Prompts for retrospection
There's a meme for you at the end if you can get through the tedious self-reflection
What do we think of the holidays? There’s some wonderful pros: Quality time, days off from work (ideally), gifting. There’s some notable cons: “Resolutions,” uptick in diet talk, year-end lookbacks from every try-hand on the internet (sees mirror, ducks).
This time of year, rather than feeling wowed that the new year is upon us, I tend to feel more puzzled that the January–April end of things was a part of this one. Some kind of retrospective seems worthwhile, but what’s the right format? I’ve already trawled my camera roll for a standout project/work event/creation from each month. Even as the main character in my adventures it wasn’t that fun, and definitely would have made for a boring read.
I thought we could try something different. Here is a list of year-end prompts I’ve compiled for myself, an exercise for considering the past 12 months one more time before we turn the page. What would you add to this list? And how would you answer?
Core ingredients for you to have a good day/week
I don’t mean what characterizes the most outstanding days or weeks – just what are the necessary preconditions to have a good one? My ingredients are not changed from previous years, but I have gained more clarity on what things enable my good moods or help me be most resilient to bad news and unexpected challenges.
Caught up on chores/clean house
Exercise
Close contact with my friends and close contact with my family
Partner doing well
Reading a book
Feeling like my work is purposeful and gainful
Feeling caught up/no major projects and tasks neglected that I’m feeling guilty about. (That “something hanging over my head” feeling is a gigantic drag on my quality of life and for such a long time I was so used to feeling that way, I didn’t even realize it was conditional.)
A little bit of goof off time each and every day
I tend to conceptualize self-care as maintaining my baseline, so it makes sense that most of my ingredients have to do with maintaining the core tenets of my life (domestic, physical, relational, work-wise).
Skill you’re most excited to keep developing
Simplifying my writing – making the point and moving on.
Most loathesome work task?
Gold medal: Selecting a health insurance plan (and paying for it). The pandemic-era federal continuous coverage period ended in March this year, which meant like many people, I was kicked off of MassHealth after being allowed to stay on for an extra couple years when my income would have otherwise (just barely) rendered me ineligible. Like most loathesome tasks, choosing what plan to buy was worse in anticipation than it was in reality; but since what naturally follows is paying the bill, it still sucks the most.
Silver medal: Washing paintbrushes at the end of a long day of muraling. It takes a lot of time and water to do it right, and it just won’t do to do it wrong!
Bronze medal: Cheerily reminding clients that they haven’t paid your invoice yet. (If anyone needs good template language, hit me up.)
Habit from 2023 you’d most like to leave behind?
My default writing pace is slow, and that applies to email as well. So when I don’t set aside time for inbox maintenance, my unreads/un-respondeds amass by the dozens. This specter makes progress feel all the more impossible, and so the problem gets out of hand. Over the holidays I got very caught up, which feels amazing, and I intend to hold the line. This will require procrastinating less, writing faster/not overthinking it, and remembering to budget time for the task.
Best advice you received?
My whole conversation with Dr. Pizza (see below).
In July Travis advised me to “just send it!” on a mural, and I did, and it turned out just fine. This helped fuel a whole ongoing reflection on how belaboring something doesn’t necessarily correlate with better results. I continue to try and remember that effort and outcomes aren’t always twins. A scary concept because effort is the only thing we can control – but nevertheless!
This quick bite on chores from Seth Godin’s famously excellent daily newsletter. I’m a person who can easily succumb to productive procrastination, so I have this post bookmarked. “The truth is that if we stop doing chores, we have to do real work instead.” Outed!
Most surprising work event?
I’ve written plenty about my window mural for the Lowell Folk Festival in July. It wasn’t super surprising to get this gig, just because I’ve done work in Lowell before, and clients often like to bring back proven people. But I was available on only two (2) days of the two-week painting window, after which I would be out of town, and I was called for jury duty on one of them. But then Zeus tossed down a lightning bolt and my jury duty got cancelled, so I got to paint instead.
