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I need to find or create new work. No, I’m not out of a job. I still have my freelance clients, and on paper it looks like I’m doing well. But I can’t help feeling that I just woke up and found myself in the belly of a monster – a monster I unknowingly created over the past two years.

See, the thing that was my work has turned into metawork. In other words, my work has become writing/talking about my work. I’ve made a career out of discussing my career. Like a snake eating its own tail, it’s not very nourishing. It doesn’t look pretty, either. This article is no exception.

Yeah, yeah I love my work and whatnot, but it got to the point where I became oblivious about everything else that wasn’t in that tiny universe. One would think this almost obsessive attention to one’s work would create improvement, but all it did was cage me in and dry me out.

Nothing fed The Work anymore. It turns out that the things that are Not Work are the things that feed The Work. It’s the minute things like cooking, cleaning, and walking your dog. It’s the painful things, like watching your closest friends leave the country, wrecking your marriage, and having a beloved pet die. Whether we realize it or not, our experiences with these things do show up in the things we make. They give us insight, the opportunity to think laterally, adding another dimension to our work. Without these things, work becomes hollow. Soon, we will feel this hollowness. Like I’m feeling it now.

More importantly, though, it’s about change. A conscious effort to make your work better, getting inspiration from a vast variety of sources that you wouldn’t even normally look at. Change is what reminds us that we’re alive.

Let me explain:

To me, my work is not just something I do. I don’t just do it to pay the bills – though it does. It is part of who I am, and not just in a curriculum vitae sense. I write. I’ve always done so. Even if I become blind or lose my typing hands in an accident, I know I’ll find a way to keep writing. It’s who I am. So you could say that my work is just as part of my identity as my nationality, gender, and dysfunctions. Writing seeps into everything I am and everything I do that there is no way for me to compartmentalize it as “just my job”. Since it’s part of me, it is hard to love anything else more than writing.

This is why my partner says that I love my work more than I love her. It’s not a complaint, but a statement of fact. Most of the time, I choose to finish a sentence or make the most out of a burst of inspiration rather than listen to a joke she wants to share. I am not being cold-hearted.¹ I am just being Celine. It’s like what they tell you just as the plane is about to take off: wear your oxygen mask first before you assist someone else.

So yes, I love my work that much. Because I love myself.

Things weren’t always this ideal, though. While I was in college I had to spend hours each day writing descriptions of sex toys and articles on loans. I had to support myself and my family at a relatively early age so I took every job I could get my hands on, my personal fulfillment be damned. I certainly didn’t love that. I enjoyed it to some extent, telling myself that at least it was writing, but it wasn’t the kind of writing I really wanted to do.

This is why I realize that I am very, very lucky that I can now say “yes” only to projects I want to work on, that I spend my time working on the quality of every piece I put out there even if I’m not always satisfied or successful. I am aware that it’s not a common or easy thing to find the work you love and to act on that love every day, but if you have the power to make it happen then you’d be crazy to let the opportunity slip away.

Work as Identity

Recently I’ve been hearing a lot of disdain for using one’s job description as a life description. This feeling is only relevant if you don’t like your job, but if you like your job enough to call it your work – a crucial thing you do that enables you to thrive – then you wouldn’t mind being labeled as a writer, programmer, plumber, or architect.² The sound of that label may be as familiar to you as your own name because your work is now part of your sense of self.

It doesn’t help that writing or making comics or painting or any other creative endeavor doesn’t have a strict process. It just bleeds into your day like breathing. You don’t always know when you’re done for the day and you also don’t know when you’re creating. For me, reading is an essential part of writing even if I’m doing it leisurely. I get quite a few ideas from just talking to friends, so casual conversation is part of it too. Then it follows that sleeping is also part of writing, since I often find myself waking up with razor-sharp focus to write something very specific.

Here’s where it gets tricky, for me at least: if you love your work enough to make it part of your identity, you can be a little touchy when people are mocking it. I don’t mean nasty troll comments left on my blog posts, or an editor’s criticisms on my latest article. I mean when people get this look, have this tone, and they say something like “What? That’s what you do with your time?” This is often followed by “Do you even have a social life now?” or “I bet there’s not much money/stability/credibility in that.”

Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you – except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them, nothing, not even a sound they can recognize.

