I’ve had an epiphany about what has been holding me back in my creative life.
Being chronically online has dis-regulated my nervous system. I feel anxiety about posting my work, which has impacted my ability to create.
So in retaliation, I’ve created this personal diary, so that I have a body of work that is evident to me, and not due to a pressure cooker of online presence.
This will be as ugly or as well-drawn as I want it to be. It is freeing just to have a space where it’s literally a collection of my thoughts, that I can just vomit into a void of space. And voila – it’s recorded as my body of work. 🤪😆
I feel like McFly’s expression is how I feel when posting haha!
But in all seriousness, this makeover is to protect me and allow me creative freedom; to allow me to retreat my inner world without guilt and no longer hold responsibility or commitment to responding to the outer world. If I think about it, a lot of actors probably live this way. That is why they are not on social media, or watch themselves in their movies. They just fully commit to the practice of acting.
This will be a challenging process to go through – to untangle myself from social media, because it had inevitably has become my life and I no longer want it to be. I felt like everything I was experiencing on life was either a personal account or thoughts of someone else, rather than balaning it with my own physical experience of people and environment and creating from that.
Oh before I forget, I want to get this on Kindle – it’s like $57, but if I were to get the paperback it would be over $300. It is a philosopher’s philosophical account of chronic illness, and I feel important to the understanding of creating graphic medicine.
Anyway back to why I’ve created this, I realised I was bored, or that the feeling of being excited about what I’m creating just hasn’t returned to me. I have everything I could possibly want, and yet I don’t feel that excitement I used to when drawing comics and posting online. And then I realised (with the help of ChatGPT) that I’ve been taking on two roles:
ARTIST: internal, solitary and private
PUBLIC FIGURE: outward, responsible, relational
And it really is in opposition to how someone who is 2E should be living their life.
So because:
My audience has grown = more emotional input
My work has found its meaning = people have emotional attachment to it
My empathy is high = I FEEL obligated
My health and energy is finite = the cost is clearer
The novelty is gone = the labour remains
So instead of:
“I’m excited to share!!”
All I think about is:
“I’m about to open a door I can’t close. ARGH. UGH.”
No wonder I have lost the creative twinkle. ✨
ANYWAY. I’m going to TAKE IT BACK.
NO more kow-towing to invisible trolls and feeling the endless leak of online interactions. Sorry, not sorry, but I’m an artist that DESERVES to protect her internal world and space, and not having to respond continuously to people. Especially if I’m freely sharing my creative work with them.
I’M TAKING BACK THE CONTROL.
On the other hand, Geneva June 2025 made me realise I absolutely THRIVE on in-person interactions. SO I want to incorporate MORE of this through:
-Talks
-Conferences
-Workshops
-Exhibitions
-Book events
-Panels
I WILL create the life and creative flow I dream of having.