There was another article I was about to stitch this cover collage to, one that was equally as personal. But after seeing the tangentially related image I had conjured, another more pressing thought I ached to write about surfaced instead. Something that would be less sloppily personal (there’s always time for getting sloppily personal about the past later). This is another disorganized article written more for my own benefit than anyone else’s, but as always I have the faint hope that my thoughts might make someone feel less alone or just entertained for the time it takes to read through. Towards the end of the year I vow to post a not so personal article covering my favorite fiction books new to me in 2023, so look out for that if you’d rather not read about me being silly.

 Time is always on my mind. Time already wasted, time actively being wasted, and time destined to be wasted in my future. There’s a reason I play ticking clock sound effect videos when I need stressful writing music. I go through cyclical phases on my level of contentment with the fact that I will never be able to make the fullest use of my time. There will always be inefficiencies and sacrifices born either of obligations or physical limitations. Time must always be spent to improve and subsequently save time later (such as with art). There will never be enough time for me to devote to all that I want to learn in this life. All the subjects I want to acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of and skills I want to achieve proficiency with. All the media I want to devour with care. All the people I would want to spend time with.

 Rest becomes a terrible, unquantifiable thing. Beyond the fact that I do not know what constitutes rest for my mind and body (for simply doing nothing produces a painful air of restless boredom agonies), I cannot content myself with one thing without thinking of what is lost from not doing some unknown other thing. Even objectively productive tasks are sullied by the constant thoughts of optimization, other tasks that need to be done, and that ever present threat of looming burnout if I perform the current task recklessly. Worst of all, contentment with a task or deriving rest from an activity will not last and I can’t ever forget this temporary nature. I can only enjoy something for so long and often not without the taint of anticipatory grief.

 Yet for all my fears, time investment is the greatest expression of love. This realization was one of the first things that seriously drew me to art as I detailed in past personal articles. The revering regard required to render a thing so accurately and intimately through use of line and shapes. The extensive consideration involved to depict that which most people wouldn’t spare a second thought. While I dread so often the amount of time studies demand, when I enter that flow state I achieve a level of unfathomable bliss. I swear that I’ve never been more content with life than when I was twelve hours into my spring drawing final and committing countless hours to delicately layering thin layers of acrylic to capture the subtle tones of my subjects’ skin. In a more traditional sense, time-investment related things have always been my top love language. I was always moved by the idea that another person’s precious time was spent considering me and always touched more by gifts made by hand knowing that I would be in their thoughts. It’s the primary way I show my affection in turn. Something I will always be thinking about.

 This complex surrounding time is one of the last few dreadful things that linger from what I’ve jokingly termed as my Dark Ages or Pre-Life before I finally started to feel alive some time in 2022. One of the few things, outside bouts of depression, that persists and consumes my every thought. I have grown more than capable of staving off the feeling through a lot of work and ample distraction, but it inevitably will surge back up in full force. Though the reliable methods of fending off the dread have failed me slowly over time as I grapple with the fact that in a way I’ve ‘made it.’ I’ve defeated the wretched demons that consumed me ceaselessly, rendered me entirely dysfunctional, and re-built myself into something more or less passably functional. I’ve overcome the largest hurdles in relearning my skills and managed to surpass them into this awkward not-quite beginner state that feels borderline embarrassing to be in at this age when I’m feeling particularly unkind. I have a lot of unremarkable work to do without milestones to celebrate. I can no longer claim the same sense of victory for finishing my first sketchbook nor my first painting. I only have to keep working on and on without justifiable reasons to celebrate what was once worth celebrating. I am running out of easy new things to try (art supplies mainly) when the despair strikes. New achievements require more and more work and demand a certain degree of vulnerability I don’t yet know if I’m capable of sporting.

 I have to ultimately define the ominous idea of what comes next. What am I working towards apart from an abstract notion of happiness? What does a life look like now that I’m inhabiting one beyond generally getting better at everything? All of my options demand so much of my time and energy. Time that must be expended without knowing whether it will pan out for me. Not in terms of conventional success, a thought that couldn’t be further from my mind, but in what makes me feel like a real, satisfied person. I don’t fear in the least that the person I am now is very likely radically different than future iterations of me, but I fear missteps in the process of achieving that self I may come to regret more than I realize. In the same vein that a past self of mine thought that investing so much of their life into art would be a fruitless endeavor, there exists a very real possibility that a future self might want nothing to do with art and find something else to somehow fill that void.

