Remix

I keep getting those annoying data annotation ads. You know the ones. 'Data annotation is a legit thing! It's not a scam! It's totally not a scam! I can't tell you how much it isn't a scam!'

Anyway, in these ads, they interview people of all ages, backgrounds, and life situations. One of these is a young mother. 'I can do data annotation when my baby naps,' she says. 'Or if I'm walking the dog and the baby, I can do it on my phone. It's great for my work/life balance.'

IT'S GREAT FOR MY WORK/LIFE BALANCE.

No. NO! Let's stop this. It is NOT great for your work/life balance to have a little device in your pocket that constantly pulls you back to work, even when you should be enjoying the presence of your dog and your baby. It is the absolute opposite of work/life balance.

I feel strongly about this because last summer, my catastrophic lack of work/life balance caused a sudden and quite unexpected decline in my mental health. It was a bit like swimming slightly too far out to sea. It all looks safe. You can feel the sand underneath you, just about. The water looks calm. And then suddenly, you lose your balance, and the tide takes you. I look back on it now like a lifeguard watching from the shore. I should have seen the signs! They're so obvious from where I'm sitting now.

But hey. I didn't know.

Here's what happens when work and kid stuff and life admin and uni and family responsibilities and friendships all blur into one huge, constantly tumbling washing machine: chaos. Chaos happens.

The issue with us is that my freelancing is flexible. The flexibility is part of why I wanted it in the first place, for obvious reasons. But it's a double-edged sword. Holding boundaries is difficult. So difficult that they often don't exist in the first place. At the end of last summer, my (scant) childcare situation collapsed. The kids were restless and frustrated. I could not physically get my work done anymore. There weren't enough hours in the day. On top of that, we had a house move on the horizon. I started to lose touch with friends and family because I didn't want to look at my phone anymore. I woke up every day with my heart already racing. My mind was rushing constantly in a million directions. I felt fragile and hollow. Like you could tip me over and I would shatter.

'It'll get better when the kids go back to school,' I said.

And then, 'it'll get better when we move house.'

And then, 'it'll get better when we settle into the house properly.'

And then it didn't.

I ran out of things that might be causing it. I felt overcaffeinated every moment of every day. And then, when everything settled, I crashed into a deep depression, and I tried every single thing I could think of to distract myself out of it. I became someone I no longer recognised. It took months to recover. I still am recovering.

That's the danger of not having a decent work/life balance. Of not separating the money-making part of you from the rest of you. You might think you're fine for a long time. You might think you're not susceptible to it. But eventually, it'll knock your feet out from under you.

I could write forever about work/life balance. (And I will go into it more, if you want. I'm always up for writing things people find useful.) Unfortunately, for me, a lot of the recovery process has involved total phone deprivation. I had to reset my brain. If I slip back into a lot of phone time, I can feel my mental health spiralling. So I have to have off-screen hobbies.

If I had unlimited time, I would do so many hobbies. There are loads of things I want to learn. Sewing. Drawing. Watercolours. Clay. Pickling. Buying an old doll's house and renovating it into a secret fairy grotto. (Quite specific.) As it is, embroidery is my current go-to.

Sometimes, though, I fancy something else. Something that doesn't require me to check on YouTube for stitch instructions every five minutes. So I turn to collage.

I wait until I've got a little stack of old magazines, and then I cut them all up into pieces and make pictures. Sometimes, I do it to lure my kids away from their own devices. Other times, I do it just for me. I did a lot of this over the summer. I started to create images just because I quite enjoy the slow, methodical process of layering. And also, the chance to just make something silly.

I'll be honest with you: doing something creative doesn't come easily to me. Not because I don't have the will or the inspiration or the skills. But because I have guilt. The hangover of burnout is immense, crippling guilt. If I'm not constantly moving, I'm usually fighting guilt about it. It takes me quite a long time for my mind to settle and my feelings to pass. Eventually, I get into a nice flow state, and time dissolves away. It's worth getting there, but it's not easy.

If you think you're crap at crafts, I cannot recommend collage enough. You're cutting up something that would go in the recycling anyway. You're taking someone else's work and remixing it. You don't need to know how to draw. Just cut and stick. Like you did as a child at school.

