Journal

I’m wrapping up at my current day job this week, and it got me thinking about how I personally like to finish. I’ve spoken with folks about this topic over the years, and many say that as soon as they give notice, they feel completely checked out and mostly cruise to the finish line.

I intend to cast no judgement when I say that, for some reason, I just can’t do that. There’s something in me that wants to treat it more like the end of a race; I want to go all out for those last few minutes and finish feeling strong. As with running, that effort is mostly for me.

The reason that I want to finish strong is to support a team of people who I care about, to be clear. When I say that it’s mostly for me, I mean that I want to prove to myself that I’m the kind of person who does care in that way. The only way to prove it, of course, is to actually do it.

The most joyful part of work for me is having wonderful collaborators. In fact, work is only joyful when I do have wonderful collaborators, and I try hard to be a great collaborator in return. That’s the impression I want to leave—and why I want to finish strong—because when it’s all said and done, work is just people all the way down.

I never get quite as much done as I hope to in those final days, but I always leave feeling confident that I tried really hard to do as much of the right stuff as I was capable of. I want to wrap up on my last day with the feeling that I’d made a good go of it; that I’d pushed myself a little further. All we can do—all we can ever do—is earnestly try our very hardest.

I’m sure some part of it is just ego, or maybe I’m just being a try-hard, but the thing that motivates me in the first place is the team of people I collaborated with most closely. I’m doing it for the company, sure, but what is a company if not those who… well… keep you company, even during the most challenging stretches of an important project.

After a good sprint, you need a rest day. I haven’t been good at taking those over the years, but I’m taking one this time—a few of them, actually. I’m going to make art, write poetry by a lighthouse, and prepare for my next thing. I’ll update you on that, but first, I’ve got to finish this run.

Something that I notice when writing my morning pages is that if I get animated about something, I’ll swear a lot more than usual. I should clarify before going on: I’m English; I already swear a lot—so when I say “more than usual,” I’m starting from a pretty healthy baseline.

I’ll clarify something else: it’s almost always positive. I’m not cursing anyone out or complaining or getting angry. Usually, I’m getting excited, or giving myself a pep talk. Less “I fucking hate this” and more “you’ve fucking got this,” if an example helps. It lights a little fire under me. It make me feel like I have fucking got this; like, I’ve really got it.

As I write this post—like, right this second, as in just now—my eyes find a book propped on my desk that I’d forgotten was there: Do the F*cking Work by Jason Bacher, Brian Buirge and Jason Richburg. As you can imagine, my chosen word features pretty regularly. They make a popular poster, too—one that hung in the office of Jony Ive at Apple, and the first few lines of which read as follows:

Believe in your fucking self. Stay up all fucking night. Work outside of your fucking habits. Know when to fucking speak up. Fucking collaborate. Don’t fucking procrastinate. Get over your fucking self. Keep fucking learning. Form follows fucking function. A computer is a Lite-Brite for bad fucking ideas.

I could say that this book influenced my tendency to swear quite so much in my morning pages, but I was doing it long before I knew of it. Reading that poster gives me the same feeling as writing those curse-heavy pages, though: my heart rate goes just a little faster than if I take the word out. Try reading the above without the cursing—it’s positively anemic.

For me, that’s the power of cursing, especially in writing. It adds something that you might normally express with a louder voice, a higher pitch, or by using body language (that is, jumping excitedly up and down). There are many ways in which cursing isn’t helpful, but there are a few ways in which it’s great—where it’s really fucking great, actually.

I love that a simple word written or read can add so much. That it can turn the volume up, get your blood pumping, and inspire in you a feeling that only comes from writing it more often than you’d ever speak it. If you haven’t tried it, I invite you to flagrantly curse in your journal entries right alongside me—because you, too, have fucking got this.

I’m a little under the weather today and feeling a bit sorry for myself. It got me thinking about other times that I’ve felt a little worse for wear, and the first one that came to mind was my recovery from an otoplasty.

An otoplasty is the pinning of the ears—a procedure given to those whose ears stick out a little (or a lot) too far for their liking. As far as I know, it’s almost entirely a cosmetic issue, but it can have a pretty big impact on those who go under the knife. It did for me.

I remember the first time I was bullied for my ears. I’d be running around on the playground at Northwick Manor primary school when I’d hear “hey, Dumbo, nice ears!” shouted by someone nearby. As soon as someone said it, others had to join in—or at least laugh.