-Ayn Rand, “The Fountainhead”

And you know what, it hurts. Especially when it comes from people you love and respect. Not everybody realizes that some people can have such a personal connection to their work, mostly because it’s a rare thing. It’s easy to be self-deprecating about being an accountant if you don’t like being an accountant, or to tell others to switch careers for “stability” if you feel no instinctive connection to your own career. I used to get so easily defensive or angry about this, but I think it’s time for a new approach.

If your work is as precious to you as your most cherished memory, then treat it with the intimacy and sincerity it deserves. Leave it unmentioned in company where you know it won’t be understood, but keep it open among those people who know what it’s like to pursue their passion daily. It doesn’t matter if you’re pursuing different fields, but at least you’re with someone who knows.

But if you suspect your friends will sneer or give you career “advice” contradictory to the spirit of what you do, then just go ahead and say “Nah, my work is too boring, you don’t want to hear about it.” Trust me, it’s better for both of you. That way, you can still have a pleasant dinner conversation and no one has to down five glasses of wine just to keep sane.

I may love my partner with all my heart, but she’s an entity that’s completely separate from me – no matter how often we’re together. My work isn’t like that. My work is who I am.

1. It’s a different story if, say, she were sick or on fire. I would not hold my hand up like some asshole and say “Wait, lemme just finish this sentence…” In this article, I am referring to choosing within the “Not Urgent” choices I have to make re: my partner’s needs. (That’s QII and QIV for you die-hard Covey fans.)
2. Unless you have value judgments attached to those labels. Some people have trouble calling themselves “artists” because they feel like what they make isn’t art yet, it’s just practice.

Image illustrated by Celine

This is not a coat rack.¹

But it is, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be my easel, but right now I use it to hold a couple of jackets. Ergo, it’s a coat rack. It’s never going to be an easel until I use it to hold a canvas. By applying this level of honesty to the other objects lying around my house, here’s what I’ve come up with:

• Electric guitar and amplifier – Remnants of my time with a band in high school, currently hogger of valuable cabinet space.
• Baseball bat – Object that gives me fake courage and confidence to ward off burglars when I’m alone at night. (Not guaranteed to fight off actual burglars.)
• Old analog v8 video camera – Also hogger of space.

Now, applying this to myself: I am not a painter. Unless I’m actually painting every single day, making it my work, then I am not a painter. I’m just some hobbyist who paints if/when time/money/desire allows it. I know this, that’s why I never call myself a painter.² I do call myself a cartoonist because I doodle almost every day and most of my doodles are cartoons or comics. Also, with full confidence, I can tell you I’m a writer.

Many people find labels limiting, but I actually take comfort in them. They remind me of who I am. At the same time, though, I don’t grab a label I like and call myself that. It works the other way around. I go about my day doing the things I want to do. At the end of the day I look at what I’ve spent my time and energy on and that’s who I am. That’s what I do. Almost every time, the answer is the same – it’s writing. Drawing cartoons comes a close second.³

I am a writer. I also draw cartoons.

But surely labeling yourself is superficial… we are not our jobs!

If we’re not what we do, what we think, and what we say, then who are we? These labels are not imposed limits, they merely reflect what you’re already doing. Owning up to that and trying to compare what we think we do to what we actually do helps get rid of the delusions.

How many people say things like “I’m not really an accountant.⁴ That’s just my day job. My real passion is writing.” Out of those people how many of them actually spend time on their “real passion”? If you spend 10 hours a day doing accounting work, and 15 minutes facing a blank screen because of your “writer’s block”, then you’re really just an accountant with delusions of writing. If you want to be a writer, write goddammit.

Yes, I’m being harsh. But in case you haven’t noticed (the number of comments are a hint), this blog is really just me talking to myself. I have to keep myself in check and own up to what I spend my time on, own up to who I really am.

I am a writer. I also draw cartoons.

Thank goodness for that. Now, to fine-tune this a bit, I’d like to add the word “fiction” before the word “writer”. And there’s only one way to do that without deluding myself.

Write more fiction.

1. With apologies to Réne Magritte.
2. In some cultures, a painter is someone who paints houses and the like. If that’s the case then I am a painter once in a while.
3. I didn’t know this yet when I wrote this post. Now that I’m more ruthless with cutting out procrastination, the truth emerges.
4. With apologies to accountants who love their job.

There are two types of productivity apps: those that block out distractions from work and those that encourage work. Examples of the former are web site blockers (such as Leechblock) and application blockers (such as DoNotDisturb). As for the apps that encourage work, they’re the tools that allow you to work faster and better. For me that includes Texter and Google Docs. In the past years that I’ve been experimenting with almost every productivity app ever released, I’ve realized one thing – the distraction blockers don’t work in the long run.

