Bleh.
Okay. I’m done working on Turncoat for now. It was going okay, but I just have zero passion for the project at the moment. I think it might be worth picking back up at some point, but right now I have no enthusiasm for it and, alongside time, enthusiasm is my most valuable resource. I’m going back to working on EverEnding for a while. I just had a nice little work session where I got a bit more progress done on the detail behavior editor, and I don’t think it should take me too long to get back into the swing of things.
It’s hard. Sometimes I feel like I’ll never finish anything, and by a standard of personal worth measured by the impact I can make on the world with my art that’s a fucking disaster. What that reveals, though, more than anything, is I need sources of positivity in my life that aren’t directly dependent upon my ability to complete projects. As long as my self-worth is vested entirely in my value as a worker (because, for anything else an artist might be, they are still a worker), I’ll always be emotionally out at sea on a life-raft. Right now this is the only way I know how to be, but I need to figure out a better way.
Making things is super important to me, and there’s a reason I’ve constructed my life around it, but it’s simply an emotionally dangerous way to attempt to sustain oneself. I need to find a new balance. And, once I do, once I no longer need to wrap my emotional state in flavorless fluff to insulate it against reckless boom and bust of project completion and project failure, I think I’ll find myself with more time, rather than less, to work.
The first step is the hard one.