Droughts (Mortigi tempo)

Until yesterday morning, I’d been unemployed. My previous job was contingent upon my continued residence at a very specific location. Came the day I had to leave, I left the job as well. That was just over a month ago.

This is a very bad thing for me. Not for financial reasons, though that has been a very real factor, and a source of unending stress these past weeks. Still, that I could handle; I’ve been poor all my life, and have expectation of remaining that way for the foreseeable future. No, the threat to me is psychological.

I don’t respond well to boredom.

Under the best of circumstances, I am only a bad week from total depression. It’s something I’ve struggled with for well over a decade now. Depression, much like addiction, is not a disease you can ever really be cured of-- all you’re hoping for is more time between relapses. For me it’s every couple of years. I’m coming out of one now. It was a bad one, not that they aren’t all bad. But it was harder for the circumstances.

Being bored always makes things worse, for me at least (never having gone in for therapy like a sensible person, I’m never sure how much of all this is universal). Depression is also like addiction in that it feeds off itself. Once you’re depressed, the mere fact of feeling that way makes you even more depressed still. And when you don’t have a job, don’t have classes, don’t have ready access to friends just down the hall or pressing commitments of any kind… well. Then you’re good and fucked, aren’t you? For someone like me, it’s almost impossible not to be depressed when being depressed is the only thing I have to do. I’ve managed to pull out of it, thanks largely to help from numerous sources, but I’m only going to stay well if I have something to occupy my time and my mind. I need this job very much.

Plus, the money thing.

Now, if we set aside bills and groceries and senseless consumerism (more on that on a later date, I think), I could probably get by without the job, as long as I still had my art. Hell, the plan (you know, the Big Plan), is for my job to be art. But art is a tricky thing. And just as I’ve been going through a drought of employment, I’ve been going through a creative one as well.

The stereotype of the tortured artist has never been a comfortable fit for me. Depression does not fuel my work; I don’t know how to channel it into anything constructive (though I almost always try). This is something that sets me apart from many, if not most, of my heroes and influences. For me, art is an act of love. For them, too, of course, but it’s very hard for me to feel that love when I’m wallowing in despair. It doesn’t help me any. It’s just a stumbling block.

Well, I’ve been stumbling on that block for six weeks now, roughly since my latest relapse started. In that time, despite spending an hour or two in the studio or with a sketch pad almost every day, my only significant achievement has been to completely disillusion myself with every idea I’ve had in the past two years. Depressed or not, I am now almost completely convinced that they represent, as a whole, a series of dead ends. Even the actual work itself is only important for the technical value and the lessons learned through process.

However, therein lies my hope for eventual resolution. I put enormous faith in the process of art-making, which I hold to be far more important to a piece than the original idea, or even the eventual outcome. All true art is personal, and for an artist, the process is where any real self-exploration occurs. This, again, is a subject worth returning to in greater detail at another time.

For now, though, my hope is that as I continue to pull together emotionally, I will begin to reassert myself creatively, and that with a little luck, the two may even feed off each other. (Perhaps “build off each other” would be a better way of phrasing it.) Just as I’m counting on the job to offer additional relief in one aspect of my life, I’m depending on the artistic process to help clarify my ideas and sense of direction in another.