Let me clarify: if an app blocks out things you can’t control such as noisy neighbors and needy cats, then it’s useful. But if it’s blocking out something that’s within your control like, say, checking your email or looking at Facebook updates for the umpteenth time, then the app is nothing more than a cosmetic. It’s like sticking a Band-Aid on your melanoma and telling yourself that it’s cured.

Apps can be disabled, programmed, and uninstalled. The same goes with the manual tweaks you do to “block” distractions, such as tinkering with the hosts file and whatnot.

“Oh, but they make it difficult for you to disable Leechblock.”

Yeah, but would you really want a solution that is dependent only on the fact that someone pressed the “Enable” button? What if you’re working on somebody else’s computer? What if you’re so desperate to check your email yet again that you find a way to disable your site blockers “just this one time”? Then you realize that you’ve done it so many times that your “productivity tool” is actually making you unproductive at being unproductive.

Hey, I’m not judging. I used to do that a lot. And now I feel stupid about it.

Painting the Office

In the past month, we’ve been redecorating our home office. We were already overwhelmed with work and rarely had a spare moment to attend to this project. Ergo, it was slow. When I told my partner that I’d been fiddling with Adsense, Facebook, and message boards during my workday, she gave me a scolding simple solution. “When you catch yourself doing that, why don’t you just paint the office?”

Good point.

Now that the office is done, I see myself growing into the habit of channeling my energies to other important tasks. They can range from sorting the laundry to writing my novel. It doesn’t matter what I do, as long as it’s not Spider Solitaire or Adsense or Facebook. True, it’s still procrastination, but at least something‘s getting done. And you know what? I’m also having a lot of genuine fun. Not the mindless drone-like buzz I get from checking Facebook, Adsense, and Google Analytics yet again.

Also, here’s the key thing: every time I feel like opening another tab, I ask myself a very important question.

Why?

Why do that? What am I going to get from doing this? If I really take the time to answer that question, what I get is really painful:

• I’m going to play Spider Solitaire or look at Facebook because I’m too lazy/afraid to do my real work.
• I’m going to check Adsense to see if I earned a measly $0.01.

These answers are embarrassing and pathetic. I didn’t want to be that person anymore, and the only way to do that was to admit that I think these things and find a way to just deal with it. And to actually spend more time doing the gorram work than “dealing with it”.

The Results

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but by accepting the full responsibility of my own productivity and being more conscious about falling into distractions, I actually got a lot of stuff done. Here’s what I accomplished so far:

• Made significant progress with my Spanish. I’ve been taking in a lot of new material, and it’s just a blast realizing how much I understand now.
• I started and finished a 7-page short story and submitted it to an anthology. My first short story in five years.
• I spend less time feeling guilty about not being productive enough, and more time actually doing the work. Any work, as long as it’s something I’m passionate about.

At the same time, though, I’m not going to lie and say that I’ve got it perfect. That I’ve got my shit together. I still fall into the occasional digital fiddling trap. But you know what? There’s less of it. And I know that if I keep getting better at dealing with this every single day, it’s going to happen less and less until it’s barely happening anymore.

It wasn’t as simple as enabling an app. This act of being a productive person rather than a productivity person is going to be a lifelong process. It’s going to take a solid daily commitment. And I guess that’s why it works.

These were all done while I was still in college. Weird to see the evolution of drawing style (and themes) on just one page.

When Leonardo was obsessed with birds, his father bought him some books on birds – only to find Leonardo suddenly preoccupied with painting. Again, when his father came back with painting supplies, he found his son building a small mill. With Leonardo’s interests changing every week, his father concluded that he would end up with the uninteresting work of the notary.

We all know the ending. Leonardo becomes all these – a naturalist, an inventor, and an artist, among other things.

The book had such a profound effect on me as I was growing up. I knew I had a problem with shifting interests. Most kids do. We didn’t worry about career paths or choosing the right job. As far as we knew, the possibilities were endless. You could be a tenor astronaut who occasionally goes on the Tour de France. It was possible. Your mother said so. Hey, it happened to Leonardo, right? In fact, polymaths were en vogue during the Renaissance.

It doesn’t help that when you take up history in school, it looks as though everyone back then was a child prodigy (a fallacy, since most of the population doesn’t even make it into the books). A teacher even told me once “Michelangelo sculpted the statue of David when he was 17! What have you done?”

As if I weren’t feeling the pressure already.

