Creative Work-Life Balance
My count of RSS feeds as of this writing is a whopping 340. A lot of them haven't had an update in a year or more. Some are dead (I should develop a method for cleaning them up). However, one of the benefits of my laziness is sometimes a non-updating feed updates! Like today's post on Necropolis, a webcomic I haven't seen update since 2020. The author's been busy being a professional animator and producer.
Getting to make cartoons with so many talented people has been a huge, all-consuming privilege. It’s taken me five years on the job just to get my legs under me, just to begin to feel that I know what I’m doing. It’s taken everything I have just to keep my head above water, to get something resembling our crew’s talent and effort and intention onto the screen. For that entire half-decade I have longed to make comics, to write stories for myself, to draw for myself. But there was always something that needed doing.
Recently I’ve realized that denying that part of myself, telling it to wait its turn through one more script revision, one more review, one more retake, one more episode, one more season–it’s taken a toll that I can no longer afford to pay. I don’t think I can keep going unless I take some time to write and draw and explore outside of the studio production system. As we fight through post on the third season of My Adventures With Superman and start writing the first season of Lantern, I’m looking for ways to work and lead that will get me some of that time back–and my teams are really coming through for me.
This is very poignant for me. For many of the years I worked for Amazon I couldn't drag myself to program on my own time. I love programming — it satisfies a deep need in me, and I'd be doing it even if I never had to work again. But the day job is often incredibly busy and stressful. Like Jake, I had to stop myself and recognize what was going on, that I was giving too much of myself to work, that I was removing the joy and enjoyment from my own life. I've spent a few years now working on this and found a decent balance, though there are still times where all I can do after work is watch YouTube and zone out.
I wish Jake well. It's so hard to find the balance, to save and nourish your own creative drive for yourself. I expect this is a commonality between software engineering and other creative jobs.