How I Turn Frustration Into Art

or art into frustration

I get bored easily. Doesn't matter how the watercolors sit there like good pets on my table, the way they practically wink at me with their small round bodies. The crayons too, all facing the same direction like obedient children. They love me so much. I love them back with equal fervor. But.

There is this thing that visits me. A monthly tenant that doesn't pay rent. Like a fruit fly but worse because you can't see it. It crawls into the smallest corners of my lungs and just sits there, breathing when I breathe.

What happens when I'm stuck?

1. Anger.

2. Then, I make a ceremony of moving things and announce to my apartment: I have no sketchbooks! This is a formal lie that the 200 sketchbooks I own can hear. I search for inspiration as if it's a physical creature hiding. A shy thing, always crouched beneath the sofa. I say to it: You know my situation, the gym and I have never met. I cannot move this furniture to find you.

2. Next comes the pageant of my despair. A grotesque parade of thoughts: I am an empty person; ideas have forgotten my address; everything I know has left me. I deliver these lines like I'm in a play I'm also directing. I take intermission breaks to pee. Return to my mark on stage.

4. After this: surrender. The performance ends. I enter the government building of indifference: None of this matters; I'll make whatever appears. If nobody loves it, they can make their own thing.

5. Then, finally, I make something again. A casual approach to the desk, a non-commitment. One step and another until, oh look…I've made something that feels true. And it's actually beautiful. Suddenly, I want to make twenty more, I want twelve uninterrupted hours, I want my entire existence to orbit this activity until death.

6. And, of course, after loving something so completely, I get stuck again. Then angry again. Then the house-turning-over dance. Then the sadness pageant. Then indifference. Then creating again.

What helps me avoid this loop? Not much, honestly. Nothing works every time. Some occasional medicines:

• Reading things. Not painting relating things. Not painting as a solution to painting. Reading is a boat I can sit in.

• Dancing around my apartment with my person I love while the GTA Vice City soundtrack plays. Those game radio stations contain actual magic.

• YouTube people who know things about joy that I forget: Rachel Nguyen, Polyphonic, Juno Birch, Ana Wallace Johnson, Quality Culture, emma chamberlain and much more.

• Writing this to you: it helps right now, thank you for being the reason.

Things that help stop the loop when it's already happening:

Putting what you've made into a drawer where it can have its own life without you watching. Lately I've been calling this: Let it get stewed in the stew, the stew needs stewing, the process of stewing the stew. Just let it stew.