I can't understate the impact Super Eyepatch Wolf's video The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games had on me. If you haven't watched it, you should. It's about fake games, obviously. Books and art offering flashes of entire worlds that you can't actually step into and play. We bought two books off the back of this video:

Every time I dive into them, I admire the effort. The craft of it. These are old-school dungeon crawlers. Locations, creatures, weapons. Pure world-building just for the sake of world-building. An exercise in imagination.

I love the style of Vermis; it has a fuzzy, surreal quality to it. And it's kind of lonely. I can imagine diving into this world as a child, being slightly too young for it, and having some of the creatures creep around in the edges of my brain forever.

I've recently found myself thinking of a game in collage. Probably inspired by the Vermis books. I'll never make an actual game, to be clear. (I don't have the knowledge. Or the will to learn. Or the strength of mind.) But I might commit to the odd page of a sketchbook every now and then, just for fun.

Some of the most memorable games in recent years have earned a place in my heart, at least partially, because of how beautiful they are. Games like Unpacking, for the pixel art.

Or Disco Elysium, for the expressionism.

Or Terra Nil, for the illustrations.

Or Dordogne, for the incredible watercolours.

Obviously, an art style can only go so far. It can't prop up bad writing, or boring gameplay. But it does tie everything together. And I can't help but think that none of these games would exist, at least in the way that they do, had a small handful of people not been allowed time just to mess around for a while. Would Dordogne look the way it did, had Cédric Babouche not been allowed to play around with watercolours as a teenager? I don't think it would.

The obvious problem with that line of thinking is that you start focusing too much on the end product. What's the point of doing watercolours, if you can't eventually make a beautiful game out of it? What's the point of making a fake game if you can't turn it into a book and monetise it? Obviously I'm so glad these things exist. But I also think part of the reason why so many of us are burning out is because we've been pressured to turn all our hobbies into moneymaking endeavours. My medium-stakes conspiracy theory is that a lot of this comes from the government. My pootling around with a glue stick isn't going to benefit the economy, now, is it?

The process is the point, basically. That's what I'm trying to say. Not the finished thing. When I was a young teenager, I spent hours drawing imaginary weapons after getting heavily into Final Fantasy VIII. And then I spent hours wandering around my local village, imagining my own fantasy world, taking notes, puzzling out ideas. I poured hours of my life into this thing, and I never wrote it. It didn't become anything marketable. But it became part of me.

There are a million reasons why we don't make stuff anymore. We're tired. We're overworked. We're exhausted by the responsibilities of parenthood or keeping up with family and friends. We're addicted to consuming content rather than creating it. We're drowning in things to do. We're scared of the opinions of imaginary people. All legitimate. I do get it.

But here are the reasons why you should do creative stuff, whatever it is:

1. It's anti-hustle culture. Making something with no intent to make money from it is practically an act of defiance at this point.
2. It fights against cringe culture. Some people are terrified of being cringy. Which is so boring. I want to know interesting people who aren't scared of doing interesting things, even if they're not immediately good at them.
3. It resets our dopamine addiction. We're so used to instant gratification. We want everything delivered to us instantly: food, TV shows, art. Doing something creative forces us to slow down. The process of having an idea, attempting it, and then the final product being not quite what we imagined is good for our brains. The trying, and the trying again. We need these attempts and failures to reset our expectations about how fast everything should be.
4. It's healing. At least, it is for me. Every minute I spend meticulously cutting out beautiful women in mad clothing, or rethreading a needle for the fiftieth time, or writing a two-paragraph story in a notepad, represents quiet and determined recovery. It represents time I have spent on myself. Unplugged, away from the demands of modern life, and completely outside of the needs of anyone else.

Creative acts enable me to draw a line in the sand in terms of how much I will allow modern life to push me around. And that feels really important, in this present moment.

I would love to be the kind of person who either inspires other people to make stuff, or facilitates creative acts for other people. I'd love to make space for people to sit down and express themselves without fear of judgment. I don't know what that actually looks like yet, although I'm thinking of ideas. In the meantime, I hope this helps you to pick up those craft supplies you bought back in 2020 and have stashed in a cupboard somewhere.

PS: please avoid burnout, read the symptoms, keep an eye on how you feel 💜

PPS: I am on Ko-Fi, if you like my work and want to buy me a coffee sometime. Right now, nothing is behind a paywall. I make little vlogs sometimes, and at the moment I'm doing a daily writing challenge, little bits of flash fiction or micro blog posts. Come join me if you like!