It might seem small—and it is, in the grand scheme of things—but I remember feeling so self-conscious. I was a shy kid, but I’d started to make friends, and I wanted to to keep it that way. Every time someone bullied me for my ears, it felt as though that might slip away. I wasn’t old enough yet to understand that this too would likely pass.

Fast forward a little, and I was scheduled for my procedure, although I didn’t really know much about it. I just knew that it was supposed to stop the bullying. The hospital staff would talk to me about my “bat ears,” which—whilst I had learned was an informal medical term—didn’t feel much better than the bullying, only this time from adults.

Following the surgery, your head has to be wrapped up in bandage like Mr. Bump, covering both ears completely and making it look as though you’re getting ready for a Halloween costume party. Fortunately, you stay at home whilst recovering—I think that my new headwear might have got me more name-calling than my ears had.

I’ll skip the gory details that make up the healing process, suffice to say that it wasn’t very fun, and was made only slightly better by video games and an almost-unlimited candy supply. I don’t remember very much of it anyway, to be honest—just the most disgusting bits.

The thing that I thought would stand out in my memory that absolutely doesn’t, though: how it felt afterwards. How it felt to go back to school, back to the playground, and never hear anything about my ears again. People had forgotten over the summer, I suppose, that they’d bullied me at all; they’d moved on to the next thing.

Some part of me wanted the other children to notice, I think. I almost wanted them to compliment me on my completely average ears—“wow, they’re so ordinarily close to your head.” They did not, and I don’t know what I would have done if they did. Instead, I simply carried on as if nothing had happened, and so did everyone else.

I’ve sometimes wondered in the years since if it was worth it. I’ve wondered whether those kids would have just grown up a little, gained some compassion, and ignored my ears for the rest of time. I’ve wondered whether it was worth the pain and whether it was the right response to bullying; whether I should have worn my ears proudly.

Of course, I can’t know, and I’m thankful to have avoided the years of bullying that might have happened. It’s strange, the things we do to protect ourselves, and how sensitive we are to what people think of us at such a young age. I’m more sensitive now, I think, but I care much less.

I’m experimenting with ways to recall my own memories, and to make it slightly more interesting than slogging through chronologically. One of those experiments I published a couple of days ago, where I enumerated some foods I remembered eating before I turned ten years old.

I ended up posting the same content directly to Threads (since links seem to get down-ranked), and doing so caused an unintended but very welcome side-effect: someone replied with a specific memory of their own along with a question that helped me to recall another of mine.

Without stating the town in which my memories had taken place directly, I’d included details that would make it obvious to anyone who either recognized or researched the places I’d referred to. I don’t know how the post got in front of this person, but I’m glad that it did, because they were clearly from the town that I’d grown up in.

Still crave Grays herbal tablets from the sweet shop on the Corn Market. What was your vending machine snack after swimming at Sansome Walk? Scampi flavour fries for me.

Immediately, memories that I hadn’t thought about in years came flooding into my brain. Sansome Walk Leisure Centre was the local public pool in my hometown, and I went there more times than I could count growing up. We’d take the coach there from primary school for swimming lessons, and I’d go there with my father frequently.

There was the memory of the snacks I’d get from the vending machine, sure, but that wasn’t the only gift that this question had given me. I remembered the songs we’d sing on the coach on the way there (Charlie had a pigeon, a pigeon, a pigeon…), how difficult I found learning to swim, and how much I loved going to Sansome Walk regardless.

I hope that by sharing these small memories, I helped this person to recall fond memories of their own. I know that by sharing their own memories in return, I was given a wonderful, unexpected gift. I googled it after to find photos, and it made something stir deep in my stomach. I was taken right back to those days at the pool, and I loved it.

Write down your memories and put some of them out there. You might be surprised with how it makes you feel to sit with them for a moment. You might get to surprise someone else. If you’re lucky, you might get a gift from a stranger that makes you feel something.

Headed home from an evening in San Francisco, I stopped by City Lights Books to browse the shelves before the store closed for the night. The cover of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tail caught my eye, but when I picked it up, it was the pages that really grabbed my interest.

I don’t mean the content of the pages (at least not at first), I mean the pages themselves—they had a deckle edge, and I rushed to project a whole lot meaning onto the content of the book itself. How brilliant, I thought, to treat the object in this way—how profound!

I thought of how it reflected on the book as a recovered artifact, or as a banned book pieced back together by many hands. I thought of people reproducing it in secret and cutting pages roughly by hand. I felt the rough, uneven edge with my thumb, and I felt connected to this object.

After some research it became clear that this wasn’t the purpose of the deckle edge at all—I was simply holding the 40th anniversary edition published under the Vintage imprint of Penguin Random House. It was the same deckle edge that they apply to many anniversary editions, and apparently had nothing to do with the content of this book.

