Art keeps me focused and feeling alive, but life is so hard.
Welcome to the most sobering and emotional post I’ve ever shared on this site. If you’ve wanted deep lore on where I’m coming from as a creative…
This year I started this blog to talk about lots of stuff: D&D and Tabletop roleplaying games, game design and how I prepare my own games, announcing my own projects to both keep me on task and to get feedback from other great creators.
And, of course, deep down I started a blog because I wanted people to look at what I’ve made. I did a 4 year degree program for English (Creative Writing) - hoping it would open other doors for me as well as make me become the kind of person I wanted to be - and we focused on Fiction writing there. Carver and Hemingway, really heavy on the “economy of words” and telling great Fiction with a capital F. It was great instruction, but isolating in the end.
Even as I miss workshops and the social aspect of critique, even as I shake my head at the horror stories I could tell about the bad ones, I’ve come to realize how unfulfilling the pursuit itself is. Short stories are great to train your brain to tell focused, fast-paced stories….but there’s no success in it. I don’t even mean “money” - of course there’s also little to no money in short stories - but it’s this solitary, lonely pursuit that’s like staring down the barrel of a gun, and you have no idea how many months or years will pass before it fires.
When the pandemic began I really tried to draft my first novel. I used NaNoWriMo to jump start the project and keep me on task, but after the event ended and I threw it in a drawer, a quick “cool off” turned into a glacial period. I couldn’t pick it back up, I couldn’t make myself dive back into a project that had filled me with so much purpose in an uncertain world, where I was taking time off from university and living back in my childhood bedroom with my parents. That purpose was there for the briefest of moments, and then it left as quickly as it came, becoming a herculean ordeal.
It’s been so hard to create…anything these past few years. For so long I’ve called myself a writer, but that self-flagellating ideal of a lonely, locked up artist just isn’t healthy, it isn’t sustainable, and I only realized that when the whole world became lonely and alone almost overnight.
I keep telling my friends that the past 3 years have felt like 10. It’s so easy to feel lost when the world comes to a screeching halt in what’s supposed to be the true beginning of your adulthood…but the pandemic also coincided with the beginning of my health issues.
My experience of Summer 2020 - besides hyperventilating because people I knew and cared about were being teargassed in the streets - was also the beginning of chronic pain. I learned I have degenerative disc disease after I fell ass-backwards down a flight of stairs, and couldn’t walk without losing feeling in my left leg. It was sobering, to put it lightly. Having just been ripped out of college, taken from an environment where I could walk everywhere and exercise on my own schedule, to being (almost) unable to walk…I still struggle with how I’ve changed since then.
I started walking in graveyards. I started listening to 80s post-punk and tried to figure out a kind of masculinity that’d let me feel comfortable in makeup. I tried to put myself into art to distract from how low I’d fallen, emotionally and physically, to little success. I questioned if I’d been somewhere on the Autism Spectrum my whole life.
And I wept. A fair bit.
Another health issue developing at this time was ADHD. It’s a borderline cliche topic in some circles now, but I genuinely had a hard time wrapping my brain around how much my own brain had changed. “Wasn’t ADHD a learning disability?”
No, no it was not. “Why am I experiencing this now, when I went through most of university with good grades?”
I don’t know. And I’ll likely never learn, because the universe isn’t so neat and simple. I just am this way. I took it as an end to part of my story in many ways, but endings always herald new beginnings. Like the stretching that I’m supposed to do every day to keep my body in check, the mind must be kept in check, and that’s okay. Based on every source of media I’ve ever been exposed to, my body is supposed to be immortal through at least my 20s, and only breaking down in my 30s. It’s not fair.
I write this to catch a glimpse at the uncertainty and rage I’ve been feeling…but now I just shrug. Life isn’t fair. I have my whole life ahead of me, and I get to decide whether I put effort into trying to be happy and healthy.
Thankfully in the past year I’ve become medicated for the ADHD symptoms. I started with Adderall XR (which made me irritable) and now am on Vyvanse. (Highly recommend, btw.)
This has been the greatest change to my life in the past 3 years. I feel much more focused at work and in my personal life. I can start and finish projects, set and meet deadlines and goals. More than just becoming productive, I have started to live an authentically creative life. The kind of life that I’d dreamed about in bed rest and while limping through graveyards, where I can write and share it with others.
