I spent years setting unrealistic objectives for my creative art projects and my creative art practice. These objectives often had very short deadlines to accomplish and were disconnected from my career objectives.
In practice setting unrealistic objectives allowed me to avoid taking responsibility for my scattered long-term plans, which had very little connection to the reality I was living in. Now after years of learning about myself, my creativity and neurodiversity I can see how my long-term plans were too abstract for my neurodiverse brain and detached from my creative values and temperament.
I tend to work on several projects at the same time. Because of that approach to work my progress is slower, but at least I’m making progress while keeping my anxiety at bay (I get anxious when I’m not working on projects or I’m not developing ideas). However, in the past doing, making, and creating didn’t really mean I could stick to the objectives I set for myself at the start of a project; the smallest of creative distractions could have easily pulled me in the opposite direction. Creative distraction and the need for constant change are my neurodiverse traits. Allowing creative distractions to disturb my creative flow led to my inability to reach creative objectives, which I set up at the start of the project. And when I was unable to reach my objectives, in despair I changed them, hoping that the outcome would have been different with new set of objectives.
This unsustainable and damaging tactic was driven by my fear and anxiety, which was the legacy of my early education. As an undiagnosed neurodiverse student, I was a constant disappointment. And not meeting my objectives re-created a pattern that felt so familiar to me. I was programmed to operate this way to protect myself from the world that didn’t acknowledge my needs, differences and difficulties.
When I started learning about my neurodiversity, my understanding how to set and achieve objectives shifted. I realised that my challenges and traits, shaped by my dyslexia and dyspraxia, were integral to who I was and influenced how I approached setting and reaching objectives.
However, there comes a time in every person’s life when running away from our conditioning is no longer an option. My creative self came to the rescue once again and I started diving large objectives into smaller chunks (for some people it might have been an obvious solution from the start but for me it so wasn’t). In the process, I had to learn how to be patient, be kind to myself, and my creative self, and how to set objectives I could reach within a realistic time frame without dependency on other people’s decisions regarding my work. As I can’t make anyone like my artwork, but I can keep creating and learn how to be proud of what I do.
It is always scary to venture outside my comfort zone. Still, by doing that, I’ve managed to reintroduce fun and spontaneity into my creative art practice, reject perfectionism as a measurement of success and see my creative art practice as a larger body of work. Building a long-term creative sustainability in my creative art practice that reflects my personality, my creativity and my neurodiverse traits and needs are the strengths of my creative art practice, which I appreciate every single day.
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