I have recently been diagnosed with ADHD and what a relief it has been to finally have a name and an explanation for all of the struggles I’ve faced throughout my life. One of those struggles has been my easy distractibility. While one could spin it as a superpower of creativity, in practice it means I have notebooks filled to the brim with scribbles and ideas that never come to fruition. Lately this has manifested as what I’ve finally realized is creative burnout.

My mind races every day. In the mornings and early afternoons I’m dreaming of all the art I want to make (but can’t because Day Job). In the late afternoons and early evenings I’ve switched gears to analytical puzzle solving, if you will (PERFECT for the Day Job, but alas too late, now it’s kid time!).

In my efforts to put food on the table, I’ve been writing down all my ideas and then leaving them off to the side, only to continue spinning them around in my brain and not doing anything about them. This leaves me creatively exhausted but wildly unfulfilled and unsatisfied since I’ve expended all my creative energy but not actually done anything with it. And not only that, I’ve been so distracted that I didn’t get nearly enough work done for the day, leaving me an anxious mess that then needs to work after the kids go down for the night. This has been the recipe for disaster that I have been swimming (let’s be real, drowning) in for a while now. Several weeks? A few months? What is time anymore? I don’t know.

I think this stems from the life changes that led to me losing my dedicated studio space. Not only did I lose the space, but the ritual of me getting Painting Time ™ guaranteed every week disappeared too. This has resulted in a storm of needing to do creative work and exhausting myself trying to figure out where it might fit in in the nooks and crannies of my daily existence. Basically, I have not been showing up for my art.

When I reflect back on the first few months of the year where I felt really good, artistically speaking, it was because I had a clear delineation between the Work (acrylic painting on canvas) and my creative hobbies (paintings in sketch books, collage, various arts and crafts). Because I knew I would get time every week to paint, I was able to relax and let myself enjoy my creative hobbies. Now, with no guarantees, I’m constantly reaching for some sort of creative outlet and still not feeling satisfied. I’ve tried to fill my time with unsatisfactory little projects here and there without feeling any sense of progress or accomplishment.

My favorite analogy for this feeling is that I have been a fish flailing on land. And now I need to stop flailing and crawl in one direction and evolve legs.

That last part is a bit more difficult to parse, but my realization was that I needed to simplify. I couldn’t keep chasing interest after interest and still expect to feel satisfied if I didn’t commit the required time to the Work. Painting has to come first and when I have that down, I can explore and experiment with everything else.

I’m not trying to shut out my swirling creativity brain, I’m just trying to harness my natural tendencies towards a feeling of fulfillment rather than exhaustion.

I gotta show up for my Art. I gotta simplify my life. Focus on painting and when that is taken care of, then fiddle around with all the other shiny creative things that catch my attention.

Part of the realization here is a point made in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, a book I thoroughly enjoyed reading. The point is common sense of course, but reading it spelled out so simply finally made the feeling start to sink in. To wildly paraphrase: we will never get through all the to dos. There will always be more to do. We are finite and thus will never be able to do everything and that missing out is what makes the rest so special, because you had to sacrifice time and other opportunities to do it.

I will never get to every single creative idea that I ever have. And that’s ok. I have to choose what really matters. And what really matters is my painting. That may change at some point later in my life, but it rings true for me now. Painting is the thing I choose to spend my time and creative energy on, making it all the more precious because of the thousands of other creative endeavors I didn’t pursue as a result.

So I need to simplify. Paint. The rest can happen in the margins if I feel like it.