Amidst the Chaos: A Creative Burnout Journey Part 1

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Let's just cut to the fucking chase: Covid-19 is a mother fucker and it's ravages across this world have been devastating. The future is entirely unpredictable. How this all shakes out is scary at fucking best. Amidst the chaos, without anticipation, I've begun to find myself creatively, again. Something I'd thought I'd lost entirely. I thought writing this shit down might be cathartic, or perhaps even helpful for people having similar experiences because as somebody probably once said "there's light even in darkness."

HOW THIS SHIT HAPPENED...

Around this time last year (the end of spring 2019 if'n you're reading this in the distant future) everything in my life was ramping up to be fucking perfect. I was a month away from getting married to the love of my life, we had just sold our crap-ass condo and bought a new house, a shared dream of ours for years, and we came away with a chunk of extra change from the sale. We'd be moving into it as soon as we got back from our dream honeymoon/vacation to our favorite place in the world, Prague, with a brief trip over to Germany to visit Dresden and Berlin. The day job I'd been at for 6 years as a graphic designer (bringing the grand total of years in the industry up to about 14) was running along smoothly and I was making enough money to afford the life we wanted. Creatively I was finishing up my comic series The Haunter and wrapping up the latest issue of my collaborative comic Krush McNulty and looking forward to the next phase of these projects. This was essentially all I could have asked for.

We got back from our honeymoon, moved in to our new house and set out on our new life as a married couple. I started to get back into my creative routine I'd been doing for years: go to the day job, come home, live life, then work on comic books until we went to bed. Suddenly, I couldn't find the desire to do that creative work at all, or even muster the enthusiasm to even think about it. I'd lost even the mere excitement or simple desire to even hold a pencil to sketch and it sunk me into a dank, creative depression, one that has lasted up until recently.

So what the fuck happened? How could I be so fucking depressed but still be so happy and content with my new life and partner? Looking back now I can isolate exactly why:

1. A new, overbearing, and over demanding boss.

2. The prolonged negative aspects of the comic industry and making very little gains in that market after 10 plus years.

3. My growing disdain for nostalgia and it's stranglehold on the creative/pop culture market.

At the time some of these were obvious. They're even more obvious now. Once they were isolated it became easier to confront and now, amidst the chaos, I'm starting to come through and have solid executable ideas and plans to keep me going. I'm going to dive into these three contributing factors in upcoming posts because they deserve the attention. They're a part of how I began to find the fucking light.

METAL MOMENT:

Here's an album I turn to that always gut punches me with how creative it is. When I need some energy this always helps get me in the mood:

Devin is a whole huge topic worth exploring with a vast catalog of massively creative music but this album of his always hits the spot with its sheer beauty and magnitude.