The last few years have been rough. They’ve taken a lot out of me and I often wonder if I’ll get back to where I was before them. I don’t even feel like I’m the same core person I was before and that’s deeply disturbing because for most of my life I’ve had a concept of myself that I aspired to. It’s not that I couldn’t aspire to that person anymore, it’s just that I don’t know if I can remember him.
That’s the context. What I want to write about is the stress that has hurt my ability to work on projects. I definitely don’t want to give up on them but I’m struggling. The side effect of that struggling is I keep coming up with new projects to start and not finishing anything.
The reason is it’s easier to conceptualize an idea than to pick one back up. Why? because I have to essentially load the current state of a project into memory, to manipulate it and move forward. If I’m uninterrupted, this feels like a flow state and it’s pleasurable. Unfortunately that takes time and effort. I have time. That’s not the issue. I spend my time watching youtube videos on science, making and literature. I’m not sad that I’ve learned a lot of interesting things but it isn’t my goal.
What I don’t have is the emotional energy to discipline myself and focus. I worry that this might be a permanent state. I don’t think it has to be. If I were to force myself to work on a project and finish it, I think I could get my focus back. So why haven’t I?
Finishing games or stories takes a good deal of concentration. Being able to do that concentrative meditative work, I feel, makes me sharper. It also takes effort and big chunk of my effort, my mental energy has been going into averting disasters. My creative pursuits have rightly taken a back seat.
I’m in a relatively calmer place right now but I’m not sure when the next crisis will pop up. Actually I’m in the middle of one right now. I’ve sold my house and the house we were going to move to was snatched out from under us by another buyer with better connections and probably more money. Even with that going on, things have improved for the moment.
The problem is I’m not sure if the other fires are fully out. They could come roaring back and that has me hopping back and fourth between thoughts. I’m not sure I should take my eye off them right now. Staying in that fight or flight mode trains me to be vigilant but prevents me from thinking deeply and that bothers me greatly. I want to be able to think deeply.
So here’s to hoping things keep calming down and the fires are out. I hope I’m able to settle down and rebuild the habits that get me to finish projects. That’s not an empty hope, I am still motivated to get them done, I’m just hedging my bets at the moment. The longer I stay in this mode, the more it’s going to take to get back to where I was, so I’m eager to find a way.
I really know what you mean, though it sounds like you’ve got some pretty legitimate reasons for not focusing on creative work just now. I hope it’s at least some comfort that there are already games and such that exist out in the world because you made them happen, even if life’s making it hard to do more of it just now. (Me, I’ve spent pretty much my entire adult life generating the -ideas- for or -beginnings- of fiction [or games, sometimes] and always, always stalling out, without fail.)
Thank you! I’m making progress, we found another house and I’ve started writing again. I haven’t made much progress but at least I’m putting words on pages again.