Running from what?

Recovering from "playlessness."

In Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder in an Exhausted Age, Katherine May addresses the difficulties of reviving a dormant creative habit, noting that “[i]n playlessness, your adult self is not nurtured, but strangled. And deep play — that play that connects across months and years, that fosters its own arcane missions, that delves into the minutiae of being — is hard to find again” (152).

Despite having a decade-long habit of making regular diary comics, I found myself unable to draw in the final six months of my dissertation revision. I tried to at least bandage this gap by writing in a daily diary with the intention of coming back someday to draw about this experience. While it’s good to have notes (if only as a reminder of how often I cried each day [many times]), writing these moments did not help me process them to the extent that drawing would have and I’m left still feeling emotionally raw after all this.

The thing I want most right now is to be drawing regularly again. And, as so often happens, it’s exactly this that I am having great difficulty making myself do.

It’s easy to forget how difficult it was to form my initial habit so many years ago. My kid was a toddler and I was not employed nor was I enrolled in university. Demands on my time and my mental space were still there, but they looked and felt different. Carving out a couple hours in the evening or over a morning coffee during childcare hours felt more possible because I was not balancing nearly as many spinning plates. I was a different version of myself and I was living a different life. I write this because I need to remind myself of the reasons why returning to my creative habits feels so different this time around!

Returning to May, she reminds us that the skills and habits that support the experience of enchantment (which I reach primarily through my comics work) are worth attaining (and recapturing), though doing so is never easy. To reawaken this requires “asserting the awkward right to time, space and solitude” as well as “learning to trust [our] long-forgotten gut instinct and to feel a yearning for [our] own work… putting aside time to do things that seem pointless to the outside world” (152, emphasis mine).

Time. Space. Solitude.

Gut instinct.

Yearning.

And so where to begin? I’ve started playing in my sketchbook again, drawing three-panel comics based on text generated by a bot, “Girls Running from Houses,” designed by a brilliant friend (truly - go visit her site. BRILLIANT). I love these little moments of almost-story when they cross my feed, so the idea to start drawing them on occasion felt right (gut instinct? check). They gave me an excuse to draw some different locales and invent some new characters and, most importantly, felt like a very low-stakes way to experience joy in making comics again (yearning? check). I started making it my goal to sit down for a minimum of thirty minutes every night and work on one - either starting a new one or finishing one I had started the night before. Each takes roughly an hour of drawing and then the digital fiddling and social-media-sharing adds another 30. For right now, this feels semi-sustainable and I’m hoping to will help me get back into my diary, which is still one of my favorite places to “be.”

Have you been experiencing a change in your creative momentum? How’s your current relationship with “wonder”? I would love to hear your thoughts!