I love how you talk about the different feeling qualities of when work is abandoned, I haven't seen anyone describe it so accurately. I have walked with depression most of my life and the energy evaporating behind something is accurate to my experience, like a car running out of gas. But even years after I've moved past depression dominating my experience, I still notice when I work on something and the energy fades, it feels like you described, even though I wouldn't say I feel depressed, so that's something interesting I'm going to pay attention to.
Thank you so much for reflecting that back to me. I think it's a form of grief and I wish our language had approximately one million more words for all of the different kinds of grief and loss and transition we experience in life.
Thank you for sharing that. Yes, I have come to think of depression as soul grief. It's different than the grief of losing a loved one. It's the grief of living out of alignment with who we dream of being, of what we came here to do, of denying the truth of the quiet voice inside of us. It also feels like depletion - like we're given too much energy to doing things against our nature that the soul doesn't have any more energy to support our will anymore (learning Chinese Medicine helped me start to sort some of this out and understand depression differently).
Well hello anxiety, you good old friend 😂 the book I wrote in 2019 is calling…love this idea of the mapping. Very helpful to think about creative wellbeing in this way. Helpful too as I switch over from the productivity world to the creativity world.
I write a lot but don’t like marketing/networking my work. I think that’s anxiety. The blank screen is fine. I can fill it. Personal interactions are a different story. Thanks for giving me something to consider from a different angle.
One reason I enjoy reading your posts is that they're so compassionate and constantly strive to help writers and artists be compassionate with themselves, releasing self-judgment and especially the external "should's". With this post, I think of my years in tech (at Microsoft) where many, many projects didn't see completion, even after several years and millions of dollars of investment. But the only real failure was to not learn something from the experience.
It's like the quote attributed to Edison when he was trying thousands of different materials to use as a filament in a light bulb. Rather than thinking in terms of failure he said something like "I've just found thousands of ways that didn't work."
Closer to home, while our son was growing up, he explored many different activities--really getting into some for a few weeks or a few months before setting them aside. He realized later that he was simply searching for what was trying "his," rather than "failing" to somehow succeed in those activities as other people might. By the time he was about 16, he pretty much knew himself clearly. So, all those other so-called "attempts" were just experiments, not failures, and he definitely learned something from all of it.
I love how you talk about the different feeling qualities of when work is abandoned, I haven't seen anyone describe it so accurately. I have walked with depression most of my life and the energy evaporating behind something is accurate to my experience, like a car running out of gas. But even years after I've moved past depression dominating my experience, I still notice when I work on something and the energy fades, it feels like you described, even though I wouldn't say I feel depressed, so that's something interesting I'm going to pay attention to.
Thank you so much for reflecting that back to me. I think it's a form of grief and I wish our language had approximately one million more words for all of the different kinds of grief and loss and transition we experience in life.
Thank you for sharing that. Yes, I have come to think of depression as soul grief. It's different than the grief of losing a loved one. It's the grief of living out of alignment with who we dream of being, of what we came here to do, of denying the truth of the quiet voice inside of us. It also feels like depletion - like we're given too much energy to doing things against our nature that the soul doesn't have any more energy to support our will anymore (learning Chinese Medicine helped me start to sort some of this out and understand depression differently).
So well said. <3 I was mulling over a thoughtful response but honestly just want to sit with your words around this.
Well hello anxiety, you good old friend 😂 the book I wrote in 2019 is calling…love this idea of the mapping. Very helpful to think about creative wellbeing in this way. Helpful too as I switch over from the productivity world to the creativity world.
The shift can be so challenging from productivity to creativity but so so worth it when we can.
This is so interesting and provokes me to think more thoroughly about my own unfinished work. Probably anxiety reigns supreme with me.
Anxiety has driven too many of the things I do/think at times.
I write a lot but don’t like marketing/networking my work. I think that’s anxiety. The blank screen is fine. I can fill it. Personal interactions are a different story. Thanks for giving me something to consider from a different angle.
That makes absolutely clear sense to me. <3 <3 <3
One reason I enjoy reading your posts is that they're so compassionate and constantly strive to help writers and artists be compassionate with themselves, releasing self-judgment and especially the external "should's". With this post, I think of my years in tech (at Microsoft) where many, many projects didn't see completion, even after several years and millions of dollars of investment. But the only real failure was to not learn something from the experience.
It's like the quote attributed to Edison when he was trying thousands of different materials to use as a filament in a light bulb. Rather than thinking in terms of failure he said something like "I've just found thousands of ways that didn't work."
Closer to home, while our son was growing up, he explored many different activities--really getting into some for a few weeks or a few months before setting them aside. He realized later that he was simply searching for what was trying "his," rather than "failing" to somehow succeed in those activities as other people might. By the time he was about 16, he pretty much knew himself clearly. So, all those other so-called "attempts" were just experiments, not failures, and he definitely learned something from all of it.