Self Motivating During a Global Pandemic...
2020… The year I went FULL-TIME freelance. Wow, what timing!
The pandemic has changed my life completely, but not in the most visible ways. At the end of 2019, I was transitioning into full-time freelance work, so typical office life was already gradually disappearing. I was riding on the high of starting to work on my dream project, a graphic novel that would take up most of 2020. I moved into a local co-working space in February 2020 as I’ve learned in the past that I don’t do my best work at home. By mid-March, I was back in my home studio where all of the reasons that working from home doesn’t work for me escalated. Feeling isolated, stuck, and separated from my mom was of course never the plan.
I think everyone went through some kind of baking phase. I busted out Lucy Knisley’s book, Relish, and tested out the “Best Chocolate Chip Cookies” recipe among many others.
I was also scheduled to go on tour with Terrapin for all of April and May in China and Japan for the children’s theater show that I was a part of in October 2019. I would be working on my graphic novel during the day and drawing live in the children’s show in the evenings. With all travel and shows being cancelled worldwide, it was, fortunately, the only big financial hit for me.
During the lowest times in the pandemic, my life still looked the same from the outside. I was still working on my huge graphic novel project and a picture book which I felt extremely lucky to have been contracted for in 2020. The huge project, Big Apple Diaries, takes place in New York City before and after September 11, 2001. It was surreal to try and capture the essence of the city recovering from that shock at the same time the city was suffering again two decades later. A lot of the same themes were there - fear of the unknown, lost loved ones, and the strange mutual understanding that everyone has. Somehow the diaries I wrote when I was twelve have financially supported me twenty years later when the world is in crisis.
Small panel in Big Apple Diaries that suits the mood, watching the world crumble.
Self soothing activities during lockdown included Animal Crossing and an ongoing Catan tournament with our housemates who live downstairs. (My score has greatly improved since this photo was taken.)
I honestly don’t know how I would deal with 2020 without dogs…
Starting full-time freelance in 2020 has been intense because it feels impossible at times to self motivate when the world and everyone you know is hurting in some way. I somehow found myself in 2020 with a contracted job to do, without kids to worry about, with universal healthcare, extreme covid restrictions which led to zero covid around me, food on the table and much more to be extremely grateful for. It’s the non-visible stuff that has changed - the wondering, worrying, news refreshing, social activism-ing, and more. I started collecting some images in a “Pandemic” folder as a form of memory keeping in hopes that one day I can come back to make something out of it. At the moment it is still too ongoing and raw. My mom is still in New York in her own covid fatigue chaos.
My sketchbook reserved for “travel only” had to be used at some point this year when we were finally able to “travel” within Tasmania again. We drove four hours north to Derby, a mountain biking haven. Living on an island closed off to the rest of the country and world has been a blessing and a bit scary… mostly a blessing though.
A pretty great place to be isolated.
Binalong Bay Area, Tasmania - another pretty amazing place to be isolated.
In many ways, living in Australia this year has also put me in an incredible advantageous point to self-motivating for book work. In June I was able to move back into my co-working space and life has mostly resumed to relatively normal capacity. The worries and fatigue are still there as I look to all of my friends and family in the US. I am honestly not sure if either of my books would have been completed if I was still stuck at home and worried at the same time. For all of the other sensitive artistic souls teetering on the edges of poor mental health in the best of times, I don’t know how you do it!