cloudscapes wrote:
Also as a creative person I tend to bury myself with way too many creative projects I can handle, and that burns me out as well. Whether it's music, painting, drawing, pedals, modular, other stuff. (...)
Because creative motivation/drive is difficult at this specific point of my life, I have to embrace what comes to me. Rather than force it into "I gotta make pedals for people now". Maybe some of you will relate. It stresses me out, and stress is a killer.
Hopefully this isn't too much of a derail from the thread topic, but...
I can identify (but in a smaller, personally specific way) with this scenario.
If in fact I am correctly reading and comprehending what you are talking
about.
When I was growing up I just thought that I was prone to "procrastination".
But that's not totally it. To finish something is to let it go... and there is
a version of "perfectionism" that I am prone to that often prevents me from
finishing the things that I start because I want them to be...
perfect.
And also I don't want to let them go. Part of this has to do with the fact
that critical judgment and creative output are never comparable. I can
imagine all kinds of great things, I can recognize great things... but when
I start to make things... often all I see are the flaws (my recent tactic
has been to reiterate to myself that creation and destruction are inextricably
intertwined, and so the "flaws" actually make what I create more "interesting"
or alive).
All of which means that often a very specific idea often metastasizes into an
unwieldy glob of "everything at once" (a song idea
must be accompanied by visuals
and that specific kernel of an idea is also relevant to all the other ideas
I've been thinking about recently so each project takes on a kitchen-sink
accretion like a ball of something in a game of Katamari Damacy).
At one point I landed on the idea of making a comic about how inside my brain
there are these idea-acrobats that clamber up into elaborate, death-defying
pyramids while spinning plates and tables and bike wheels on thin poles and
then my "procrastination" or self-sabotaging "perfectionism" is like a huge
sumo wrestler who just has to unsettle the elaborate spectacle in order
to "win".
And... of course I haven't gotten around to drawing that comic.
As more and more projects clutter "the backburner", the more the self-reproach
grows, leading to paralyzing inaction.
So I try to set up arbitrary constraints and try to keep my creativity within
those bounds while allowing myself to put one thing down and pick up another
when my wheels spin out in the mud.
Not sure rational thought applies here.
No, you're right, given the context, it's rational. I was speaking about jwar's thought process in general though. 
