Sage Bray Varon

My apologies for not writing as often this last month or so. It’s been a question of priorities, although I still sit down and scribble out my thoughts for you. It’s just that I don’t always finish the post because life keeps calling me to do other things.

Prioritizing is an area of living a creative life that can be a bit of a conundrum. We love what we do so we want to do it all the time, but at the same time we may become afraid to fail, causing us to procrastinate so we don’t have to find out if we will. Then there’s the balancing of the rest of our life with our work. Workaholics in particular need to consciously make time for relationships and social lives so those aspects have a place of prominent on the schedule as well.

A lot of things we do these days can fall into the categories of either overworking or procrastination. Online time is a particular problem. In order to feel motivated and not so isolated, many of us share our work on social media. It’s also where we commonly find our audience to sell or promote to.

However, social media can be such a time sucking rabbit hole. Those platforms are specifically designed to draw you in and keep you there. They are literally designed to be addictive. Too much Instagram is going to eat into your creative time.

It can also push us to focus on our audience in unproductive ways. While considering your market is part of deciding what types of things to create, aiming to make things so you get more likes will draw you away from creating authentically. Focusing on likes pushes us to follow trends or do outlandish projects that we don’t enjoy. And creativity should be, first and foremost, enjoyable and fulfilling. It’s hard to make it that when you aren’t creating work you are personally passionate about.

Being drawn away from our work by the very community and audience we want to sell to is not a phenomenon of the internet age. It’s always been a possible pitfall. I remember many, many moons ago, when I was heavily involved in the poetry scene in Southern California, falling into this problem. I had co-founded a literary journal, read at poetry readings a couple times a week, and consistently submitted and published. It got to the point where I spent more time doing those things than writing. It wasn’t until another big poet on the circuit disappeared and I heard he did it because it stole time away from his writing. The community had become such a big part of my life that I couldn’t imagine stepping away from it, but in the end I did because I loved the writing more. But it took someone else’s story to wake me up to what was happening.

Those of you who have followed me through my career as a polymer art centric writer and publisher, saw the same thing happened there. The publications took up so much of my time and energy that I wasn’t doing my own work. It took health issues to push me to realize what I was sacrificing creatively. It still saddens me to be away from producing publications, but we have to have priorities and at this point in my life, I want it to be my own creative work.

The lesson is that if we want to have a fulfilling and productive life, creatively and otherwise, we need to monitor our daily activities, our schedules, our tendencies towards procrastination or workaholism, and we need to regularly reevaluate what our priorities should be. It’s great to be fulfilled in our creative work, but to be happy in it as well, we need to attend to and enjoy all aspects of our lives.

So, that’s where I am at. Tracking and re-evaluating my priorities. I need to renew my commitment to my health, which includes reducing stress. I’m sure many of us could use a little stress reduction! Because of that, and because my novels and poetry get first dibs on my time, I haven’t pushed myself to get these blog posts done. The hurdle was my being okay with that. After years of constant deadlines and strict schedules, it’s kind of weird to not have them.

I decided that I will serve myself, and you, best if these posts come out just when there is time and an article I can’t help but write. It leaves rooms for one of my favorite concepts… serendipity. I’m hoping the cosmos will push me to post the right subjects at just the right time for the readers who really need it. Let’s see how that goes.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll take a spare moment to consider how you prioritize your time right now and change what isn’t working to give you the space you need to create and to keep the rest of your life in balance.

I’ve already dashed off a few more post drafts about social media usage for creatives, so there will be more soon. In other words, I won’t disappear. I’ll just be an irregular but, hopefully, serendipitous visitor to your inbox.

 

Photo above by me using random objects on my studio table and the ICM (intentional camera movement) photo technique to create landscape like photographs. Photography had also been distracting me but it’s been great fun and gives me more images for my poetry posts on Instagram and my planned poetry collection, so it fits into my priorities!