December Recap
The monsters I finished this month!
Oh my god. 100 monsters is a lot. of. monsters. That said, I got into a pretty good rhythm with it for the first part of December and managed to paint 9 more, which brings me to number 74. I did fall short of my goal to finish this year, and even my smaller goal to finish 80 this year. I kind of lost steam at the end of the month. The holidays can be a weird, hazy time. I’m hoping to get back into a groove for January and just keep plugging away.
Sometimes it feels like creativity is a wild animal. It can be really powerful but also unpredictable and easily spooked into hiding in bed for two hours… or two days. It needs the right amount of direction and discipline, but also freedom to go off on aimless tangents. A healthy amount of new experiences to fill the well, but not so much that it gets overwhelmed. It’s hard for me to find that balance. I have a helicopter pilot friend who once explained flying as trying to balance a ball on top of another ball, which I think is a lovely visual that also feels applicable to the balance of tending to creativity. Frequently in need of both small and large corrections as expected and unexpected, internal and external forces act on it. Could I shave some of the roundness off the balls, to make it easier? Or does that introduce a different set of issues to the equation?
This is my sixth year of doing Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year journal (it’s free! you just have to share your email address). It’s a pretty epic amount of writing but I love pulling the previous year apart and then dreaming and scheming for the coming one. One of the exercises is picking a word for the year, something that helps center your intentions and my word this year is ACTION. I can get so stuck in worrying about making mistakes. But I’m also realizing it’s a lot easier to course correct once you’re already in motion. Sometimes you need to start heading in the wrong direction just to get moving and realize it’s what you don’t want, so you can start aiming closer towards what you do want. As Martha Beck’s friend says “The path of ‘not here.’” I just love that idea. I don’t know what it is that I want, but I know it’s not this.
I also made some improvements to my angled board: I taped a piece of cardboard to the edge, which I added sticky feet to so it won’t slide around. Now I can move it and put it away easily. I can also flip the side with the shelf to the back and clip my light board to it for tracing.
Thanks for reading! I hope your 2025 is off to a great start! And if it’s off to a rotten start, well I hope that gives you some clues of what to walk away from :)