Reap what you sow
You can’t get any commitment, discipline, consistency, or hope if you don’t have any goals.
Hi everyone! Thank you for your warm comments and emails regarding my last post! I’m really thankful for my small community! It's been a tough few days but here I am! This week I’d like to talk about failure.
Last December, I had to take a month off from work because of anxiety, depression, and exhaustion. To cut a long story short, I’ve been a librarian for two and half years in a « difficult » environment, where the only way to strive through pressure was the warm friendship of my teammates. But after almost a year without real holidays, I couldn’t bare it anymore. I mean, one’s not supposed to cry every morning just because being human is too hard, is it? After a month alone with myself, allowing myself to get some rest (and Covid) and clearing my twisted mind, I went back to work in January with my resignation letter and on March 1st, I was officially a 37-year-old job seeker again.
This is how I’ve spent the last few months:
-Thought about what kind of illustrator I wanted to be, enrolled in 2 expensive online courses but never completed them.
-Relaunched my Etsy store but never really communicated on that: 2 posts and a story is NOT communication.
-Tried to do something with Instagram - reels, strategies to get noticed, etc… but never created illustrations for my portfolio nor created a website for it.
-Learned many things, collecting Domestika courses & art subscriptions but almost never really applied anything in my work.
This. Is. failure! This is how one’s not getting anywhere! This is how one sows nothing but frustration.
I started this post just before the tendinitis got the best of me, thinking that maybe I should just quit illustration because I was convinced that none of the things I tried to provide had succeeded. I sold some Christmas and birthday cards so technically, I can say « I got some money ! » but being a starving artist is not my goal.
The truth is: I failed because I never set myself any real goals except getting money. How was I supposed to succeed if my only goal was to get money? It’s not a career, it’s not even a thing.
You can’t get any commitment, discipline, consistency, or hope if you don’t have any goals. You reap what you sow!
It seems obvious that if you want to bake a chocolate cake, you need to buy chocolate but also decide whether it’s white or dark, cheap or expensive, with or without nuts. Let’s not talk about choosing what kind of chocolate cake you want to bake. In the end, if you choose to make a tart, then a muddy cake, then a brownie, the result will be a disaster, not because you’re bad at baking but because you’ve changed your mind so much along the way that even with the best ingredients the « cake » never has a chance to be edible or « pretty ».
So I decided that for the last month of 2022, I’d focus on deciding what I really want to do in 2023, very specific goals, and concrete steps, and I’ll share them with you in my next newsletter. Maybe we could all share a small review of the year, the highs & lows, and our goals for 2023? Substack has now a chat option so maybe, I could create a discussion on this topic and for those interested, create a kind of accountability group. I’m open to your ideas!
See you on December 18th and thanks again for being here!
Love,
BC
I adore this illustration of the person chasing the sled. ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 It’s my favorite of all your work (that I’ve seen so far).
Maybe all those months since you quit your job earlier in 2022 are not about failure. Maybe they were a much needed Creative Rest.
I’m a writer, not an artist, but I suspect every creative person--in the literary arts as well as the performing arts, visual and fine arts and so on--needs to rest and recharge their creative energy occasionally.
Whether or not you are painting or drawing, you are an artist. Whether or not I’m writing, I’m a writer. If we never left our studios or desks, if we never spent time in Nature, and quality time with our families, friends, and pets, if we never read books and went to museums and listened to music, how would function? Where would we find inspiration?
It is in living that we find the means to express ourselves.
Thank you! I needed to hear the You reap what you sow in that particular context. It makes a lot of sense! I have my annual review this afternoon and this is coming handy!^^ All the best with setting your goals for 2023, I have that planned at the end of the month too. ^^