My brain likes to lie to me in many different ways, and yesterday as I was working on comic pages it brought out an old favorite it hasn’t employed in quite some time.
I got an early start on the page I needed to do, and as a result I was done a little earlier than usual! I was quite proud of myself and had some extra time before my son got home from school, so I was all ready to treat myself to some peace and quiet before I had to switch from comics mode to fatherhood mode.
But then I realized I had a solid idea for the next page I was going to work on tomorrow (today), and with the extra time I’d earned from my early start I could begin that one to get ahead of schedule! So I scrapped my peace and quiet time and got back to work. I managed to finish some of this second page before I hit a block, because my original idea wasn’t working the way I’d envisioned it. So I stepped away for a little while, but no new ideas were coming, and then my son came home from school.
The lie my brain told me throughout the afternoon was that I was being lazy and unproductive for not having finished that second page. My brain was even trying to convince me that I’d fallen behind schedule by not finishing that second page, treating its unfinished state like it was the page I was supposed to complete, which I already had!
Some days my brain decides it’s going to try dragging me down regardless of facts and actual creative output, and yesterday was one of those days.