Ramble 27.2

Lucy Bellwood: Hi Patrons. I'm trying this again. I recorded a Ramble about a week ago and I just felt out of sorts. I was betwixt and between different feelings. It was rambly, but, like, not in the way that I like to be rambly. And I haven't posted that one yet. And I thought I would give it another go this morning. I'm still in a weird head space, still in a weird soupy morass of uncertainty, but I took a longer walk today, far away from the heavily trafficked trails in the Preserve. And I'm sitting underneath an enormous sycamore tree that grows at the diversion of two creeks in the Ventura Riverbottom. And there are tiny red ants crawling around on the ground around me—hopefully I'm not gonna regret sitting down here—and there's a crow in the tree above, a whole lot of Redwing blackbirds and Turkey vultures. Mallards, some curlews. It's a good spot. There's a lot of birds. You'll probably hear some birds.

[00:01:16] The things that are on my mind right now, I have a hard time telling if they're genuinely to do with hitting a crisis point in my career, or if, once again, I've cycled around into this space of believing that somehow the rest of everything that's happening is distinct from my creative practice. 

[00:01:39] I was talking to a friend yesterday about the healing process. And I think any kind of growth has to do with this because I was realizing that it's actually very similar to the way that I think about money in an ongoing fashion and charging what I'm worth—is that you're always adjusting the comfort window, the comfort level, the Overton window, some combination of those words.

[00:02:05] And it used to be that I couldn't imagine charging somebody more than $200 for anything.

[00:02:14] And these days, my window of comfort with money has changed. I can charge somebody more than $200 for something. I can invoice somebody for thousands of dollars. Not often mind you, but you know, if the opportunity arises, I will take it.

[00:02:33] But there are weirder windows. And the window of healing or the window of giving yourself enough time is trickier to measure.

[00:02:47] When I think about grief, when I think about—I mean, the, the acute example is relationship grief, for me, there was a period following the end of my last relationship, where I, I grieved in the traditional way that one would expect: I read all my old journals. I cried a lot. I was very sad all the time.

[00:03:07] That kind of stuff. You know, the stuff that we're used to pointing to and saying, "Ah, yes, this is grief."

[00:03:14] And the creative process is like this, I think that the reason that I'm talking about it is not  to sort of unload about my relationship issues on Patreon on, because I don't know that that's exactly what this place is for—it's related, but it's not the whole of it—but the way that it reminds me of the creative process is that there, there is the, it's the same feeling that I get from saying, "Oh, I understand about lying fallow. I understand about taking breaks. I understand that you need to really sit with an idea." Maybe I've said this before, but the most valuable thing that I heard at the Wayward Retreat two years ago was that nobody is going to write the next great American novel in the next five days of off-grid living.

[00:03:57] And that anybody who had come to the Retreat in the past had made transformative and valuable and fascinating work after coming, but it had taken them at least a year to get to that point. The kind of change that they were interested in creating was change that unfolded over a much longer timescale.

[00:04:24] I'm an impatient person.

[00:04:35] And the things that really drive me creatively are often moving at the speed of light. They're overwhelming and swift, and the excitement to make things comes upon me and I get swept up in it and it's all just a rollicking good time. And when it comes to grieving, I feel like I've grown used to saying, "Ah yes, the grieving process. This is the part that I'm comfortable with. I know that it takes time. Here I am taking time. Look at me being so good at taking time. Now I would like it to be done, please. I would like it to be over." I'm not accustomed to the nebulous ambiguous grief it's called, that comes after the acute grieving. 

[00:05:21] And I think there is likewise a space for ambiguous creativity versus acute creativity, right? Acute creativity being the moments when everything feels like it's on fire an—in the good way, you know, your, your neurons, your synapses are firing on all counts and you're excited to put things together—and I blogged about this a little bit last week, the, the feeling that sometimes I look at my thought process and it feels like a giant wall of conspiracy string where there's just push pins and bits of paper and everything is connected to everything else and it all feels so exciting. And then some days it's like somebody's just turned off the layer that contains all the string and instead of feeling like I'm in the midst of this vast and vibrant conspiracy of excitement, I'm just looking at this mess.  (bird noises) 

[00:06:11] Hello. Drama. And I've had a week like that. I've had a week of feeling like the mania is not moving towards something nourishing and creative, but instead it's just me kind of grinding myself down. The drill is stripping the screw, and it's not a good feeling.

