Heyyyyy,

It’s certainly been a while. Honestly, when I look back on my last post it’s hard not to cringe at how earnest I was about the importance of staying consistent and doing the work in a society that increasingly devalues creative output, only to then have to put the entire project on hold for the entire summer with no word or update. And the longer that went on, the harder it became to try to jump back in and pick up where I’d left off.

It gave me a lot of time to think about what I’m trying to do here, what is working for me, what isn’t, and how I’d like to move forward.

tldr: I’m going to talk about the creative challenges I’ve been facing over the summer as well as just generally, with this project and others, then I’m going to explain what changes are coming to the Mixing Media format, starting with a new series where I discuss formative media for me, which will probably take up the next couple months (if I’m able to stick to a consistent posting schedule).

Also, I’m going to get more personal than usual, so I’m probably going to delete this at the end of the month.

Where I’ve been this summer (and why it’s been hard to post)

It’s been a really busy summer for me, in ways both good and bad.

The Good:

I got engaged! This has been something that’s been coming a long time, but it has been a blur (positive) trying to plan a fun proposal, getting pictures, planning things out, having to adapt said plans, and starting the early stages of wedding planning.

On top of this, I had a week long family vacation, my soon-to-be nephew was born, I celebrated so many birthdays (my fiancée’s and mine included), holidays and family events, I went to a Lucy Dacus concert, so much time traveling, and just generally, there has been more than enough to fill my spare time.

The Bad:

Well, all summer it’s felt as though I’ve had very little if any free time. And I don’t see that changing. The week after I wrote the last blog post, I ended up stuck in the Atlanta airport heading to the above referenced family vacation, using up the time I had initially allotted for writing (I mean, I didn’t want to be the person on vacation writing on my computer the whole time). The week after, as I was headed home, I ended up being stuck overnight at the Atlanta airport, once again using the time that I would have set aside for writing.

I also fought (and lost) my first litigated court case. For much of May and June, I was consistently working 50-60 (sometimes more) hours during the week. I’ve always been bad about setting aside time during the work week to write, and spending so many long days at work made it really easy to do nothing during the week. Not to mention it made me not want to do anything that remotely felt like work during the weekend.

Then there was family drama, which I won’t elaborate on too much. Some of it is conflict surrounding wedding planning, and people butting heads with me over what they think the correct course of action is, to put things mildly. Other unrelated family stressors have included fights between my siblings, supporting my brother through some difficult times, and having an uncle die a couple days after the anniversary of my dad’s death. And that’s to say nothing regarding the general state of the world and the political climate. All of which primed me for depression.

The biggest thing I’ve been struggling with this summer is just depression. I lost my health insurance when I went to law school and cold turkey quit antidepressants. Which means I’ve been unmedicated for about four years at this point. Granted, now I do have health insurance, but the problem with clinical depression is that it can make it hard to do the tasks that you know you should be doing. So while I have finally scheduled an appointment to get medicated again, it took me a year to do so. Having spent most of the summer feeling burnt out and depressed, it’s been simple to just spend my time chasing serotonin through doomscrolling or media binging rather than spending my time more productively. Not to mention that the passage of time always seems distorted in these periods, for a variety of reasons. As such, I’ve constantly felt like I’m either out of time or running behind, and it’s been a struggle to consciously set aside the dedicated few hours that I need to make a 1K-2K word blog post. Particularly when the anhedonia that comes along with the depression has left me feeling cold about the media I’ve been consuming, and certainly not feeling inspired to write about anything.

Why I’ve a Hard Time with Mixing Media and Other Creative Projects

Let’s start with why this project, Mixing Media is challenging for me.

First, it takes more time than I would like to admit for me to write and publish a post, and then the habits I’ve developed in tandem with the blog also take up a surprising amount of time. First, it normally takes me a few hours to pick what I want to write on and what the general theme of the post will be. Then, it takes another 3-5 hours to write the post, especially if I’m being responsible and editing/rereading the post before sending it out. So I would say just the act of planning, writing, editing, and posting a blog takes anywhere from 5-9 hours. 5-9 hours for a couple thousand words at best that I never feel entirely satisfied with. If I leave all the writing until the weekend, that can make i feel as though I’m spending 50% of my weekend just on a blog. If I have any other obligation in a weekend, it makes it really easy to not write and to just put the blog on the backburner.

The amount of time spent per post also feels like it’s taking away from some of the reasons I wanted to start this blog in the first place. Spending so much time writing about media keeps me from taking in new media, and maybe finding something that does inspire me. I love talking about the media I love with friends, and I want this blog to capture the feeling of that. I love the long-form cultural criticism of people like Gita Jackson, Jacob Geller, Austin Walker (although he doesn’t do as much of this nowadays), Mike Rugnetta, and Renata Price. I love recommendation focused creators such as Peter Volk, Lauren Passell, Ryan Broderick, Megan Cruz, Evan Liekam, and Emmaskies. These competing ways of thinking and talking about media often seem in direct competition to each other. It’s really hard to write a good long-form piece of criticism in a week, much less to explore any sort of thematic depth. This often has me defaulting to the most simplistic form of writing available to me, and that often leaves me feeling frustrated and unfulfilled by the piece.

