“I care very much about taking all the magic away, because you keep attributing your work to other forces and all that can do is disempower you. Really I feel that strongly. I can do what I do, to the extent that I can do it, because of accumulated experience and graft. Mmm, and it’s very freeing.” quote from Tim Minchin….. and my thoughts about it!

My favourite part of writing this blog, and sharing my work via instagram, has been the learning and the growth that has come from being part of this community. And one of my favourite learnings has been coming to better understand our cultural relationship to failure. Watching it play out in posts where we talk about mistakes and we talk about failures, how we think of them and relate to them.

We seem to see failure, or rather we seem to feel failure, not just as a project that didn’t meet our goals, but rather as some kind of direct reflection of who we are as people. Many of us take failure very very personally.

So here is my theory, my hypothesis if you will. Maybe the sheer number of WIP is what is causing my making practice to feel stressful and job-like. Maybe the associations my brain is making between one WIP and another, and then the attentional pull of having too much on-the-go could be causing my making practice to feel overwhelming* and less enjoyable than it could.