have some sort of project ongoing, some sort of goal to reach, but that is a topic for another day.
Until next week, when I will hopefully be able to look back on something that has been released, something that has been realised, something real.