Working, Sort Of: On Making Art That Refuses to Arrive

I’ve been, erm, working of sorts on a series for a few years. And by “working,” I mostly mean thinking, acquiring, making one or two photos that I heavily dislike, and then setting the entire series aside for a while.

Recently, I was invited to submit images to an exciting opportunity, I’ll explain more later, and decided it was time to truly focus on this series.

Well. All that stress, late nights, set building and setup, and I’ve once again created largely images I don’t like, though there are a few that feel promising. So the series will return to the back of my brain until I find additional ways to approach it successfully. In the meantime, I submitted older photos instead. The images I sent felt appropriate, but I’m still disappointed in my progress on the new, not so new, work.

There’s been a lot between then and now, of course. Three moves, classes, work changes. There’s plenty written elsewhere here about health, car accidents, and everything that comes with them. I try not to be hard on myself, but when such a large part of how I define myself is tied to making art, the gap between wanting to create and being able to do so is not an easy one to sit with.

So very often, nothing feels truly obtainable. My body overheats, tightens, pain spikes, endurance drops below zero. Ordinary tasks, house chores, daily maintenance, quickly steal what little energy I have, and yet I’m still expected to live at the same level of productivity as those around me. Making art takes away from my ability to complete other, more respectable tasks, and yet what am I if not a creator of images, of messages, of stories?

Chronic illness doesn’t just make things harder, it changes the cost of every ordinary action, including making art. Sitting at a desk for eight hours already takes everything out of me. By midweek, exhaustion settles in so deeply that even wanting to make work feels like another job entirely. Making art asks for something different than the rest of my work. The mental space it requires feels heavier, because it isn’t just output, it’s me. And when energy is limited, that weight matters.

I stared at the images on my screen at 1 a.m. on a Thursday night, fully aware that lack of sleep would flare my MS, and still unsure whether the work justified the cost. What I needed from that attempt wasn’t a finished series so much as proof, proof that I can still make what lives in my head, even if it takes longer, even if it costs more energy, even if I have to work more slowly than I once did.

I don’t have definitive answers, only lived experience and the echoed words of others in similar places. I’ve grieved people I’ve lost, but grieving the version of myself that existed before illness has been harder, and I don’t know that it ever fully ends. From the outside, life can look functional enough. From the inside, even showing up requires a level of effort that isn’t visible. Art makes that effort impossible to hide.

So for now, I’m allowing this series to stay unfinished without treating it as abandoned. I’ll make other things. I’ll let my world continue to change. We persist, not because it’s easy or heroic, but because persistence itself becomes an act of creation. There is nothing more worth pursuing than pursuit itself.