Renovation, mini-vacation

Part of my problem with projects is that I feel guilty for taking a break from them. I'm always worried that I'm going to get used to not drawing or not writing, and then I'll lapse into not doing anything. It happened a lot when I was younger, and now that I'm older and very well aware of my mortality, I'm eager to keep working.

Unfortunately, that leads to burnout. Burnout leads to reluctance. Reluctance leads to hate.

I was heading into reluctance when I got the idea to renovate part of the bedroom, where I do all my work. Renovate might be the wrong word; it's more like "buying new furniture and rearranging current furniture." I got excited. I was drawing up plans to build a new bedside desk, taking measurements of all those cramped spaces, figuring out how long it would take to buy everything I needed...

And then I found out that I couldn't accomplish everything I wanted. Some spaces were too cramped to fit furniture. Building the items I wanted would take too long and probably cost more than buying something already made.

Three days spent obsessing over all of this. I was so disappointed in myself. I could have been working on projects all that time.

But when I returned to my projects, I found that I was happy to work on them again. The three wasted days were really a mini-vacation that I needed to recharge my batteries.

In fact, I came up with a new idea of working on my main project: instead of doing everything on the iPad and Mac, sketch and ink on paper, then scan everything for coloring. I enjoy working on paper more than on a screen for several hours at a stretch.

I need to take more mini-vacations.