A summer of reflection
I thought this summer would be a period of incredible output, I had an enormous list of projects and ideas, and thought I had plenty of time to execute them.
Oh boy was I wrong.
Mistake number 1, was not realising that my brain would need a rest after delivering the final projects for my first year of university. I thought a week off would be sufficient. It was not, it was also half term for my kids. Not restful.
Mistake number 2, was not realising how much time my website would take to design. Design is really not my strong suit! When I decided to take the website offline for a month, I thought I was giving myself plenty of time to get everything ready, but I genuinely was working on it right up to the day before it relaunched!
And my third mistake was overestimating my available time once my kids broke up from school. I piled myself with projects and self-imposed deadlines that were not realistic. I very quickly got behind, then overwhelm set in, and anxiety spiralled.
What I’ve ended up with is a deep need for reflection and reassessing what exactly I am doing. I decided to ask myself a few questions:
If I had to stop everything that I do except 1, which would I keep?
What do I want to do? If I could start again from scratch what would I fill the time that I do have with?
I think it’s important to bear in mind that I’ve been mulling these over for a few weeks, not just a single journalling session. This prolonged exercise has helped me to prioritise the projects I give myself and the commitments I’ve taken on. It’s also given me a level of perspective on some of the things I’ve been doing out of a sense of duty. I also came to realise that I’ve started to do and create things in a way that no longer brings me joy (I’d like to expand on this in a future post as it’s a really important point for me).
Of course I don’t have any magic wishes, I have commitments! But this way of exploring what’s important to me has helped me come up with some ideas for change and how I can evolve my work in ways that feel good to me.
I won’t share my full responses as my journaling practice is private, as everyone's should be (yes I have been journalling). But I wanted to share an interesting thing that came up for me.
I kept looking back on 2020 with nostalgia.
What?!
Yep.
And it took some unpicking to work out why the period in which I was so severely depressed kept coming up as something I wanted to return to. Essentially I came to understand that in working through my depression I embarked upon my “learning journey” which included my online learning log School of Holly and it included taking a very slow and methodical approach to my art and creativity.
Somewhere between there and here I took off at a sprint and no longer give myself the space for slow, meditative art or write about my journey in the way that I used to.
Writing is definitely something that I would like to return to, both creative writing and reflective writing. Because of this, I am actively clearing time in my schedule to write. As I have this website, my blog/learning log will be moving from School of Holly to here but I will leave the former live as I love to reflect on some of the articles that I’ve written.
I hope that you’ll join me here on this journey to creating in ways which feel good.
All photographs used in this blog post have been taken by me.
