So if anyone is wondering where I've been, I ain't gonna beat around the bush.
I've had depression and anxiety which has made work a lot worse for me.
I announced a comic a year ago, as well as a short film, both projects proved too much for me and I recently had a breakdown. I am feeling better but the guilt of not being able to deliver anything to my audience lingers. It hasn't helped either that I've had school and personal stuff to deal with as well.
I'm gonna produce smaller animations and comics in the future to see if that can help me back on my feet. I still want to work on my longer comic and short film but they will have to wait until I figure things out for myself.
I'm sorry for promising things I wasn't able to deliver on. I'm trying my best to fix that in the future. Animations will likely come out but I can't promise on when.
Take care.
Kajenx
It's okay, learning how to get past resistance is a major step in the learning process for every creative person. Something that has helped me is to shift my goals from "I'm going to try to make this project" to "I'm going to do this specific task every day." So, if you want to make a comic, simply make the commitment to do one panel every day. There will be days, or even weeks, where making that one panel feels like a huge chore, but a lot of the time (more and more as you commit to the daily task) that one panel will lead to three panels, or six, or a whole day of working. Even if it doesn't, eventually the slow trickle will end up at a finished project and you will start to feel better about the situation.
Find a way to break things town into 10 minute projects, and commit to just one every day. That way you can procrastinate until 10 minutes before bed, and still get something done. I was able to write half a book this way over the last few months. It adds up faster than you think it will.
https://youtu.be/1lTcgSzf0AQ
I found this video very helpful - even life changing, if I could be so dramatic. The successful creative people don't make things when they're inspired, they just show up every day for a little bit. They check in to see if the muse isn't busy.
Doing the same things every day can be very helpful for anxiety and depression as well. If you can find a way to structure your free time into a regular routine, it will help avoid resistance - both towards creative projects and towards daily life. There will be the initial resistance to get past af you commit to the routine, but after that, you will feel resistance towards NOT doing the routine, since that will become your new normal - it will be what makes you feel comfortable.
As for anxiety - try to understand that it's an alarm bell that you're allowed to turn off. The point of anxiety is to give you a warning. Once you have the warning, it's okay to turn off the alarm. A chronically anxious person doesn't experience any extra problems, they simply don't turn off the alarms once they go off. To turn off your anxiety, you want to turn your mind away from the problem you're thinking about. You can ask yourself "is there anything I can do about this right now, at this exact moment?" If the answer is no, then you can say "ok, I can allow myself to forget about this problem until later. I don't have to do anything to solve it right now." Procrastinate your anxiety until it's relevant. When you can actually do something about the problem that triggered the anxiety, you won't feel anxious about it - you have satisfied the conditions that make the alarm go off, so it no longer does.
Anxiety puts you in a state of readiness. It's the mind telling the body to tighten up the lungs, clench the bowels, give the muscles adrenaline to tell them to release energy. It's fight/flight - the body is ready to react. The problem is, you're reacting to your own imagination. There is nothing in front of you to fight, and if you run, your imagination is just going to come along with you. So approach your imagination as a way to work through problems. If you imagine something embarrassing or uncomfortable, go into the scenario completely, don't let your mind lurch away or cringe. You can say to yourself "I don't need to have any kind of physical reaction to the thoughts and images going through my mind. I can just let my mind work out what it needs to while remaining perfectly calm physically." Intentionally imagine things all the way through - if you said something stupid, imagine how everyone is laughing at you. If you are worried about giving a presentation, imagine peeing your pants in front of everyone, forgetting everything you were going to say and bursting into tears, imagine scowling faces judging you, or everyone being disgusted by you. As you imagine this, you'll notice it breaks through walls - you are giving your mind permission to wander wherever it likes, so it no longer has to stay on alert and try to avoid thinking certain things. This will disable the state of readiness.
At the center of all of this is the idea that you don't have to spend all your time preparing for the future. You can trust your future self to take care of things. Allow yourself to forget about things that don't matter at the moment - just think about something else, something positive you're looking forward to. It will feel a bit reckless to turn off the state of readiness, but you can make the decision, "I'd rather live my life calm and happy, even if I have to screw up more, rather than living in a perpetual state of tension just to make sure I don't make any mistakes." Anxiety is perfectionism, and you can allow yourself no to be perfect.
TheSilleGuy
Thanks for the advice! I really appreciate it! I will try to think of work on that from now on!