I started reading the book on the BART and was presented with another example of readers making their own assumptions. Atwood claims to have not named the protagonist anything other than Offred—readers had simply assumed her real name.

Some have deduced that Offred’s real name is June, since of all the names whispered among the Handmaids in the gymnasium, June is the only one that never appears again. That was not my original thought, but it fits, so readers are welcome to it.

It’s what I was referring to in I, Art when I claimed that the audience contributes the final leg of the journey in a piece of art. It’s easy to simply think that you were “wrong” once you discover that the creator had not intended what you had assumed; that I was wrong to assume the intent that I had. You’re not wrong, though—it’s just your contribution.

I love the copy of the book that I purchased because the form of the book connects me to the content of the book, even if that was unintentional on the part of the publisher. I romanticize it because it could only have happened with a physical book—there are no deckle edges on my Kindle books; no texture to rub my thumb against.

All art is interpreted by its audience. You should feel free to interpret how you wish, and to leave that mark on the work if it makes you feel more connected to it. You should expect that your own art will take a similar journey, and be open to the audience contributing their part.

Sugar mice from the cathedral gift shop. Chocolate flavored carrots from Iceland (not the country). Chocolate nibbles from the sweet shop on Tunnel Hill. Atomic fireballs from the newsagent’s by Gheluvelt Park. As many PEZ as I could fit in my PEZ dispenser. Boiled potatoes with butter. Spaghetti and ketchup. Tiny Cadbury chocolate bars from a red plastic chimney that required a two pence coin. Clotted cream fudge from my stocking. All of the crisps except prawn cocktail. Victoria sandwich. Crumpets and butter. Little burger-shaped sweets from Lidl. Pilchards on toast. Butter on a spoon. Barratt pink and white nougat. Candy sticks (and pretend they were cigarettes). Pork scratchings from the pub. Pickled egg from the pub. Angel Delight. Turkey Twizzlers. Super Noodles sandwich. Crisp sandwich. Branston pickle and cheese sandwich. Powdered sugar on bread. Bread and butter. Chicken Cup a Soup. Grays herbal tablets. Salt ‘n’ Shake crisps. Mint imperials. Marzipan with hundreds and thousands. Saveloy and chips. Chicken and vegetable pie. Tuna sandwiches with malt vinegar. Chocolate donuts from the Cornish Bakehouse. Cornish pasty. Pork pie. Parma violets.

This thought isn’t fully developed and might sound strange (even to me a few minutes from now), but I think that memories—all memories, if we consider them for long enough—each have a color, form and texture.

My brain—and maybe your brain; maybe every brain—really leans into associative thinking. It tries to make lots of connections very quickly. If you told me one of your memories, I suspect that I’d see a color in my mind and could imagine the texture and form of the memory.

One memory might feel like a smooth blue sphere. Another could look and feel just like a misshapen Brillo pad. A third resemble a piece of warm yellow tissue paper—the kind used to wrap gifts—crumpled up, but then smoothed back out (no you’re being too specific).

If you imagine a room filled with endless items in every color and made of any material, I suspect you could think of a memory and pick out exactly (or close enough) the things that feel just like that memory.

Of course, I really like moments and memories, and I like making art, so I’ve also been thinking about how I might represent a memory with a piece of art. Not in a literal sense, but by picking out the color, medium and material that feels right, and then finding the right form.

One of my favorite recent purchases is a Paper Republic journal, in which I’ve added two inserts: a ruled notebook, and a sketchbook. I use the notebook to capture memories and the sketchbook to (attempt to) represent that memory with a piece of art—it’s a strangely joyful act.

When you find the right form for a memory, you feel it; it just clicks into place. You—and I suspect only you, to be honest—can look at it again later and recall the memory that it represents. It almost feels like a secret code, or a hidden message sent from you, to you; you alone.

If you’ll humor me for a moment, try closing your eyes, thinking of a memory, and really considering its color, form and texture. If you’ll humor me further, try to find some items that feel like they fit—or if you’re so inclined, try to make that item (art; object; etc.).

I think there’s a great deal of joy in sitting with your memories, and even more in bringing them out into the world; giving them form. I’ve enjoyed trying to bring mine to life, and I hope that you do, too.

This post is a rerun. I post occasional reruns as a kindness to myself and to unearth old posts for new readers. You can read about reruns, too.

Today’s rerun is Creative Constraints, and I’m really only re-running it because something has changed and I wanted to talk about it. You can read the original post, but this should basically stand alone just fine.