This surprise victory feels significant because if I hadn’t done this project in Lowell this summer, I probably would never have started the chain of outreach that culminated in me applying for Lowell’s ARPA-funded public art program in the fall. Now that program is funding an eight-part mural series I’ll lead next summer.
The other contender was the Troy Art Block mural festival – with this one, I actually was surprised just to be accepted. While I have a connection to the Capital Region by dint of growing up nearby, I hadn’t done a mural festival before, and a lot of my prior work is intricate and detailed to a fault – not necessarily great evidence for my ability to throw up a wall within a tight window. I am sure that emphasizing my local roots and the public art project I did in Albany, NY in 2017 boosted my application and helped me get the gig.
If you’re a muralist closer to starting out, that’s a takeaway I’d focus on – and of course it’s simply the concept of networking applied to this field. Start with opportunities in communities you can stake a claim to (I live/have lived here, I’ve worked here before, I’ve done this type of thing before), and build your CV from there, dot by dot. It’s okay to swing for the fences sometimes – Lord knows I do – but you can’t stake your schedule on it.
Any unexpected milestones?
Wow, thank you so much for asking about my creative consultation session with Andy J. Pizza. Longtime readers are aware that I am such a huge fan of this dude and have been a Creative Pep Talk Podcast listener for years. This summer, Andy announced preorder incentives for Invisible Things, the new kids’ book he made with his wife Sophie: Order 5 books, get a poster; order 10 books, get a one-hour creative consultation with the doctor himself. I chose wish fulfillment over infinite regret and placed my order.
Our conversation was a densely valuable 75 minutes, and a highlight of my whole year. I went into it hoping to discuss the question of “must I winnow down my creative services/offerings, and assuming the answer is yes, how do I prioritize?” The context for that line of inquiry is that for the first half of this year, I was spinning my wheels. I wasn’t getting incoming from new clients; my projects and income were mostly coming from the same very few sources; I didn’t see a sustainable path forward. Honestly, I was feeling like shit.
Among other things, I had a creeping suspicion that I ought to be winnowing – focusing my energies on one or two services and trying to become known and sought-after for those things. You know, branding. But I needed some hand-holding: I wasn’t getting past the “I don’t wanna!” phase, and I needed help thinking through what to lift up and what to table. As I prepped for my session with Andy in early August, I journaled: “Sometimes I feel like a jane-of-all-trades, but I’m worried about specializing in the ‘wrong’ thing.”
With Andy, I was able to have a conversation that got me out of the weeds and focused on the big questions that, deep down, I knew I needed to focus on if this whole experiment wasn’t going to fizzle out. Andy asked me: What are the creative services that are actually paying my bills? What parts of my practice are outshining the others? Unambiguously, the answer was murals. But when this came up, I couldn’t help but mention how honestly, I often feel pretty ambivalent about public art: There’s so much public art I don’t love, including a lot of my own work. And is it really a good use of public resources? As a public servant, I see how many crucial needs go chronically underfunded. These are some major reasons I hadn’t felt ready to truly invest in or commit to this medium, even though I love the act of painting murals and have earned some success doing it.
This complaint sparked an immediate response from Andy. You need to run towards the thing you don’t like, he counseled! If I’m groaning about murals, it means I need to figure out what it is that dissatisfies me (aesthetics, fake community engagement, fake interactivity, funding, whatever) and come up with solutions for how to do it differently. Among many other notes, I jotted down: “The art you’re best at making is a medium you kind of detest! It tells you something about your sensitivity… that will give you a niche and make you interesting!”
I deeply needed this conversation, and I needed this outside and expert perspective. It helped me feel like I had permission to do the scary thing, which is committing to being a muralist and a public artist.
Andy also reminded me that even if I am prioritizing murals in this season of my career, in no way does that mean all the other stuff (cartooning, kids’ books, pattern design, etc.) will never come back online. It is strategic to let your apparent main thing be your main thing: let that support you financially, don’t fight the wave, learn and improve from it. And while you are doing that, you can be listening and looking for what’s emerging as your next main thing. I always benefit from outside reminders to think long-term, and it was heartening to consider that if I try to be as successful as I can be at this instead of half-assing too many things, then when I do pivot to my next main thing (a product line? books?), that project will be advantaged by any resources, platform, and connections I amass in this season of work.
