Validation is the enemy
👋 Hello again, my friend.
Way back when, I was constantly drawing, and misunderstood for it.
When my relatives would ask me if I wanted to go to the water park, or race go-karts, and I told them I'd rather stay back and draw, they would look at me like I was from another planet. I remember the particular type of shake-your-head-and-laugh response that would communicate in no uncertain terms that I was an absolute fucking weirdo.
I want to be clear– this wasn't some nascent need for approval or desire, beyond the basic need every child has for approval from on high. While my parents were creative, I did not feel any pressure beyond being raised in a creative house. I just literally could not not be making things. My mother recently sent me a box of old drawings of mine from some forgotten corner of the basement. In it, thousands of doodles and comics. Decorations for Christmas, half-finished animation ideas, sketches of my D&D characters. I must have been drawing 24 hours a day, though I also remember an ungodly amount of TV, so who knows, really.
It wasn't work, though: it was just the way it was. There was never an end goal, because the idea of being goal-oriented wasn't really in my household DNA. I don't think my parents even knew when the SATs were. So: you made things in life, because that's what humans did. We made.
Back then, I suffered a kind of temporal-based terror, one of Too Little Time. For a large part of my young life, I was stricken with dread of so little time for so many plans. My drawings and schematics would stack up, making work back plans for a haunted house beginning in July. How would I direct films, write comic books, invent RPGs and become a world-class fencer all at once? I would have to figure it out, somehow.
Somewhere along the line, I think I lost that thread.
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I recently stopped working at a job. It was just time to go. And I'm lucky enough that I can take a little time before I have to work a new job.
I have been achieving professionally for a long time, and I'm good at it. As remarked upon in a previous missive, I think I'm a B+ illustrator and designer: good enough to get the job done, but no great talent. I think my real skill is being able to read expectations of people and then play up to them. Need me to be auteur creative guy? I gotchu. Need me to hard-nosed data-driven designer? I'm there, fam. And everything in between. Code switching as an art form.
As a result, I have trained my brain to seek this kind of validation as a kind of dopaminergic release from a sense of flailing in a fundamentally confusing world. I can play the part, and if I play the part, will you pat me on the head and tell me I've done well? That will keep me on solid footing for another day, at least.
I have a line I trot out that pretends I have bifurcated my life into the professional achievement and the true making that is "who I am". But is that true? I have to do money-losing-ventures that pretend to scratch that itch, but even that is still infected with achievement lurking outside of it as validation. Even then, the effort in some ways is an internal race, a chance to get lauded, get a blurb, a review, or a place in a good book store. The anxious anticipation of the red social media notification – who has liked me now? How humiliating.
My therapist and I have talked deeply about what's behind this clawing and sweaty need for approval. Why am I not enough? And while the run-down could fill a sodden tome with glum, solipsistic observations, I will spare you. Friends, I think I am just smart enough to know that this is no way to live.
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There is another type of temporal based affliction, and that is the Too Long Time. Suddenly, my time is endless. These days, there is nothing but time in my bucket. My plans have not yielded the mental comfort that I assumed would follow. I have published comic books – it has not changed my self-image. I have won awards. My brain doesn't quiet. And yet, the time still flows. It flows lavishly, gloriously, too much and too sweet. I can fold laundry, fix the oven, do a comic, ride a bike with my kid, and still there are hours and hours left. And my brain still chirps.
I am stuck in this loop forever, seeking an outside view into the house to earn a glimpse of the floor-plan.
Chirp, chirp, chirp.
XO,
Joe
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