[00:06:35] And with grieving the thing that I find myself coming back to again and again, is this realization that it's like I got in a car crash and there were big wounds, gashes, you know, huge, uh, bleeding trauma experiences that were stitched up and on the surface healed relatively quickly. It took time. And I thought I was giving it a lot of time, but then beyond that, there's, I don't know enough about medicine for this really, but like subdermal bruising?

[00:07:10] There's stuff leftover that isn't so visible, that takes a longer time.

[00:07:22] And what the Pandemic is forcing me to do in regards to relationships, in regards to my creative practice, is to just keep coming back to that fact. As if I'm sort of continually just pointing to my arm and saying, "Ow, but it still hurts. Wait, but this, but this still hurts. And I, I don't understand. I took the time."

[00:07:52] And of course, the fact is that none of this is a one-way, finite trip.

[00:08:02] In fact, if it were, I, I think life would be pretty boring, but it's tempting. It's tempting to wanna believe that we reach a place where we can be done, where any of it can be enough.

[00:08:21] A lot of the thoughts that I'm having right now center around the future of Patreon, the utility of these various platforms that we're all utilizing to try to make a living in a capitalist society that is in the throws of total crisis, trying to figure out how to make something that looks different, poking my head into the wider arena of the Internet and just feeling so, so tired.

[00:08:56] I find that I have very little room for social media when I'm down here. There was a meme going around, not a meme, a, a writing challenge around some of the blogs that I follow for people to write up what their average day looks like. And you know, a lot of it is, is childless self-employed people who are talking about, "Well, you know, I, I get up and I go check my email and then I prioritize this kind of project work in the morning..."

[00:09:19] And I kind of started to realize that that was me when I was in Portland. And when I'm down here, your, my life looks very different. And the litany of things that I set out to accomplish each day, when it comes to looking after my dad, are extensive. And one of the things that has made me feel like it might be the right choice—I mean, there are many factors going into this decision, but one of the things that I think make it the right choice to move down here more permanently, as much as that's kind of wigging me out this week, the week before, it was really exciting, this week it's like instilling a crisis—are that I think the lessons I need to learn next, right, the, the, the edge that I want to push toward next, um, has to do with being put in positions where I need to learn how to be selfish. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean, being put in a scenario where a huge amount of my psychology and upbringing and affection are geared towards is, are, is geared towards wanting to look after my dad 24/7. It could very easily consume a whole life.

[00:10:42] And it weaves in and out of what's going on with the Pandemic. I've found that I'm struggling to feel excited about getting the vaccine because I can't comprehend how my life would change. And also from a lot of the guidelines that we're seeing published, it doesn't seem like we're being encouraged to change very much beyond just the added security of understanding that we are now less likely to catch a horrible disease or transmit it to other people.

[00:11:14] I've grown accustomed to taking a long time, and I think the sudden rush of activity around vaccine eligibility and how quickly it seems to be rushing towards us all of a sudden is a degree of change that the rest of me, maybe isn't ready for, even though I'm going through big changes and making big changes in all these other ways.

[00:11:39] So I want to circle back to talking about the, the length, the length of grief, the length of creativity, because the ambiguous grief, I can't do anything about that. I have a lot of tools for acute grief. I feel pretty emotionally well-equipped. I have people who I love. I have hobbies that I can turn to, journals to read, writing exercises to do, nourishing spaces to exist in. There's a whole other thing that I want to talk about with that when it comes to social media and offline relationships, and how the two might be converging or diverging right now, but in regards to grieving or the creative process, I think I have a lot of tools for those moments when the pressure is on, something is broken, and I'm looking for ways to fix it. And ambiguous grief or ambiguous creativity don't call for those kinds of tools.

