#farewell2016

As I sit here after a full day of writing.. (yay), and I attempt to move on to drawing (key word here is attempt) and I left still reflecting 2016. 

Some 2016 has come to an end.  It was not the greatest year.  2016 was a year that I lost a job. I lost a friend.  Money got super tight. My very newish car got hit. Creatively I’ve been a bit wounded as well. 

And then all the celebrity deaths. Death is never justified, but sometimes people do pass too soon. Carrie Fisher in-particular, along with Prince and Bowie, were pretty damn huge to me.  Fisher even more so, as it felt like her entire life she had this struggle, and it wasn’t a private one to deal with, but on the public stage. And she had her amazing wit and mind to combat it all. Truly, it was a wonderful to see her start to become her own person in today’s culture.  Kinda like Shatner, who rose from the ‘the bad actor from that sci-fi show’.  He became well loved, a classic actor from Boston Legal, and yada-yada-yada. And now the sci-fi show is considered kinda cool. 

Same thing was happening with Carrie Fisher.

Hrm. What else happened in 2016?  Well… I realized that trying to be a creative person and trying to be a creative person in a relationship is downright exhausting.  I love both, but the two come into conflict with each other a great deal.  It also doesn’t help that creatively I work on a weird lazy as it comes level, that if I try to push creativity sometimes, and by creativity here, I am meaning ‘writing’, it feels forced and it just doesn’t work as well to me. Or for audiences as well. But you get the point.

On top of that, I’ve realized in 2016 that I still have issue with criticism. Now, constructive criticism I am taking better, though there is still room for improvement BUT-  I am not good with people in general just talking about how they feel in general in a hurtful way.  Instead of just confronting it and letting it go, it is really eating at me and influencing me creatively which is no good. No bueno! Now, some of this is tied to the fact of how I am wired as a human being… I’ve always been a passive aggressive person so it’s more of a matter of… how do you not only combat that in your personal life, but also creatively as a creative person?

So with all that internal creative strife, now try to balance a wedding (one of the few good things that happened this year), and the general holiday season around that, and the whole concept of date nights, and spending time with your loved one. 

My wife, god love her, considers sittin in the same room while I nap or she naps ‘quality time’.  If I am writing though, it urks me. Creatively, I find it hard to write when someone is doing that.  Or she wants background noise on. And I don’t work well like that.  So then I am sequestered in my man cave/basement for hours at a time to work.  But my creative process is I procrastinate until it all comes pouring out.  So then… with my dwindling amount of time available… how will that work?

And we haven’t even thrown kids into the mix yet. Oo boy. And then there’s that.

So far, my procrastination has worked out wonderfully.  Hm. Maybe I feel the need to draw now?