Rocky re-entry

And finding ideas

It’s hard to get momentum going again after a hiatus. Add a bit of lingering viral crud and it’s a recipe for disaster. Or, if not disaster, then a recipe for a head full of emptiness instead of ideas. So what do you do when you have no ideas and nothing to say? You just draw that, because, it’s something. And something is better than nothing when you are trying to get moving again. Something is better than nothing because something is an idea, even if it is a dumb one. Nothing is just, nothing.

I could have skipped my newsletter this week. It would have been easy. I thought about it. I don’t have anything to say, my sketchbooks have been languishing, I’ve barely written in my journal so there’s nothing to pull from that I can make a newsletter out of. So why even bother? Right?

But, I’m here anyway. Because even if I don’t have any ideas right now, if I show up, they might come, and if I don’t show up, they certainly never will. So better to show up and try, than put it off for another week when the ideas are flowing better…because what if they are not flowing any better next week? Do I put it off again? It’s easy to fall out of a habit, harder to get back into one. So here I am, rambling.

And the thing is, while I was rambling, I did find an idea. Because even though I haven’t written in my journals much lately, and even though I haven’t used my sketchbooks much lately, I have 10 years (or more) of journals and sketchbooks just waiting to be flipped open and mined for possible ideas.

So I grabbed a bunch of journals from February-ish over the last few years to see if they had any ideas or any insights that I could share with you. And what I found was…

February in my journals always seems like a struggle. And then I found this apt nugget of wisdom scribbled inside one of the February pages.

Like, relearning that February is always a slog, and that it’s ok to feel empty of ideas in February and also, that restarting things is hard. All lessons I keep relearning. I have no clue why I wrote that, the context is unclear on the page, but it does hammer home that things are cyclical and we learn something and forget it and relearn it and forget it and maybe that is just life.

But opening those journals also brought me this:

A comic I forgot I made, in a year, I didn’t remember making any comics at all. And if I wanted to, I could use this as my idea. I could make another three panel comic that reflected what I see out my window today. I could capture that moment in time. I could even look out the same window. Capture the same scene. And then next time I am scrounging around for ideas in February, I will have TWO versions of that scene to go from and then I could add a third. Anyway, it’s an idea. It doesn’t matter if it’s a good idea. All that matters is I found one when I didn’t have any.

This is just a quick scribble, barely a capture of anything at all, but now it’s part of a series and maybe I will revisit it again next February. And now I have an idea that didn’t exist at the beginning of this newsletter.

Which, I guess, now that I’ve rambled on for awhile, the point is, that even if you don’t have any ideas and even if you are sick or feeling drained, if you want to find an idea, if you want to do something, you will find something, all you have to do is show up.