A life with purpose to it, even as the world around me is so uncertain.
That’s why I gave blogging another chance. I saw the impending heat-death of Twitter (still ongoing, I believe), moved from Wordpress to Substack, and have been having a much greater time reaching an audience. I know how to advertise on social media now, I’m much more of an adult with the confidence that both myself and my art have value, even as there is a sea of incredible artists who all deserve time under the sun. The faction article I did back in January did really great numbers, and I’ve almost started to chase that high.
There’s analytical power in targeting (sic. tagging) Dungeons & Dragons, and I struggle with thinking if I should cater to that audience, even as I had very strong words about moving away from this monolith and The Seattle Company that owns it. My Dungeon23 articles have not done very well outside my current following, but I persist because I love this project so much. The daily goals held me maintain progress on other tasks as well, it drives me to do even more.
I feel the ebb and flow of trying to put out weekly articles, tamping down my tendency to overwrite or over-explain when I know in my mind that people will get it, I don’t have to prove myself. I feel like a phony or a chump continuing to make announcements of projects in development, afraid deep down to share that I’m working on something and never truly finish it.
And yet ~
Some days are harder than others. I’ve had an absolutely terrible 2023. I lean into my projects to try and stave off the despair - this blog, Dungeon23, Project Unseen, my own home campaign - and sometimes making art still feels impossible. I’m in such a better place, made something good with my life, and yet there is still hardship.
“The light of the mind alone cannot burn away all darkness”.
My partner and I of 2 years broke up (mutually, mostly). Our shared kitten is likely to leave my life for them, and a little piece of my heart will go with him. We still live together, and I struggle to find another place to live. My day job gets harder as I do the work of 2-3 people at a coffee shop, a job that I genuinely like and struggle not to feel resentment towards.
And after all my progress, my nonlinear march in and out of the graveyard of my own life continues to find head-markers of hardship. The past 2 weeks have been stolen from me by real life obligations to try and keep paying my bills, to try and find a new place to live, and I haven’t even been able to use artistic creation as a coping method.
I started a book I’d pre-ordered a year in advance and had to put it down for lack of time. I keep putting down Dungeon23, and I’m worried that a bad week has already robbed me of my daily habit. I had a hat trick of bad days at the cafe and felt physically in danger for the first time ever. I go home to recover from my exhaustion and I stare into my phone, burning away the time to wait for a change that won’t come because I’m not actually working towards it.
My phone is truly my wizard’s orb, and as I ponder into it I see visions of madness and delusion. Losing attention span and taking in all of the violence and chaos of the modern world truly afflicts me with madness. The human brain was not meant to comprehend even a dewdrop of the ocean of human suffering that can exist at any given time, and it’s beamed directly into all our pockets.
My Google Pixel is my fucking Palantír.
I put this out into the ether because I know I am not alone in this struggle. So many artists across disciplines and interests struggle the same way. We cannot suffer in silence, nor can we cannot allow ourselves to believe that widespread issues are singularly our own. And, despite my doom and gloom…
I feel better for having shared. Despite my long struggles and the despair that rears its ugly head every time I grow comfortable…I feel comfort in the idea that in the end, there is light in the darkness. I am a melancholic person no matter my comfort or energy level, but I keep a kind of perverse death-drive in my pursuit of happiness and success. I’m still alive - no matter how much darkness there is, the light of my life still burns on. Whether it takes joy or spite to keep me going, the path remains.
The path to continuing to write. The path to a healthy body that doesn’t ache and can walk. The path to a mind unburdened by fog and can create.
Love in its myriad forms sustains me and helps me drive out the dark. The love for my first kitten, Ghost. The love of my family. The love of my friends, who encourage me and challenge me in the best ways possible. Friends who eagerly come to D&D night after these 3 years that have both felt like 10 and no time at all…
Hardship continues to rear its many heads, but with hardship comes ease.
I pick my pencil and my Chromebook back up, and I continue where I left off. I put more safeguards on my Palant-I mean phone- and keep away distractions.
Thank you for reading, and I hope strength and patience comes with your own hardships.