[00:12:46] They call for other stuff. I think it's a Dalai Lama quote that somebody said to me the other day that has been on my mind where he was saying, "Try to meditate for half an hour every morning. If you find you don't have room for half an hour, meditate for an hour."

[00:13:11] I think that's kind of the vibe for right now, for the Pandemic, for this emotional season. I keep feeling like every time some circumstance feels like it's telling me to go faster, the lesson that I'm supposed to learn is to go slower.

[00:13:43] Christina Tran was just talking about potentially renaming the graphic novella memoir that she's been working on about losing both of her parents and the grief that followed and her ways of dealing with it or avoiding dealing with it. One of the themes that she was talking about was workaholism in a capitalist society and how we avoid feeling the feelings that we want to feel.

[00:14:12] And when I stop and look at the impatience that I bring to bear on my own emotional landscape or on my creative work, it's such a destructive cycle because the longer I go feeling like I should be doing more and not doing more, the crueler I am to myself. And the crueler I am to myself, the less gets done, so on and so forth, cycle cycle cycle, until I find something that, that breaks me out of it. And what has been a little unnerving recently is that, and I think this is, this is adjacent to burnout, people talk about this with burnout, right? That all the things you've done before don't seem to be working anymore.

[00:15:01] And there's definitely some of that. I definitely find that I am unnerved, I suppose, when I try to turn to the things that have brought me peace in the past, and they don't seem to be working or that it's just taking a lot of time. And my, my first instinct is always personal fault. My first instinct is always, "Well, if I were more X, this wouldn't still be happening."

[00:15:35] And I wonder sometimes if there are things that you just can't rush.

[00:15:41] If there are processes that you just have to sit with.

[00:15:51] They don't change. They don't go away.

[00:15:57] The only thing you can do is notice them and recognize that sometimes it takes a long time.

[00:16:05] I don't know that I've ever sat with how long grief takes.

[00:16:13] Like really, to this degree. Certainly not. When it comes to relationships I've been very bad at—ah, judgment. I have had a tendency to rush out of one relationship and into another. And I have had a tendency to rush out of one creative project and into another.

[00:16:36] So when I talk about the lesson that I need to learn here being selfishness, I think it is a space where it is the ultimate challenge. I tend to want to caretake in all my relationships, but of course, the place that I learned that is here. And in the first Ramble that I recorded, that the one that I'm probably going to ditch, I think, I was talking about how living with your parents is like having two ambulatory human manifestations of all of your shadow selves, just walking around you all the time, acting out in whatever way they would like to act out in.

[00:17:09] And of course your shadow self comes from this environment, comes from these people. I should change that: my shadow self, certainly. And so when I try to corral my parents or encourage them to do something, or I'm able to apply the tools that have worked for me to their lives and I see good result, but at the expense of my own ability to take use from those strategies or tools, it's bittersweet, it's complicated.

[00:17:39] And of course that will be the highest temptation: to, to play in that space to, to help those people with the tools that I have gained to try to heal this part of myself.

[00:17:54] And the real struggle is figuring out how to push aside that tendency, not all of the time, but, regularly, some of the time. Because if I choose to stay, I will not do well unless I make that room for myself.

[00:18:21] The thing I wanted to say about emotional and social and economical validation, this thing I've been kicking around, that I've realized that—I was off social media for the last month or so, right? And a week ago when I released that video about writing for comics, I hopped back on to promote it because I wanted to help out the Studio and I'm going to be helping my friends, Tara Shepersky and Stefan Lorenzutti, uh, we're going to be putting this book of illustrated poetry on Kickstarter together and I am the person with the largest following in that crew of collaborators, and I have the most Kickstarter experience for larger campaigns.

[00:19:04] Stefan has run many himself, um, but this is newer for Tara and I, I really want the campaign to succeed. I really want it to go well. And I, I think part of what is pushing me to be back on social media is this feeling of "Well, I need to be active there so that when the project comes out, I can start sharing stuff about it, and, you know, people can find out about it and I can, I can pull my weight. I can be a good collaborator."

