We're Not Gonna Make It, No No...

It wasn't just Monday morning grumpiness that caused me to write my last post. It was something much, much more substantial. I've come to the conclusion that it's time for me to make some drastic changes. I need to lose ballast and spice things up with completely new challenges and directions, or I'll go nuts. That's the short version. Now follows the long version for anyone who cares to read about it. Which, most likely, is just me. But hey, at least I always like reading back what I wrote. So that's fine.

My past, especially my childhood, left me with a very specific kind of personality. My strengths have always been in stubbornly overcoming the worst kinds of odds. I can't become a comic artist or webdesigner because of colourblindness ? Watch me. I can't pour a glass of milk because of no depth perception ? I practice until I can. I walk around with the firm knowledge that if someone else has archieved something, I can archieve that same thing. When I draw, I don't sketch, I just jot everything straight onto paper. And when people tell me that something (like, say, a webcomics convention) is a bad idea or would never work and would never be able to be set up, well... let's just say I'll be the first to attach wings to pigs and to turn up the AC in hell if necessary.
It turns out I'm fairly good at getting the right people together and enthousiastic about the things I truly believe in. And my stubbornness gives me plenty of strength to pull the cart when things are facing impossible odds and it seems like too much needs to be done. I'm the right kind of guy when things need to start up and there's just no way it'll make it.
That said, there's a downside to these traits. A huge one. I can't handle success and I suck at maintaining things. I always need to go up, further, bigger, more, or different, change, move forward in that direction. I can't handle things when there's no current to fight against and all that is required is to maintain the status quo. It's a very serious flaw - I'll lose all focus, I'll become sloppy, I get insecure about the whole project, I very slowly start to lose interest, or worse, I start considering destroying it all and seeing wether or not I could rebuild it again. I can't seem to overcome this effect. It works like that everywhere in my life, down to the smallest things.

Over the past half a decade, I started two huge projects. Huge for me, at least. Probeersel.com and ClickBurg. Both have grown to a fairly stable, successful position where a better leader than myself should take over, given the previous section of this posting. I'm trying. Honestly, I am. I'm doing my best to maintain everything, and to ignore all the effects my personality traits are unleashing on it. With ClickBurg, I still have a big fight left to go, so that's easier to maintain. But Probeersel.com is starting to suffer from my sloppiness. There are a few links here and there that don't work. For four months already, there hasn't been a half year report yet. Staff members' verdicts on new members auditioning aren't being chased up by me with the same vigour anymore as I used to. It may all be fairly small, but the signs, to me, are very clearly there. To make matters worse, I'm growing exhausted. Trying to maintain these projects takes more and more effort, and the fact that their successes makes them grow more also increases the work load.

Thing is - I never wanted to be the head honcho of Probeersel.com or the president of the ClickBurg foundation. I'm an artist. Several people in remote and recent past have claimed otherwise, but it's who I am. I need to create. I can't help creating. When my last relationship ended, I returned to creating, which I'd partially sacrificed for the sake of the relationship. It felt like coming up for air. No matter what people feel about what I create, I need to create it. And exactly the way it comes out.
My biggest fear of recent times, with all the effort that the two projects take, is that they will come in between me and my comics. That at some point, I'll have to really choose between drawing or organising. And that if I'm not careful, the only way to opt for drawing comics is to utterly destroy the things I'll otherwise have to organise. A nearly impossible choice: either give up on drawing and focus entirely on organising, or focus on drawing and let the things I put so much organisational effort into fall to peaces and be for naught. I know several people who've had to make this decision at some point in their lives and I see the very scary road ahead through them.

And I know what I'd choose. I'd choose drawing. Always. There is no doubt in my mind that I would. I need it. Without it, I'd whither away. But I don't want the things I've built over the years to just fall apart either.
Which is why I need to start taking a bit of action now. Start letting go of some things. Start saying 'no' to new things. Focus more on drawing, and make sure to have more time available for that than just the weekly Grim DotCom episode. For experimental projects like The Artificial Real, or just drawing and doodling and coming up with things. Because I already lack the time for that and it's eating me up. It's one of many things contributing to my becoming overworked: I don't have the time anymore to do the thing that got me into all this in the first place.

I've taken several steps lately to work on this. Today I took a bigger one. It's still no final step, but it'll help me resolve what I should be doing and why. So I can take well-considered though drastic steps. And avoid that big dillemma for now. Because I'm still much too young to be faced with such a dangerous fork in the road. Rather take a few steps back and avoid as much as possible having to choose a direction. It should still be possible to have some of my cake and eat it.