who am I without my little treat
Endings are hard, beginnings are hard, returning to something you abandoned feels the hardest. I fight and fail the urge to apologize whenever I come back to my journal after months of letting it be, that sense of guilt so ingrained in me. The worst part of my brain telling me "Well, if you wanted to be writing, or drawing, or making so badly, wouldn't it be easy? Wouldn't you just do it?"
The end of 2025 was so wonderful and horrible in ways that I never anticipated. We got engaged. We went on vacation. We came home. I got laid off. It's been two months since that happened, and every day feels so long but time passes so quickly. Suddenly, it's February.
I never thought of myself as someone who needed to work (this is a lie, as anyone who knows me knows I take doing a good job at work really seriously and identify as a hard worker), but in my entire adult life I've never had these long stretches of open-ended day, to be filled with whatever I want, or simply nothing at all.
Certainly parts of this are good for me. Rewiring my brain to move away from retail therapy/little treat culture/consumerism in general as a way to make myself feel better. No more Vintage Cola Olipops at 2pm for me, I guess. I've had to rethink about what makes me happy, what brings me joy, what do I do in my life that actually makes me feel good - instead of the bandaids I've relied on to keep me afloat.
At the beginning, I thought it would give me lots of time to work on art. I would be at the studio every day, in my sketchbook all the time, all this time freed up and isn't that what I always complained about? That I felt too tired, too busy, too worried about work to be able to commit myself to making art. But how do you make art, make anything, when you don't feel like yourself anymore? I don't know this person, the person who wakes up and doesn't have any meetings, no tasks, no one to answer to. The person that sits down at my sketchbook isn't me, the person that moves paint from palette to page isn't me.
WIP, gouache & colored pencil
Lately I've told Sung that art is not something I enjoy, it is something I need. It is not the same or as simple as "I feel happy when I'm making something." When I am painting, when I am at the studio, when I am 2 hours hunched over my desk without any water or sense of time, my mind is blank. There is no discernible emotion for me. The enjoyment, the happiness, comes afterwards. It is the assessment of how I've spent my time doing something that is important to me, but I wouldn't describe it as fun. It is more often than not the opposite of fun. It is constant dissatisfaction and a need to improve. If I was happy with what I was making at any given moment, I would simply stop. I would determine it done. I would move on to the next. So the act of making is not something I like necessarily, but something I love. To not feel like myself right now is to not feel connected to everything that feels necessary to me.
The truth is, I'm not making things I like very much right now. Everything looks wrong, feels wrong. But I have to trust that, eventually, I won't feel so bad anymore, and maybe making things will help.