“Ice bergs, Long Point”, a stereograph by G. H. Nickerson (George Hathaway), featuring unknown figures, latter 19th century — Source.
I've felt creatively blocked for a while. I don't know what kind of art I want to make or what kind of writing I want to do. In the past year, I tried to move away from hyper minimalist, geometric illustration and into more freeform drawing to see if it would be easier on my body.
In the process, I discovered a few accommodations for my hand pain:
- Procreate allows artists to adjust the way a vector stroke auto-corrects after being drawn.
- Big grips can be added to a pencil so that it requires less effort to grip.
In talking with my physical therapist, they have also reminded me over and over again that activities can be modified. We can try to make them work for my lifestyle.
But my struggle is that I don't know that I even want to try anymore. Drawing things by hand was supposed to make art making easier. But that's not happening.
I can't draw or write anything out by hand for more than 10 or 15 minutes without significant pain. So it feels like the part of the creative process that a classmate once described as "sitting on already-warmed toilet and taking a nice, long dump" just never happens. And this isn't a recent development: I have been struggling with hand strength and nerve pain issues throughout my body for nearly six years.
My left hand is still noticeably stronger.
And in the weird gaping maw of regret this kind of shit makes me feel, it's like there's a secondary form of emotion that eclipses it all. I feel ashamed that I can't "overcome" limitations like this, that I can't just turn it all around or have a better attitude.
A year ago I also decided to begin writing again. This time for a big tech company. But I haven't written much creatively. I've been blocked, and I abandon so much more than I actually publish.
Maybe part of the problem is that I don't feel grounded in what my creative voice is. Every time I've felt grounded in my identity as an artist, humor has been always been the cornerstone of it all. And by humor, I don't mean like standup comedy. I mean like, the sort of bad jokes that have been stuffed like a trojan horse into a work of art that make people feel like they can laugh about extremely mundane or even otherwise serious topics.
Stuffing bad jokes into seemingly earnest essays and interdisciplinary forms of art has always been my thing. But nothing has felt funny.
And I desperately want everything to be perfect. But I know that all of my art sucks. So I get stressed because I can't push myself like I used to — I can't just suffer for the art. And because of all that I get easily disillusioned and I abandon everything that feels too embarrassing to try to complete.
And then I marinate in the angst of it. I'm just a boring, unremarkable person not making art. Or, that's the narrative I think I've been telling myself.
---
Lately I've been thinking that maybe there are other things worth doing that don't cause quite so much injury to my dominant hand. Like, learning french.
I am not talented at learning foreign languages. I'm not even particularly competent at listening to things in english much less french. So despite years of previous practice, I am not particularly good.
But there's something very genuinely magic and shiny about noticing my comprehension grow. I love how learning a language feels stepping into another parallel world: how it feels like I'm picking up fragments and stories that I wouldn't have ever necessarily noticed.
---
I've been slowly getting to know a Quebec-based blog dedicated to independent music called Le Canal Auditif. (My reading comprehension is B1 at best, so I'm not the fastest reader.)
The blog introduced me to the artist Ponteix and his recent 2025 album, Le Canadien Errant. In the album's titular song, Ponteix sings in French,
On m'prends pour un vagabond
Un Canadien errant
Un anglais qui parle bon
Ou en Français figé dans le temps
Un Canadien errant means "a wandering Canadian", and while researching the phrase I discovered that it is also quite notably the name of an 1842 song written by Antoine Gérin-Lajoie in the wake of the Rebellion of Lower Canada.
According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the revolt led to meaningful political reforms, including the introduction of responsible government, which would become an important part of Confederation and enable a peaceful separation from Britain without revolution.
Before that reform happened however, the campaign failed, and many were either sentenced to death or sent to a penal colony in Australia. Other individuals who were not captured fled the country and lived in exile. The rebellion's leader, Louis-Joseph Papineau, first fled to the United States and then France until an act of amnesty allowed him to return and re-enter politics.
There's a lot of nuance and complexity in this history that I don't think I feel confident in my understanding of. But what is more plainly clear is that the original song is about the pain of living in exile: and that same theme reverberates through the poetry of Ponteix's album.
I have been listening to it so much that I finally happened to notice that Ponteix is playing a show in Quebec the exact same month I'll be living there this fall. Which feels like a wonderful coincidence that never would have happened without my sudden interest in becoming bilingual.
---
I have been mulling over writing about what I am reading, listening, or watching like this on a weekly basis. I've never been able to do that in the last couple of years that I've tried with this blog.
Every other time I think I hyper-fixated on perfection. Or I tried to cosplay as entirely different sort of human than I am. Someone with big-brain thoughts who says things that resonate.
When really, my creative process is just mashing words together with bad jokes and occasionally wonderful turns of phrase and hoping for the best. And perhaps I worried that this sort of chaos isn't enough. That I shouldn't be writing online about my appreciation about another person's art if I couldn't muster the kind of eloquence that someone deserves.
I just have "I like it". But maybe that should be enough.
When I was in college my two favorite places in Chicago were Myopic Books and Quimby's, and nothing quite inspired me like discovering newly pressed issues of poorly photocopied zines. College was also the first time I really struggled with my physical health: so what's different now?
Maybe just that I'm worried that it's a little too late to be a messy writer. To write with the kind of knowledge that everything is ephemeral and at best this thing will be discovered by exactly 8 people I've seen on the 12th floor of an incredibly specific building in the South Loop of Chicago and exactly nowhere else.
I don't know if I'm ever going to get back to that era. But I don't think anything is stopping me.