I try to ask this question myself every day
Hello, dear reader,
I welcome you to yet another dispatch from me.
Here I will take a short time to congratulate myself on sending the 4th dispatch on a weekly basis. I struggle greatly with consistency. And now is the moment to say out loud that I am very proud of myself.
And also I would love to thank you for some personal responses I got after publishing my sobriety piece. It means a lot to me.
It is two months since we moved to Spain, we are still doing bureaucratic quests and going through the process of signing a contract for the apartment rent. But Lukas already attends school for month and a half. Which means that I have time to actually be alone with my thoughts.
Snippets of life, light here is magic, I want to film and film
It is more or less for the first time over the last two years that I can sit and quietly think - who am I as a professional? How do I want the things to work out? Where do I want to find my focus? And at that moment it starts to feel like a psychedelic trip (at least how it is represented in media, never did it myself haha). All the ideas, possibilities, plans, strategies, goals, dreams - they bloom and boom in my mind like a pattern on a tie-dye t-shirt of a hippie.
I don’t really have problem with generating ideas of what I can do. My weak and soft spot is consistency. I would love to think that it was easier before, but when I start to reflect, I come up with the acceptance that it most probably just not my strongest feature. I can do sprints, I can do crunches, but it is not a healthy pattern for me. The more I do personal therapy, the more understand how this self-sabotage and procrastination works for me.
So now I am building almost everything anew, I try to be attentive to my own needs, be gentle when I stumble. And keep focus.
3 things I try to do now to help myself to not space out:
Write down a lot
I bought myself the cheapest notebook possible and drag it around all the time. I am the person who has a lot of beautiful journals, sketchbooks and notebooks, but sometimes I am too anxious to use them. Especially for ugly scribbles. I have a tendency to “fly over” my life, one thing stops and then another three begin. So while writing I slow down.
Stop before I lose motivation
We have been discussing it with a friend lately, how to not burn out? How to know when to stop? For me it is definitely just a bit before I get tired and bored and fail morale. But how to feel this moment? How to not miss it? I think, I used to be able to stop when I just cannot withstand it anymore. Now I try to do breaks - to stretch, to get myself a cuppa (we don’t have heating now and it is pretty chill in the apartment), to go out to the seaside to warm up a bit. I think that now I caught this personal beat of mine, so I do those breaks without alarm clock and I learnt how to ask myself - how are you now? If you hyperfocus, or lean towards “doing it a bit more” and then tadam it is 3 hours later and your eyes hurt and back is sore - I would suggest to try using timer. Timers might feel boring or too mundane, but it is the simplest and very much amazing instrument.
Keep a sleep cycle
I have to wake up at 6-50 everyday to prepare Lukas for school. Ariel also has to wake up that early, because his is 2 timezones behind his colleagues. And as plain as it sounds, I just cannot allow myself a luxury of going to bed after midnight. As much as I would love to. Actually my body is completely ready to be a bed burrito just after 10pm. So usually I go to bed around 10-30, which so so so frustrating. To sweeten up this situation, I try to read at least half an hour before diving into Morpheus’ embrace.
There definitely smaller tricks that I do, but I would consider these the pillars. What are your pillars? I am curious to learn from anybody. Because one can never know what will be a precious insight.
Thank you for reading me,
Vera
What am I enjoying now?
This video inspired me to attend a session of self portrait as well. Recently I feel a bit stiff in front of the camera. I guess it is both because I changed a lot both from the inside and outside, and my usual just smiling self is not enough for me, but when I think deep, I obtain such a grim face. I will make an attempt and let you know how it went.
I am very glad that my dear friend Kris started a Substack. For now she plans it to be mostly of her art shop update, but she is amazing storyteller, so I hope she will use Substack more. For now I would recomend you to subscribe.
Yesterday (during my bed read) I finished up The Nature of Nature: Why We Need the Wild by Enric Sala. I won’t lie that I waited for more of an auto-fiction from this book, and mostly I grabbed it at my friend’s house because of a stunning cover. But in the end it was unexpectedly gentle read on ecosystems and ecological state of the world. I loved that he not only state quite grim truths, but also suggest decisions which are scientifically based.
Also it was wonderful to learn that the author is originally from Catalonia, so he wrote a lot about his personal experiences of diving here. It felt more personal to read it as I live in Catalonia now myself.
I adore Adam’s integrity and his ability to find right words for very complicated topic. He stands up and speaks up for people whose voice is not heart. His video on women touched me deeply. But this one is also very special, here he talks about the imperative of finding one’s own music, beat, rhyme in making art. To craft one’s own recipe of what works. This is exactly what I am doing now. So this video happened at the perfect time for me.
PS: I notice that when you receive my letters you have a note down below that says you can pledge me money to support my writing, please don’t. I appreciate Substack desire for authors to earn, but I won’t have a chance to access these money. I will establish a tipping/membership thing soon, and will let you know. Also these writings will be forever for free.