Pulling weeds and wrangling demons

It's hard.

I am a scatter-brain. Always have been. And I get excited very easily about basically anything and everything.

Even if we don't count the things that haven't been able to grab me on a deeper level, I end up with a bunch of avenues I want to creatively persue which often leads me (unfortunatelly) to not persue any of them.

I am a musician, songwriter, UI-Designer, programmer, photographer, paragliding pilot, storyteller, flow artist and probably two more things that I can't retell right now when I feel energized and on it. When I'm not then I'm neither of these things and what remains is guilt.

Then there seems to be a strange pull, like a force field even, that desperatly tries to keep me out of the creative flow and even the smallest action towards any result feels un-imaganably hard.

That voice happened to be extremely loud in my head again in the past months. I daresay, I've become somewhat of a master of self-sabotage in a sense. I would sit down to write, produce music or work on this very page sometimes several times throughout a day, only to be immediately drained of all energy and to find myself in front of Youtube some 4 hours later seemingly against my will, having accomplished nothing and feeling slightly dirty...

But then again

It's not hard.

Not hard enough to surrender anyway.

Most things that we do as creatives aren't - and usually as soon as we get into the flow we can do pretty much anything that a project requires.

This afternoon I managed to create a paper-like background filter, turn the handwriting of my logo I had on the cover of a notebook into a usable vector graphic, learning the new Affinity Studio along the way. I managed to sucessfully fight the strange relationship HTML still has with SVGs to bring the new logo into the index page and am writing this blog entry now to remind myself of what's possible.

All in all I moved this thing a significant amount towards it's final shape. It took me about three hours to do so (plus one for this blog post) and it flowed. I was energized and on it and no challenge could hold me back while I kept going.

As I write this I am tired. I felt so as soon as I sat down to polish the index of this very webpage but somehow found the strength to pull through and not listen to the sirens.

To all you strugelling creatives:

Know that you have the power to overcome every block and create if you manage to get past the deamons of self-doubt and self-loathing.

You're amazing by the very fact that you are human. Go and show the world what your soul desires to create!

Yes this is a bit kitsch and I am fully aware of that. It is however also true that we are all part of this world to create beauty and that we are so much more capable than we so often give ourselves credit.