As many of you know, I just finished up an art project (my tarot deck).

And looking back over the two and half months it took to get it done, I’m amazed by how unproductive it felt -- how much of it felt like wandering in circles + being lost + just pretending that I could do this thing when I wasn’t so sure I could.

There were the times I spent the hour or two I’d devoted to the project that day scrolling for images (as my medium is digital collage) and not finding what I needed -- the times it felt like all my good ideas were used up and I had nothing left, the times when I spent hours crafting a piece, attending to every detail, only to realize the next day that it didn’t work and I needed to start again.

Still, I finished the project. I kept at it, and it’s done, and I like it a lot. But getting here required *a lot* of “wasted” time + energy + effort.

I learned somewhere along the way that I just needed to account for this + accept it as an essential, nonnegotiable part of what art + creativity require.

Because art isn’t efficient, and creation isn’t linear.

Art + creativity break the rules of capitalism + productivity + perfectionism.

Creative progress happens in flashes, just it happens in long stretches of what feels like a barren wasteland (and everywhere in between).

So much of getting to the finish line with this project was simply about continuing on through those moments where I had very little to show for my efforts -- and beyond the long stretches of feeling incredibly unproductive, impatient, and annoyed with the whole process.

The moments of feeling lost + slow + frustrated were as much a part of this as the moments of inspiration + awe + flow.

I’ll be remembering this going forward. Because I want to keep making things. And to do that, I need to make room for all the imperfect inefficiencies + wasted moments my art asks me to embrace as part of the process of imagining + creating.