It’s been a weird Summer.!?

Published: 29 September, 2023

By: brainmatter

Things simultaneously felt great and shit. I'm grateful for the opportunities that came my way and the doors that closed up. The summer started of fairly nice but I felt myself disappearing into an unknown. I like that saying "creative people need some time to do nothing". I was doing so much. Between poor health choices, personal digressions, and the realities of life it all caught up with me at once. Made me not really enjoy anything I had on my mind I felt like everything was shifting all at once.

I had to stop, not a step back but just stop and reset. Re-evaluate alot of things in every aspect of myself. For me the feeling of taking a break only feels good for the first few and then the rest is just self hate as to why I'm not keeping myself busy. It gets hard. I always thought being creative is a routine for me but sometimes you fall really hard off of that routine. I'm still recovering from the fall (both literally and metaphorically). Slowly I'm regaining the love for my ideas and just understanding things from different angles.

I thought it would be a good idea to just share my digressions here on this journal to kind of just say you're not alone. I feel like creative people put alot of pressure on themselves and it is a positive to an extent. What I want to say to this is apply pressure carefully. It's hard, especially for minds that move at c².

I've been reading more, listening to alot of music as always, and I've recently started photographing in people. I'm not interested in photographing people but I'm interested in recreating people's feelings and the presence of people and their impact in my pictures. I've never been a people person but I find people very interesting. Their relation to each other and the world always fascinates me.

There are two reading matters that I'd like to share with you that have been helping me. The first is "Make Time for Creativity" by Brandon Stosuy. This is kind of getting me into a shape for how I treat my time being creative. It's helping me change my views on always being in constant motion. The second book which I finally recently got is "To Photograph is to Learn How to Die" by Tim Carpenter. So far this book has been great. Just a bunch of thoughts an ideas of separating yourself from everything in a sense dying and how photography helps you do that. I recommend both to anyone who's a creative.



There were a few days I felt a bit out of the unknown and in my own skin. I'd like to share one of those days with you all. Labor day of 2023 was surprisingly a pleasant day for me. I usually don't do much to celebrate on the day but the weather felt right and I truly took a break, a break without self hate or negativity towards my idle day. I have to say most of the days I felt this way were when I started to break out of my mental box of Sisyphus and slowly wielded creativity once more. It's nice, I wasn't expecting any of this to ever happen to me but it helped me evolve my views look forward to things that I didn't view myself in before. Coming back to Labor day, I later went down to the beach and took a few photos that made me feel a bit more connected with everything around me. I think everybody wants to feel that way at the end of the day; we just have different means and ways of feeling connected.



Lastly I wanted to share two music projects that are really helping me think in different ways. The first project being "The Head Hurts but the Heart Knows the Truth" by Headache and Vegyn. The other project that's been really helping me alot is BLP Kosher's Bars Mitzvah, specifically the track "Water To The Grave".



If you got this far, I appreciate you for reading all these digressions, till next time.!?