 Most recently I’ve faced this conundrum with writing. I’m nearly finished with the first draft of my first novel, Lost Faces, which will never see the light of day beyond the eyes of my writing partner. As I type, I have only three chapters remaining before I can start editing until I decide I’m finished. Writing was a terrible beast to conquer. Snagging hangups regarding my feelings about writing have existed far longer than my complicated feelings about art as in my darkest days I prided myself on a committed plan to be a writer all the while doing no writing out of paralyzing fear of producing bad words. A far cry from my current self who couldn’t care less if they flung out the shittiest sentence known to mankind and published it online with their name attached (unless it’s my first novel which is a Secret forever by design). I rode too high on the sparse compliments I got for my writing across academic essays and the few poems I’ve written that made me terrified to fall anywhere below the standard I had set for myself. I treated some of my first poems as impossibly high standards I couldn’t quite figure out how I made that I will never be able to make again. Hell, even now I still don’t know how I wrote some of the poems I did. Something was lost in the seven years since. This novel is the first proper attempt I’ve made at writing outside of non-fiction and a singular short story I wrote in one draft for a personal challenge back in June of this year. The one thing about this book I can comfortably admit to you is that it’s terrible. Terrible not even in a self-deprecating way, but as reasonably terrible as any first book from someone five years out of practice with writing prose can write. It’s clunky, convoluted, and the prose is repetitive. Traits that may be ironed out through rounds of edits, but traits that exist nonetheless despite all the hours I’ve spent writing it over the past month and a half. But what matters most is that it exists. It’s more words than I’ve ever written for a single piece and it exists. Not too far off from a condition where I can print out a copy to hold in my hands. But this triumph of nearly finishing is not enough to smother the feeling that I’ve wasted all this time on it. Wasted all this time on writing when I have no current intention of publishing my work. Even though it’s given me new life within my sketchbook drawing the characters and characters for a sequel series set in the same world, even though it’s given me the infinitely pleasurable satisfaction of being able to talk about “my novel…” to anyone who will listen, even though it more than satisfied one of my neglected goals for the year I still fear it was all time wasted.

 But these fears can’t kill the drive to write another book I’ve fostered. These fears can’t smother the only rational instinct I have left to just continue doing the same thing I’ve been doing because there’s nothing else I can think to do. It’s this justification that sometimes exists as the only thing that keeps me drawing and journaling. Any time the thought of giving up, of quitting, flickers into my head I can only respond: “And do what else?” What else is there for me to do if not create beyond just outright not living anymore? Nothing is the most painful possibility, so it’s better to be doing something that I find gratifying more often than not with the reasonable hopes that I might be better at that thing in the future.

 While this might also pose as a double-sided sword, my current intention into the new year is to set more concrete goals for myself. This year my goals were all abstract as I lacked the ability to establish achievable goalposts for myself to strive for no any concept as to what projects might interest me. This ended up proving detrimental to the me that languished without a thing to work for as I had no list of goals to operate off of. A list of goals that I could strike off a list upon completing for a rush of good brain chemicals. My only goals for the year was a reading goal, to write something finished, and share more art. Even with these abstract and so-called “kinder” goals, I ended up failing one miserably. I shared probably a grand total of three pieces publicly, one of which I deleted shortly after. Next year, however, I have plans for specific projects ranging from my sequel novel series to zines to small games to essays to paintings. Goals that I will affirm to myself it’s okay if I can’t make them, to make any of them would be spectacular., but it’s okay to end a year with goals only partially fulfilled. What matters most is that I try to work towards them at all. I spent that time and came out the other end better off for it, improving some facet of my skillset that would benefit me in the future even if there’s no final product to show for it. Which is part of why I can’t fault myself too much for not sharing a lot of art. It didn’t mean I made little to no art this year, just nothing in a finished enough state worth showing (and little in the way of digital art altogether). Provided I don’t panic too intensely over the concept of time, a possibility strongly on the horizon with my next birthday ringing in at the start of the year, I think I can make ‘it’ in a way that matters. The time will pass anyways. The more (even bad) things I have to show for it the better.