Most fun gift to give?
Putting aside my obvious bias, it has been completely delightful to dole out my nine extra copies of Invisible Things – a genuinely unique, beautiful and engaging kids’ book. I gave one of my copies to a new parent I’m not particularly close with, who was clearly not expecting a baby gift from me and knew nothing of the book. Five minutes after I left, I received this text: “Omg this book is sooo cool. Thank you!!!!!”
I highly recommend stocking up – it’s so nice to have an excellent gift ready to go for births, holidays and little-kid birthdays throughout the year.
Favorite life hack?
I took Sarah’s hand-crank pasta maker off of her hands in February when she was clearing out ahead of a big move. Now I have the most fun dinner party formula ever: Make the dough ahead of time and then put your friends to work making the noodles. I cannot recommend this enough. People always want a way to help out, and it’s especially nice to have an activity as an icebreaker when you have a group of people who don’t all know each other super well.
Clear eyes, full hearts, noodle!
Best meal you prepared at home?
One of my favorite things to make when I’m feeling inspired to pull out the food processor (which, trust, is almost never) is pasta with beet green pesto, because the color is so fun and who doesn’t love using all the parts of the thing? Sauté the beet greens with a ton of olive oil and garlic, and then blend with more olive oil until it will function as pesto. Serve on spiral pasta. It’s magenta! You are an artist!
Most useful phone app?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary app. For the past couple months I’ve been working my way through Green Mars, and the author, Kim Stanley Robinson (one of my faves) uses a lot of words I don’t know. 650 pages in, I got annoyed with myself for always guessing meaning from context instead of actually learning something. You can save the new words to go back and quiz yourself. One of my favorites so far is ignominious, as in, “the blogger suffered an ignominious wave of unsubscribes after boring her readers with a recommendation for a dictionary app.”
Vibiest investment?
Lauren Martin prints and $50 in plastic frames changed my apartment from barren/austere to fun/delightful; became a candle girl with the help of Rowan Willigan ceramics; a single bottle of Lambrusco.
“I’m too old for this” but in an empowering way
I shall not get good at reels; I am choosing to believe that mediocre reels feed the algorithm just as much as good ones do. That will have to be enough.
More of this:
Fiction; sleeping
Good riddance to:
My Patreon. In November I decided that 4 years of monthly pet postcards and Art CSAs was enough. Thank you so much to everyone who supported me on that platform; it meant so much to me. Over time, the ratio of fun and/or profit to labor got more and more out of whack, and it came to feel more and more like busywork, less and less like the joyful dissemination of creative by-products. I am excited to have the time and mental space freed up for other projects.
Favorite thing you made this year, based on no one’s criteria but your own:
I have some proximity bias to this because I just finished this piece a couple days ago, but I’m really stoked on this new illustration. I started it months ago and the goals/parameters have changed since then, after a lot of inertia. Originally, the thought was to take my Condon Shell mural proposal from 2021 and re-render it as a rectangular composition (I discussed this in a post in April). I have since strayed from the imagery, color scheme, specific Mystic River watershed theme from the mural proposal, but the overall theme is pretty similar – a stitching-together of different motifs, textures, silhouettes, constituent parts to attempt to describe a geographical/ecological locus in a personal, evocative way. I call it “Sky Quilt.”
Finally! An actual, completed work that describes what I’ve been trying to do creatively.
Most memorable meme?
This controversial wildlife photo that has become the foundation for my bachelorette party mood board
Favorite new hobby
Hyperfocusing
200M Men’s Freestyle P.R.
SIX seconds!
Thanks for reading!
What do you think? How would you answer these questions? What prompts should we use next year? (Feel free to leave in the comments!)
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Until next time,
Kit
