Creatively Adrift

I am struggling right now.

It’s not a new struggle – this is one that I’ve had for a long time (and one I know that I know many other people relate to). I want to learn to do too many goddamn things and it paralyzes me from doing absolutely anything.

It doesn’t help that Ashe and I moved to a place that doesn’t really have internet other than what we can provide with our hotspots. I still haven’t adjusted to a life where I can’t just open a YouTube tutorial when I want to learn something, download tools and assets whenever I want, or even listen to streaming music while I work on a project.

Since I work remotely, I try to keep most of my data available for work tasks. I save my high-bandwidth personal tasks for the times when I go into a library or a café and that extra effort and planning means that I just don’t do it that often. I either need to make myself go into town more or I need to figure out ways to explore my hobbies without easy access to the internet.

The fact that I am writing this blog post right now is an attempt to combat my own inertia.

One of the issues that I face when trying to work on creative projects is that my brain feels very disorganized. I have a bunch of different ways that I organize myself at work and keep track of various projects but I struggle when trying to apply those systems to my personal life. I don’t have any place that is the “home” for my various different projects.

As I’m going to be working in WordPress every day with my new job, however, I think that I want to try to revive this blog by trying to make myself write a blog post every day. Some posts will be self-reflective, like this one, bu I want to use other posts to catalog information about the various projects that I want to work on.

It has been easy for me to believe that I really don’t have anything worth talking about because I’m not really an expert in one particular thing. I have lots of tiny pockets of knowledge (and many opinions, certainly) but nothing where I feel like I could write a book or even film a tutorial. Any content that I create would be me just exploring a topic blindly and hoping that someone would find that content useful or interesting.

But that being said, that’s the sort of content that I really like to consume. My favorite Roots and Refuge content is Jess’s vlogs where she’s learning along with us. Simeon Gertz is always experimenting with things and taking us along with her as she learns new things. The two most recent videos that I can’t get out of my head and are making me want to learn Unreal Engine are Corridor Crew’s video featuring Markiplier and JackSepticEye learning Unreal Engine in a crash course competition and LixianTV talking about learning how to create a horror game in Unreal Engine and stumbling through the process.

Even if no one else wants to read me stumbling about, the popularity really isn’t the point. I would absolutely love to have a regular audience that I can converse with and learn from but the true utility of recording my learning process in my blog is to organize my thoughts and crystalize them into something concrete. If I do this repeatedly, that will allow me to hopefully build up small layers of knowledge which should add up into something much larger with enough repetition.

My dream is to be able to merge many of my interests together to create one massive sensory experience. I have no idea what it could look like but I’m exploring all sorts of new mediums of expression and I feel like as I learn more, pieces will fall into place more and more. We’ll see.

In the meantime, you’re welcome to come on this journey with me as I stumble my way through different artistic mediums. If you do, I hope you at least find my ramblings interesting. Feel free to leave a comment if you’re creatively inclined and want to connect – I’m always looking for new friends that I can learn from!