[00:19:33] But being back on social media is not nice. Boy howdy. I don't like it there. I like it here. I like this. I like blogging. I like owning my own platforms

[00:19:53] I guess what I've noticed in the Pandemic at large. And the thing that has led me to consider is that I have pulled back from sharing quite as much of myself in public spaces, because the stuff that we look for, as creators on social media, I think is it's validation, right? I mean, but social media gives us validation. That's what we're after. But it takes two forms and there's social validation, which is your, your comments and your likes and your, your warm fuzzy human interaction.

[00:20:27] And then there's tangible material validation. Um, people backing your Kickstarters, buying your books, follower counts, sort of? Anything that's a metric I think can be, can be applied to this. It's easily measured. Social validation is a little bit squishier to measure, but I think it's still very much a part of that. And what I've realized in the Pandemic—and I, I'd be very curious to hear if this is true for you too, I know it has been for a lot of people I've talked to—is that I've contracted my social validation sphere quite dramatically. And I find myself seeking smaller circles and more intimate spaces to get that connection. So rather than going on Instagram to share every piece of work in progress, I'm texting it to a couple of friends and asking for their feedback.

[00:21:18] And instead of participating in the wider ecosystem of Twitter, I'm going to private Discord spaces and talking to other people there, kind of using that as a feed of, "Oh, look, other people are up to stuff". And I'm taking walks with friends in person. I'm focusing on people who are in my geographic region. I'm writing letters. I'm, I'm doing—I'm still very social. I feel like I'm very connected. I'm doing Connection Club, right? I get together with people on Zoom and write letters every week. It's that kind of stuff. By and large, that makes me a happier person. But the tricky thing is that in those spaces, especially if I'm in quieter spaces with other creators who are at a similar professional level to the one that I am at, it is actually, it feels sort of gauche, and like, not, not just in the uncomfortable kind of way, but more in the, like, we understand that if we have a new project coming out a new Kickstarter or whatever, and we want it to succeed, that's the moment where ideally we would be trading on the sort of parasocial ecosystem of being vaguely connected to a very large number of people, really an impractical number of people for, for cultivating sincere and deep relationships, and we would reach out to them and say, "Hey, here's the moment when I need your financial validation." But if you're withdrawing from those spaces and not supplying any of the sort of emotional patter and validation that makes up community building in that weird distanced 2/8ths of a whole kind of social media way, then only showing up to ask people for money feels very disingenuous. It also doesn't feel like a community effort. And that's kind of what I'm wrestling with is, is trying to understand that the audience I have already is enough.

[00:23:13] And I've talked about this object permanence issue before, and I totally have it. It, it keeps coming back to me. I was just reflecting on how strange it is that going back to Twitter, that one of the messages I'd missed while I was gone was from a dad who had, I think his two daughters had found their copy of Baggywrinkles for the first time, and he said they were pretending to read it aloud to each other. They couldn't read yet, but, um, he sent me a photo of them reading it to each other and it was just the sweetest thing. And I mean, that's the kind of stuff that social media can be really incredible for. There's no substitute for that. I didn't know this guy, this guy didn't know anybody that I knew.

[00:23:48] Just some guy with two kids who have read my book and had it read to them. And when I thanked him, I said, look, I'm a little late to this, sorry, but this is so lovely. He said, Oh no, it's still, it's still going on. Look, this is from this morning, there they are again with the book, they read it multiple times a day, every day.

[00:24:11] And I just sat there and was like, "How can I express to this person that this tweet makes me cry?"

[00:24:22] Because to me, when the work is done and the book is published, I certainly haven't sold all the copies of Baggywrinkles, mind you. I mean, there are boxes and boxes of them in Portland that I'm going to have to figure out what to do with when I move down here, but there are thousands of them out in the world.

