Nothing Blooms All Year

We live in a fantasy world that tells us we must produce quality work on a constant basis to remain relevant and valuable.
This is not sustainable.
You need to create a lot of bad work to create good work. You need breaks. You are not built to create constantly, to output amazing work on a near-daily basis.
Nothing blooms all year long, including you.

I have spent SO LONG berating myself for not outputting enough art. For not trying hard enough to create. For not being able to visualize my ideas. For requiring so much downtime. Resenting my mental illness for the limited capacity it gives me.
And all it’s done is ensure any downtime I DO have is wasted. You can’t rest is you’re using your rest time to guilt yourself. The cycle just continues.

And I recently asked myself, have I ever really rested?
The kind of rest where I don’t worry about what comes next, where I don’t think about all the things I’m not doing, where I don’t end up in an anxious spiral, convincing myself this rest will be the reason I forever remain a failed artist.

I have been taking faux breaks on and off this last year and never coming back rested.
This time was different. I didn’t create. I just let it be. I stopped berating myself. Some days I feel guilty, but I know I’m building up my batteries. And recently inspiration has started coming back on its own. I feel the pull.

This rest will not be why I fail. In fact, I will not fail. Rest will be why I succeed.

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This image is comprised of numerous original photographs, taken by me, in tandem with some digital painting to pull it all together in post-production.
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