I had a plan, at the very very start of this year, that this would be a year when I’d start drawing again. It was very much a “plan” that I liked in theory more than practice, given that it lasted just one day before I abandoned it — I meant well, what can I say? — but it was something born of a real desire to do something creative for myself throughout the year.
This is, of course, also the year when this website kept failing, for reasons that were technical and beyond my understanding, never. Ind my control; as a result, the site was down for a few weeks a couple of times, and then the entire month of October. That last one was the one that really mattered to me, because it was the one that lasted and the one where I stopped writing here for an appreciable amount of time… and when I realized that this was the “something creative for myself” all along.
I’ve been thinking about my history with writing over the past few months; the loose-leaf sheets when I was a student that were versions of what I’d do here decades later, the zines I made when I was doing my Master’s degree, the reports and newsletters I wrote for various jobs and purposes in the years after that. I’ve been writing pretty continuously for more than a quarter century at this point, shifting (while in art school, ironically) from visual communication to written and training my brain to get better at that even when I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing at the time. Writing is my process now. It’s what I do.
With that in mind, I thought that perhaps my 2024 plan should be to get a notebook for writing in. That doesn’t feel right, though; now, if I’m writing for myself, I want to do it here. When I didn’t have that option for a month, I felt the loss. Now that everything is back to normal, I want to take advantage as best I can… at least until my next personal retrospective changes my mind all over again, I guess.
…I really should draw more, nonetheless.