[00:24:37] And of course people will continue to encounter them and read them, I suppose. But to me it feels done. It feels closed. I, even as somebody who makes books, don't always grasp the tenacity of the printed object. It just keeps existing. And there are some times, like I've talked about this on Patreon on before, like the, the way that different feedback in different contexts hits differently.

[00:25:07] And I was just reflecting on how, you know, if the book had just come out and I'd gotten that message from him, it would have been still impactful, but reduced in intensity because I probably would have been receiving—and I think at the time the book came out, I was receiving a lot of other messages like that. Not necessarily of that specific intensity to do with, like, kids reading your book, which I think is a special thrill and something that the idea of working on Seacritters is really, oh, I dunno, it's dizzying and exciting and I like thinking about that, but it will be different, I think, from, from what I've experienced before.

[00:25:42] But when the big rush is happening, when you make the big announcement, when you say, "Oh, I'm working on this book" and everyone goes, "Oh, hooray," there's that reactive feedback, right? This wasn't to do with that. This guy sought me out in the middle of a very quiet season—he didn't know that, of course he doesn't know what's going on with me, he has no idea—but he told me about that and because it came in isolation and because it came unasked for, it was a gift.

[00:26:14] It was a really big gift.

[00:26:24] I think I make the stakes higher for myself than they need to be. I don't think. I know. I know I make this takes higher than they need to be.

[00:26:35] And when I've complained to friends about being in this mental soup and not knowing the way forward or where I'm supposed to be going, feeling like I'm on the cusp of figuring something out, but then not moving fast enough for my own liking, continuing to poke at my bruise and saying "Ow, this still hurts." the wise friends, the hopeful friends say, "I think you're in a really rich place. I think something rich and beautiful will come out of this."

[00:27:17] And sometimes I think that's the validation that we can only get in those quieter spaces. And I'm not really interested in making Patreon a loud space.

[00:27:30] I debated talking about this because I, it, it feels a little weird and I also don't want to make anybody feel anxious or strange about changing their pledges, because for god's sake, we're in a Pandemic, but I, I had a revelation last night, when you go on Patreon's dashboard as a creator, the graphs that you can see of change in your account over time, have to do with the growth and loss of pledges. Dollar amounts. But not of numbers of Patrons.

[00:28:04] There is a space where you can track numbers of Patrons, but they only give you the data as a column of numbers, kind of like a spreadsheet, not a visualization. I'm a very visual learner and I don't obsess over those metrics, but I do look at them occasionally and there's always fluctuation every month.

[00:28:21] People come, people go and that's kind of the ecosystem of Patreon and I've made my peace with it. But I started to realize that I was losing...I thought people. I was certainly losing pledges and I'd been worrying at it over the last couple of weeks thinking, "Oh my god, like, this is, I, this is it, you know? Patreon has been this thing that I could just trust to grow more or less of its own accord over time, the Pandemic has put paid to that. Or I have put paid to that somehow. I've started doing too much weird stuff and people are wandering off because they're bored of Rambling or they don't want to talk about making comics."

[00:28:57] I don't know. What have I changed, that's so different? Who knows. This is the irrational brain space that I've been in. And I would look at that graph and I would see this line starting to curve down and to the right more consistently and precipitously than it has done ever before. There's wiggles and wobbles, but this was like, oh, a downward turn.

[00:29:17] And it was wigging me out, I won't lie. Now, again, I'm not saying this, I don't, don't worry. I'm okay. And you're okay. We're all okay. Because what I realized yesterday was that even though the dollar amount has been going down—two things happened. Okay. The first thing is that a friend of mine revealed to me that she has been mentoring some cartoonists recently, and that as part of their cartoonist training assignment, she had asked them to go into her Patreon dashboard and go through her exit surveys, which is something that I think every creator dreads doing, because there is a space, if any of you have canceled pledges to people you Patronize, I'm sure you've seen this, there's a little place where you can indicate why you're leaving. And in my experience, when I have been brave enough to check in the past, 99% of the time it's people saying my financial situation changed, and I completely understand that.

