I have had serious motivational problems with this project. It was offered to me around Christmastime, when I was already busy with other commissions, but I said that I would get started regardless. My first draft came with such smoothness, ease, and aplomb that I haven't been able to reproduce those results in a cleaned-up final format. Furthermore, the deadline of "whenever" and total creative control - from illustration style to number of pages to grammatical editing - have been oddly damning. It's sad when a project that starts out so fun and breezy turns into an object of dread and pressure. I literally wake up and think, "oh, God, I need to work on that" and throw the covers over my head. That's the sort of guilt I tend to experience: one that's so deep that it paralyzes and thereby prevents any progress from actually occurring!
The more time passes, the more I realize my bipolar disorder - diagnosed only a few years ago -has been the constant life-and-death cycle of my creative life. The euphoria of a new idea - hurling myself headlong into developing anything from a comic book to an operatic suite - quickly followed by the deep, sinking depression of perceived "failure" - wherein I can barely summon the motivation to play video games or feed myself - makes for one difficult process. I have been struggling a great deal in the past few weeks, trying to grasp what it will take to find the middle ground between these two stages. But the fact is, I've never found one for longer than a day or two. I can't consider myself a "professional" artist, nor expect "professional" results, until I can firmly take my mental wellness in hand. It's been a long process, and will continue to be so... as frustrating as that is to admit. I would love to think that if I did X and Y, art would just flow out of me eight hours a day and I would be blissfully happy. It's going to be more like A-Z, in some agonizingly encoded order. And maybe even then, it will be 2 hours a week. I just don't know.
Patience.
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