on being prolific

or why it's a sham

forgive me in advance if this makes no sense—i’m a little toasted and doing something i literally never do, which is writing an essay directly in the substack post editor. i wrote a twitter thread about this, but i want to discuss it more. basically: i cannot express the degree to which i am just doing myself literarily right now. i am doing nothing for anyone else. i was able to uncouple my artistic pursuits from capitalist ideals via art therapy. i don't ever have creative block.

i also don’t think any of these things are flexes—they are just a reflection of the way one person's practice works. i saw Ariana Brown's recent advice to keep your eyes on your own paper re: your writing “career” and i think it's dead-on. you're not lesser because you're less “productive.” productivity, especially in a creative sense, is a myth sold to us by capitalism. and your creative production is not something that is relative to others’ unless you are directly collaborating with them—which is cool, and more people should do.

i also saw a post on instagram¹ that said “pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing, and making art got turned into skills instead of being seen as behaviors, so now it’s like ‘the point of doing them is to get good at them’ and not ‘this is a thing humans do, the way birds sing and bees make hives.” and suddenly everything made sense. this is why i’m so profoundly uncomfortable any time someone gushes about my output being “impressive,” especially when they compare it to their own.² i'm always appreciative of anyone who recognizes or even enjoys my work, but ultimately, the topic of being prolific usually comes up. it's hard for me to navigate because i don't have a secret to my output other that genuinely loving (and needing) to have this outlet for expression.

i’m going somewhere with this, i promise. i’m pretty sure i’ve written about burning out before³ but in case anyone needed a reminder, i pushed myself too hard career-wise a while back, and then the rest of my life fell apart around me and i was stuck keeping pace with an absolutely grueling standard i’d set for myself. it’s okay to lower your expectations sometimes. we live in a capitalist hellscape. survival, especially for the marginalized, gets harder and harder by the day. it’s good to have aspirations, but it’s also good to be realistic and adaptive.

my relationship to my practice has changed a lot over the years—i came into the “professional” creative world around 18, when i started art school and began exhibiting my visual artwork. i was a fine artist in every sense of the word; my work was often conceptual and focused on the aftermath of trauma. this allowed me to grow into a practice where i used art as a means for healing⁴, which was sometimes really unpopular in an environment where the white-wall gallery setting was the primary motivator for many of my peers. this ultimately led to working in book arts, and “writing seriously,” as i call it—i’ve written all my life, but i consider the real start of my “career” to be around 2019, when i started writing as part of my book arts practice.

i’ll be honest and say i have always thrived in my own space, whether or not that space was occupied. what i mean to say is that i’m comfortable being on my own with something if it means i am otherwise comfortable. i’m fine marching to the beat of my own drum⁵—it’s why i notoriously get to every piece of popular media at least five years late. i save my energy for the things on which i already hyperfixate and the things my friends make.

i have long dissuaded myself of any notions of “supposed to.” it’s why, when there was not a neat space for me within the landscape of my college peers, i made my own, and did the same when there did not seem to be seat at the publishing table for me, founding fifth wheel press. it can be terrifying not to conform, but i’ve never known any other way to be other than myself. i have a lot of anxiety, but none of it surrounds the way i am perceived by others for being my authentic self. i know in this way, i am lucky, and that i partly have 15 years of therapy to thank for it.

i say all of this to say: give yourself a fucking break. move at your own pace. i promise you'll be happier creatively.

1. it was actually a screenshot of a tiktok posted to instagram, which is how the world works now

2. sorry, just being brutally honest

3. oh look, i have

4. and it also intensified when i started seeing a licensed art therapist in 2017

5. a phrase i have always thought to be condescending at best