But things were different then. In the first place, there were no graduate studies in ornithology. If Leonardo wanted to be an expert on birds, it probably took a few months to know all there was to know about them. The library of human knowledge was much smaller and more contained. There were more things that no one had observed or tried before. I’m talking about the basic things, the things that you don’t need an electron microscope or a Tesla coil for. It was easier to collect all the “ists” you wanted to attach to your name.

I keep forgetting this. I keep putting unnecessary pressure on myself about how I’m not doing, learning, or making enough things. Here’s my typical train of thought each night:

My novel is taking forever to finish. Why? Jeez, and I work on it almost every day…. I’ve been drawing random doodles on paper but haven’t uploaded a new journal comic…. With all my self-studying, shouldn’t I be fluent in Spanish by now? Plus, I think I can do better with work and updating my blogs…. Hmm, I want to build an outdoor deck but I just don’t have the time – or the money. Why do I want to do all these things anyway? God, I’m so fickle about what I want to do with my life. I’ll probably end up as a file clerk for a sleazy tabloid….

Then I end up weeping into a pillow à la Alain de Botton.

Knowing your limits

Here’s the truth: I can’t have it all.

I can be a good writer and a competent cartoonist. But no matter how much I want it, I can’t be both those things and the most gifted archaeologist and speak 30 languages and a highly-skilled woodworker and a mixed-martial artist who can beat up Jason Statham. I can be mildly competent in these endeavors, but I shouldn’t expect to be amazing.

“But anything is possible! You don’t have to accept these limits,” one might say.

I suspect that’s a myth. Because we’re human and, by definition, limited. We are not immortal, our brains aren’t infinite in capacity, and we need to sleep. We can try to push these limits to the edge, sure, but they will always exist.

Is this adult pessimism creeping in? Am I losing my childlike wonder? No. It’s not about giving up dreams and being “practical”. It’s about choosing our most important dreams and giving every breath to the pursuit of those dreams – the rest are distractions. It’s not “practical” in the notary sense, but it’s a graceful way of accepting limitations. It’s aiming for the big wins so that we don’t have to worry about the small ones.

Setting “hobbies”

So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to sweat the quality of my writing and cartooning, but I’m not going to worry about the rest. I’m going to keep practicing my Spanish, making stuff from wood, working on my garden. BUT I am just not going to worry about my proficiency in these things. I will do them because they’re fun and I’ll try to improve as I go along, but I am just not going to obsess about it.

We need to be more selective about the things we devote our attention to, if we’re to take them seriously. If I dedicate an hour each day to a different activity, how do I know what I truly love? How do I end up in a flow state if I keep task-switching?

At the end of the day I have to choose my life’s work, not because someone said so but because I want to be the best I can possibly be at it. And I can only be the best if I know the difference between my priorities and my hobbies.

I may not be Leonardo, but the energy I spend sweating that is better spent writing and drawing. Or sleeping. Limitations, remember? I’m not going to waste another evening crying about not fulfilling my human potential.

Thank goodness for that, cause it sucks to sleep on a wet pillow.

Ever since this started, though, I noticed that I haven’t been on Twitter much, and I haven’t written about how productive I’ve become (except this one I suppose). Maybe because I’ve actually been doing things rather than just talking about them. From one of my recent tweets:

This, my friends, is a great thing to realize. But the strangest thing about this realization is what actually caused it – fear.

Fear of the Undone

Here’s what was scary to me: the idea that everyone has a novel inside them. While this adage is used to motivate (or mislead) aspiring writers, the more you think about it, the more depressing it seems because it implies the following:

• You have roughly six billion competitors.
• There are much, much fewer novelists than that. This means that not everyone actually wants to write a novel. Those who want it don’t always get around to doing it. And out of those who eventually finish a novel, even fewer have it published.
• I just want to reiterate the sentence “Those who want it don’t always get around to doing it”.

In other words, by merely wanting to write a novel, I run the risk of becoming one of those people who always talks about her novel but never actually gets down to writing it. I want to be a real novelist, dammit! Not some person at a party going on about how I’m gonna-maybe-someday write a novel about everything and it’s gonna be the best thing ever. Even if I don’t have any of my final drafts published, I’ll still have more practical experience than that guy.

Come to think of it, I never discussed my novel with anyone except my partner. Even then, the only thing she knew was the fact that I’m working on it. When friends or family would call and ask what I was working on, I’d say “stuff” and move on to the next topic. I couldn’t risk discussing my work or even my methods. I felt like I was saving all that enthusiasm for my writing sessions. I couldn’t risk letting any of that leak out just by talking about my work. Subconsciously, I knew that everything I had — and I had very little — must be channeled to the act of writing itself. That was my priority.

