In the Sand Pit
During the holidays a dear friend paid a visit and we spent a lovely day playing around in the part of my studio flat I turned into an actual studio and fondly dubbed "kindergartener's sand pit" (it was the size of one too). I delight in having someone to rave about good pens and pretty watercolors, and the week brought two of my favorite humans. As we scribbled and showed sketchbooks to each other, my friend made a light remark that stunned me for a while. He said that I seemed to be drawn towards and chasing after styles and techniques that didn't naturally come to me while he would usually stick with what he found himself good at.
He was right.
What stuns me is the fact that this observation applies to many facets of my life. I'm alright with pens, but I never let wet media go. I do well in formal writing, but my true grail is a fun, jolly romping fiction. I'll be right at home reading English or one of the Social Sciences, but I just had to major in swanky Hard Sciences. I said design was not for me, but I do UIs anyway...
Cue in a joke about liking what we can't have and the grass is always greener on the other side, but I can't even say it's about trying to chase an ideal. The tinkering lizard simply wants to keep turning the gears.
I know what I like, I'm disciplined in my toolings, and yet I'm drawn to techniques/styles/forms/formats like a moth to a flame. My latest daily drawing series feature half a dozen different styles. I have written poetry compilations containing everything from haiku to golden shovel (which I modified into double golden shovel, in which the last word of each line also forms a sentence). So on and so forth. Puzzling out constraint and setting up scope set my heart a-quiver.
I don't regret things, I sure learnt a lot by continually stretching my comfort zone. It allows me to make connections between things that don't seem remotely related at first glance. For the most part, I'm a decent enough Jack of All Trades to put out passable results. But that also means I get overly harsh on myself over skills I spend time and energy to acquire, and I tend to overlook the area I could have excelled in.
In my friends' words, I'm bad at giving myself an easy life. Some people would say it's good never to rest on your laurels, but boy I sure need to learn to be comfortable so I would stop giving myself so much pressure.
I'm also a lazy tryhard, so when said path requires actual dedication, I pay a hefty price (yes, the major was one of the costliest whims I had to pay literally and figuratively. No, no regret here). I get discouraged when I don't immediately get good results. I have sworn off this and that. Yet, after a while, I would be tempted to try again. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, I circle back and gain enough experience in many things I dabble in. That's the tryhard part. It's equally hilarious and frustrating. The process of doing many things often involve grumbles and snarks and anger, yet to my friends' eternal amusement I would put myself in that situation again the moment I finish and catch my breath.
I could just leave the bloody thing alone. I couldn't. This tendency to die on a hill I dig myself is only mildly inconvenient in my creative practice or day to day nonsense, but it gets especially onerous when it comes to high-stake decisions.
These days, I combat burnout by trying not to take my hobbies seriously. Not in terms of skill acquisition, not in terms of expected output. To take the mindset of a child playing in a sand pit. My friend said the day certainly felt like that, as he was somehow content just doodling without having anything in mind. No real goal. No broader picture. He couldn't describe it as anything other than "playing" and it pleased me. The studio (which was actually nothing more but a folding table and a bunch of writing/drawing supplies arranged around it to form a low cubicle) was constructed for precisely that purpose.
I look forward to spend more time in my sand pit.