[00:30:10] And the rest of the people generally it's it's folks saying,"you know, "I, I would like to, um, cycle my support to other creators now," which again, I also agree with. Very occasionally people will leave a sweet note saying, “Hey, I got laid off. I'm so sorry. I'll be back soon." Or, "I think it's just time for me to support some other people, but I love what you're doing. Keep it up." And, actually inspired by this, when I unsubscribe from mailing lists, I, uh, I try to always leave a little note saying, you know, "Hey, I'm moving to a different city. And, um, I'm going to connect with organizations in my local environment next, so, uh, keep doing the great work you're doing," blah, blah, blah, because who knows, you know, you never know who's going to read that.

[00:30:46] But coupled with the downturn in financial numbers, I was feeling really nervous and I, I didn't want to look at it. And so when she said this, I was like, "Oh my god, I could get somebody else to look at this. I don't have to look at this." And so I asked my friend Katie if she would go into my Patreon account and look at my exit surveys.

[00:31:02] I'm not proud. I'm kind of proud though, because it felt like rocket science, uh, because your friend doesn't care, you know, your intern doesn't care. They can just go look and, uh, bless her heart Katie sent me a very sweet Google doc with a sort of vague, data-based breakdown, um, concluding with enormous lime green letters that said "0% of people left because you're bad at your job and they hate you, quit worrying."

[00:31:29] But the thing that hit me… Okay, so that was thing number one, right? That assuaged some of the anxiety. Thing number two though, was learning that in terms of number, like, total number of Patrons? The numbers haven't dipped at all. It's, I mean, it's been flatlining since like August of 2019, I think, which is kind of a long time, but I don't worry about that.

[00:31:51] I actually don't care. I, the, the moment that I realized that the community is staying the same, the number of people who are around is staying the same, it turns out I don't give a shit about the money. I give a shit about the community of people. And especially now, when I've moved into a situation where hopefully I'll, I'll be able to look out for my financial concerns a little bit more carefully, because I don't have as many expenses living with my folks, it's a very different situation and I'm, I'm not panicking. I mean, yes, I would love for Patreon to form the backbone that supplements my book deal and whatever, you know, there's, there's the capitalist drive, and that's what everything is pushing us towards when we go online. That's what, everything, all the growth hacking nonsense, all of the NFT, bubbles, all the recommended, algorithmic YouTube star videos, all of it is like pushing and pushing and pushing towards growth.

[00:32:50] I don't want growth. I want connection. I want community and I want exchange. I think about the people who are writing in to say, "Hey, you know, I had to quit my, my Patronage because, um, I lost my job" and I started thinking about like a communal fund within Patreon that pays out to people in that community?

[00:33:16] Does that make sense? I was talking to someone about a mutual aid, financial co-op that they had set up or something to that end, where it was basically like there was a central bucket of finance that people paid into, or there was one wealthy person in the community who had stipulated that they would donate however much a couple thousand a month, and people within that network could apply for those funds, no questions asked, it was just, you know, you, you put in a request and you can take a certain amount per month and it was this sort of wealth redistribution model. I love that. I love that so much. I genuinely feel like continuing to run this as something that's a one-way system of Patron to creator doesn't make as much sense.

[00:34:05] Anyway, this is a longer conversation and I have overshot my typical Ramble length, so I'm gonna slowed this down and wind it up.

[00:34:18] But this is good.

[00:34:25] This is good. Even if it takes a long time. It's really good.

[00:34:34] And the times when I sit down to talk to all of you in this format, feels very different from writing big educational posts or putting together YouTube videos or any of these other spaces, because largely because of what you have told me.  "I listened to this while I did the dishes," or "this makes me think of X" or the lovely conversations that we all have in the comments section or all of that stuff.

[00:34:55] I feel like this is far more like having a conversation with a friend, and getting to sit here in the middle of this river bed while I do it is pretty amazing.

[00:35:10] That's what I want to keep moving towards.

[00:35:16] Okay. That's the end. Bye.