Over the last year or so, I’ve become increasingly aware of my dread of completion. This is something that’s been with me a long time and something that is also rather common, I think: How many of us haven’t dawdled at the end of a great game or book, taking weeks to finish what was previously blazed through in hours, out of a sense of wanting the journey never to end? The journey of creation, though, is a far longer and more harrowing one, and building a large project is almost like building a house around yourself. The prospect of leaving is frightening. The prospect of someone else living in what you built – of them seeing all of its flaws exposed over years, of them building a relationship with something you left behind, exposing their vulnerabilities to your work and of having your work’s vulnerabilities exposed in turn – is beyond merely frightening, is terrifying. I’ve heard that art is abandoned rather than finished, but abandonment leaves the abandoner as alone as the abandoned. I dread the parting, and also the judgment that must inevitably accompany artistic display. I question relentlessly whether anyone will like just the right blend of weird stuff to enjoy whatever it is I’ve made and I’m afraid to hear a response. The weight of these worries only becomes more acute as the size of the project increases – and, once you’re talking about projects than span months, years, the accumulated weight begins to seem unbearable.
One of the only things that lets me hit the publish button on these posts each week is the knowledge that they are, by their nature, rushed and imperfect. Some of them are probably great, some are probably trash, but I can reassure myself that it’s too much to expect myself to know which are which in the moment, and that I can always go back and sift through them later. What about when it is important, though? What about when the success of a piece of art, or lack of same, could determine the trajectory of your future? It took me a long time to get to the point in my life where my desire to say something interesting finally overwhelmed my fear of saying something wrong. It becomes harder to maintain once one increases the stakes. There’s a balance: Running back and forth between specters of muteness on one side and rejection on the other, each invisible and threatening invisibility, threatening to drag you to live with them where your voice cannot be heard.
Right-wing dweebs like to whine about cancel culture, but the threat of no-one giving a shit about a thing you have to say should be one omnipresently familiar to anyone who’s created art.
I suppose all I can do is my best, whatever that happens to be. Nevertheless, it becomes a cognitive weight, something that rests at the back of the skull and drags you backwards when you try to move forward. There’s a constant balance between the past, present, and future of a big project – the tasks that are fun to think about, the tasks that are fun to work on, the feeling of being trapped in decisions you’ve already made and the feeling of being overwhelmed by the uncertainty of the decisions you’ve yet to make. The process of art is the process of being suspended between these manifold dissatisfactions, infinite fractal shattered mirror versions of the thing in your brain, and of trying to resolve that, fragment by fragment, until the tension eases just enough for you to finally touch back down to earth again.