When I started my daily art practice, I added a bunch of constraints to help me show up every day and just do the work. Fewer decisions to make; fewer excuses. At some point in the past couple of weeks, those constraints stopped serving me, and started having the opposite effect.

I put the constraints in place because I didn’t know what I wanted to make, nor which medium and materials I wanted to use to make it. Of course, once you start making anything you start to find things that work for you, and you want to do more of those things (and more often).

At first, I didn’t allow myself to move on because my rules told me that it hadn’t yet been 30 days. I’d committed to a medium and material for one month, and I wasn’t quite at the end. When I sat down to do the work though, I didn’t really want to do it. The purpose of the constraints was to motivate me, not to sap my motivation.

As fellow completionists and perfectionists might know, you can become beholden to your own rules even when it makes no sense. Even when no one else is holding you to those rules, and there are no negative consequences to changing them (or simply not fulfilling them). Against the desires of my subconscious, I just… stopped following them.

Immediately, my motivation sprang back. I was excited to sit down and make my small piece of art every day, and started to think more about the larger pieces of art I’d like to make with the mediums that had most resonated with me. I didn’t need the rules to help me make art every day—it had already started to feel strange not to make art.

It wasn’t very long ago that I started making art every day, and more recently still that I wrote so confidently and publicly about the power of my creative constraints. Letting go of things that no longer serve us is almost always the right thing to do, though, and this is a gentle nudge to consider whether you can retire any rules that no longer serve you.

I saw a post on Threads today from lettering artist Simon Walker that pretty much sums up the creative process much of the time:

DM: Hey I love your work what’s your process?

Me: Staring unblinkingly at the screen while drawing and redrawing and zooming in and out and clicking my mouse furiously and going “please look good, please look good”

It’s so easy to get wrapped up in process before you’ve even gotten started, but once you do get started, things often seem much messier than when you were thinking about The One Right Way.

A neat process always sounds good. You’ll be asked about your process in interviews. You’ll talk about it in case studies. You might even try to follow it in earnest most of the time. In reality, though, I’d wager that you bounce around a little more than you care to admit.

Making things for humans is messy, because reality is messy! People change and the world changes and we face unending challenges along the way—but we persevere. We pivot, and we adapt, and we figure it out. That’s the beautiful part to me—that we muddle through it all.

If you drew the path you took from problem to solution, it might look more like a blind contour drawing of the wind than a double diamond, and that’s okay. The story of our lives probably looks pretty similar. Have a process, sure, but remember that much of life is improv.

Writing a memoir seems like a lot of pressure. Whenever something feels immovable to me, I like to think about what the very smallest, most simple expression of the idea might be; the essence of the idea.

In 1970 Joe Brainard published an experimental memoir titled I Remember. The entire book is a collection of statements prefixed with those words. What is a memoir, after all, if not your memories.

If you reframe a memoir from the idea that you likely have in your head to the idea above, I’d bet that it becomes easier to get started. Not “write this masterpiece,” but “write down what you remember.”

You might not want to publish an entire memoir like that, but you certainly need the memories to write the memoir you want, so you almost can’t lose. It’s either final or it’s fodder, and both are just fine.

To help me write my own, I’ll take the opportunity to borrow from Joe and recount the memories that surface for me whilst I sit here today.

I remember buying The Animals of Farthing Wood on VHS from Selfridges during my first trip to London as a young boy. I played that video tape non-stop, because it’s the only one I had.

I remember going down into the cellar of our house for the first time, and wondering why old cellars were required to look (and smell) as though bad things had happened in them a long time ago.

I remember when our parrot, Max, escaped his cage and pooped right on some Monopoly money that was on the table. I remember how—for some reason—that money instantly became lucky.

I remember being upset with my father (in the regular young-child sort of way), and destroying a pom pom hedgehog that he’d made for me. I remember feeling terrible about it. I still feel terrible.

I remember having a family picnic on the racecourse and seeing a hot air balloon about to take off the other side. I remember sprinting towards it, hoping they’d let me on if only I could get there in time.

I remember excitedly buying stick insects from the pet store, and—once in their enclosure—never really knowing whether I was looking fondly at my new pets or simply staring at an actual twig.

I remember when my goldfish died, and the hours I spent crying afterwards. It was the first time I’d thought about death, and I’ve thought about it almost every day since. I’d happily have waited.

I remember when I got zip-up shoes, and how my first-grade teacher would dismiss students by whether they had velcro or laces. She took a few minutes to notice that I hadn’t gone anywhere.