Like many blog posts, this one has been started and stopped many times.
There's always a part of me that looks at blog posts with a sense of "nobody cares about this" or "isn't this just whining" or "a post about excuses for not making content is not content."
But part of the reason I've started and restarted this particular update is because my thinking keeps changing on the matter, so then what I wrote before doesn't make sense.
One of the problems with blogs, tweets, or even personalized podcast posts is that it's just a moment in time. And unless you do it a lot, it doesn't capture the evolution of thought. So then it just feels like "hey look, here's what I was thinking at the time" and then people go back and be like "wow you're a really inconsistent person, you were doing one thing before and now you're not doing it that way."
Which I suppose is an argument for blogging more often, isn't it? To capture the nuance of thought over time...
I'm getting off track.
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I think I've been depressed since about March.
Well, I knew I was depressed in and around February. Not in any real medical sense of the term, but just felt kinda low and heavy and had a hard time feeling energized and motivated. I got myself out of that really bad low in February, but I don't know that I really "fixed it" in March.
Part of this depression is working in education post-COVID.
I'm not going to get into it in great detail. The only thing you really need to understand about it is that the job is harder - or at the very least a lot different - than it was before.
Pre-COVID, I was a superstar that could make things happen quickly. Post-COVID, everything goes a lot slower, but instead of me looking at the fact that the Post-COVID world is different, I blame myself. I figure that I'm not doing enough, I'm not working fast enough, smart enough, ingenious enough.
Matt once told me I was a perfectionist, and I don't think I ever really saw myself like that. But I do think he was on to something. When it comes to things I care about, like my writing, podcasting, or my work in education, I hold myself to a really high standard.
So in order to handle the fact I wasn't reaching those high standards, I just shut down portions of my personality. I numbed myself, I suppose so I could stay focused on getting the job done, on achieving the goals, on hitting the targets.
I didn't, of course. Because you're never "done" in education.
Nor should you ever want to be, until you retire.
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Throughout June, I knew I had to reconnect to things. I actually started working on it in May. I knew I had to reconnect to the art part of all this stuff I do - the story telling, the podcasting, the writing. The art part - the part that is expressive as a human, the part that heals the soul, the part that helps you process the other events you're going through.
So much of my art identity, though, is based on the fact that I can do so much at a time. I'm a fast writer, I run the podcast by myself, I do all these things alone and people go "wow, Chris, you do all those things alone you're so amazing" and I bask in that.
But I had burned that part out of me trying to do the education work. I couldn't bear to be efficient, procedural, systems-based any more at home. This meant that, realistically, I couldn't do any projects in-progress, including editing the podcast.
(I actually sat down to edit the most recent episode weeks before it came out and physically said "eugh" then closed it. It had nothing to do with the guest, they were great, but this was one of the warning signs that told me I needed to do something different.)
So the first thing I had to do was new work completely disconnected from what I was doing.
I did three things from May through June to help with this.
MUSIC: I saw this doodad on a TikTok video and knew immediately that I had to get one. It's an Orba 2, and it's the most fun thing I've had in a while. It serves as a physical instrument with all sorts of touch responsive things, but also as a sampler and a 4-track recorder. It's been a lot of fun and a new way for me to interact with music - no computer, no instruments that I know how to play, and it has a limited tonal/chordal/scale range, so I can't even get myself overly hung up on making complicated progressions and complicated melodies. All I can do is make fun grooves and that's all I've been doing with it.
PAPERART: I bought this a bit ago. It's been slow-going, but again it's been something I can work on that is completely unconnected to stuff I've already done. But while I was doing this, I started having ideas about making paper cut-out art. I can't even really describe why I came up with this idea, I just found myself really wanting to do it.
So I did.
I bought paper and a cutting mat and an exacto knife and just...started.
It's fun!
WRITING...SORTA: I have an idea for a story I want to write, but I knew that I had to ease my way back into writing. I couldn't use my normal methods.
So I got a big blank sketchbook and some paint markers and just...started building a story in it.
It's the sloppiest, weirdest, most disorganized thing I've ever created, but it's been really good. This story is a little dark but I think it's helping me process some of the harsh stuff I encounter during my day job, which is not something I've been very good at doing. I need to create more art that's just...processing.
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So that's been the last two months for me. As you can see, it's working, as I was happily able to edit and then record another podcast episode, and I'm feeling much better as a human being.
There's a lot of other aspects to it, but that's all I feel like writing about right now.
Study Question: What do you do to reconnect to your artistic self when you’re burned out?