With that in mind, this is the part where I shut up and go back to work.

A kneaded eraser? Really? How does that work? I bet I’ll get great line quality with that size 0 liner brush and just draw the details with a Rotring Isograph. And that Ames lettering guide? Just wow.

I knew all that stuff, but it didn’t change the fact that all I could draw was stick figures. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but to pull off the stick figure thing well requires more mastery than a six year old with a crayon. (Check out Matt Feazell’s Cynical Man to get what I mean.) But I was getting too focused on the tools that I forgot why I needed them in the first place — I wanted to learn how to draw.

Couldn’t I do that with a regular pencil?

I was the same way with my woodworking. One of the first how-to guides I read literally stated “The tenon saw should be the first saw you buy.” That really stuck with me, because for a long time I couldn’t start with my woodworking until I got that tenon saw.

But, for some reason, I couldn’t find a single tenon saw in Metro Manila. Eventually, I realized how ridiculous the idea of waiting for a saw was, so I just picked up a good hacksaw and that was that.

And you know what? I ended up loving that hacksaw. When I eventually found a tenon saw a few months ago, I realized that I didn’t really need it and left it on the shelf. As far as I know, my hacksaw is all I need.

Assembling Your Toolbox

Here’s how I got to the right tools:

When I first started inking, I used a regular ballpoint pen. For more varied line quality, I bought the thinnest brush I could find. It didn’t even have a number on it like the ones in the books. I still use the brush and buy two at a time. They’re that important to my process.

The ballpoint pen, on the other hand, did not work. It was too stiff, the ink wasn’t black enough, and you had to press it hard against the paper. So I bought some gel pens – a 0.3, a 0.5, and a 0.7. Then, I realized that I didn’t need a 0.5 that much, so I didn’t care to replace it.

Years later, I realized that I liked coloring with watercolors, but the gel pens weren’t waterproof so the ink would run. Coloring before inking just to avoid this eventually grew too tedious. I had to find a waterproof pen and eventually settled with a Unipin 0.3 and a 0.8.

As for the ink, I started with poster paint (not waterproof) then moved on to acrylic (dried too fast), until I did away with the brush for inking and just used it for coloring.

No one told me to do this, and while I may have ended up with some tools I read about from “the pros”, I got there my own way. It was a very long process of trial and error, adjusting my tools to what I needed at a particular time. If you’re to ask me a couple of years from now what my tools are, I might give very different answers.

It’s not about assembling the right tools beforehand, it’s about acquiring them when needed. It’s the “when needed” that’s confusing, especially since we usually think that we need everything before we even get started. The trick is to start with what you have and build upon that. Otherwise, you get too caught up in the tools and forget about creating.

It’s the tools that should suit your work, and not the other way around.

“What are you exactly? I mean, what do I call you? What do you call what you do?”

I don’t blame her for finding it confusing to label me. After all, I was a film student for two years, then I was a painting major for three more years. To support myself, I mostly work as a writer, although I’ve accepted the occasional video work and sold a couple of paintings. Both my work and educational life are a stark contrast to what she’s experienced with her generation. After high school, they went to college, and the major they chose defined their careers.

It’s not that black and white anymore, at least not for me.

The Stuff-Maker

One of my teachers invited me to an exhibit opening which featured several artists. She encouraged me to talk to them by literally grabbing me and placing me in front of one sculptor, hoping that we could talk about art.

“So, you’re an artist too?” The sculptor said to me.

Art is a loaded word, carrying a huge baggage of value judgment. So I reply with the most honest, straightforward thing I can come up with.

“Erm, no. I make stuff. I guess you could say I’m a stuff-maker, hahaha. ”

Both the sculptor and my teacher looked at me as if I said I was a tentacled monster in disguise.

But what I said was true. I do make stuff. They can be paintings, comics, stories, blog posts, graphics, eggplant lasagna, or even silly songs I sing to my cat. Categorizing what I do is the least of my concerns. My priority is to make stuff, and that’s where I’ll pour 90% of my energy. Any attempts to label myself will be inaccurate in some way and that’s why I’ve stopped trying.

At the end of the day though, if people really want the comfort of labeling me, I’m just going to say that I make stuff. I’m a stuff-maker. Strange looks be damned.