I also spend an inordinate amount of time logging tracking the media I consume, and I still don’t have a perfectly consistent system. I love goodreads and letterboxd, but there’s no good way to log comics, or podcasts, or tv shows, or any of the other types of media I like to cover, and there’s certainly no good way to do head to head comparisons. So I’ve taken to journaling my media habits, but this alone takes 30 minutes to an hour of a normal day, and even longer when I’m trying to recap a week or a month.

The other thing about the Mixing Media format that I’ve so far boxed myself into is that I pressure myself to focus on the most recent thing that’s caught my fancy. First, it feels more fair to talk about something I’ve recently experienced, so that I’m not looking back with rose colored glasses nor am I unfairly forgetting important aspects or themes. The problem with this, as mentioned above, is that I go through cycles where sometimes there’s nothing new that I feel positive enough about to write about, or worse, I feel as though I have to put a disingenuous spin on something that I wasn’t that hot on.

Relatedly, I enjoy talking about all different types of media, but my ability to write them varies pretty greatly. I have a harder time writing about visual mediums like tv, movies, and comics than I do books, and I never really found a way to write about podcasts in a way I felt comfortable with. I also started putting pressure on myself to give equal weight and time to the mediums I was writing about. But how do I give equal time to manga and books when I might read 200 chapters of manga in a month but only a single book? And how do I compare the weight of a podcast to a substack article to a movie? Hell, even within comics, how do I compare a narrative comic like Saga to a gag comic like Penny Arcade, to something untitled I find scrolling through instagram? I know it doesn’t matter, I should just let the work speak for itself without worry about things like weight or attention, but telling myself not to worry about something has never been a good way for me to stop worrying about something.

With that groundwork, let’s start to get into why I struggle with creative projects generally

Mental illness.

Okay, maybe it all loops back around to mental illness, but if I’m being sincere, I can provide more concrete reasoning. The first and most obvious is the depression that I’ve mentioned above. That’s pretty clear cut. When you’re dealing with lack of motivation, lack of energy, anhedonia, and self-loathing, it’s hard to do anything that feels vulnerable. It’s hard to imagine that anyone might interested in your opinion. It’s hard not to feel that what you’re doing isn’t just a big waste of time.

I grew up surrounded by people with mental illness, so it’s no surprise I struggle with it as well. My brother is bipolar, and while I am not, living with and modeling so many of my behaviors around a bipolar person taught me to go through periods of intense productivity and focus followed by periods of sloth and struggle. While I think this is something everybody struggles with to some degree, it’s certainly become something that I’ve become used to seeing and doing in the extreme.

I’m also a perfectionist. I hate seeing myself spending so much time and energy on a product that I view as mediocre. I’ve been flattered by some of the feedback I’ve received on some of my prior pieces, but I also recognize that I’m nowhere near as skilled or talented as any of the other creators I mentioned. Hell, that was part of why I started the project. It takes time, energy, and effort to build habits and skills. This is a type of writing I don’t have any training in, it’s a type of writing that I’ve never received feedback on, and it’s a type of writing that I haven’t done very much of. But it’s hard to work towards improving this skill when time after time I’m left with a product I find just okay. Somewhat below average. And the fear that I will never get better starts to creep in and I find myself avoiding working on it. Especially when it feels like there are so many better or more pressing uses for my time.

And I look to signals that reinforce this belief. Renata Price is younger than me. The Sixth Sense was released when M. Night Shyamalan was my age. I will always be older than the oldest college athlete for the rest of my life. I’m too old and it’s too late. I studied the wrong thing in college, no one cares, the field is oversaturated, I have the wrong type of voice, I have the wrong type of look, I have the wrong type of style, I’m too self-conscious, I’m trying to be a content creator and content creators are annoying and entitled, and on and on and on.

I grew up around a hoarder, and this effects my thoughts on ideas of clutter and taking up space. When I put out a product that I feel is just okay, it feels as though I am creating clutter, which creates a visceral feeling. Why am I wasting server space, and natural resources, and people’s time, to create clutter. Tied to this is the belief that I can’t take up too much space. Living with a hoarder, I found myself pushed into a smaller and smaller space, and going outside the space allotted was met with backlash. This was only reinforced growing up autistic. A lot of my formative years were spent with people telling me that I was weird, that I was loud, that I was annoying, that I was a know-it-all, so it became safer and safer to sink into the background, to not make noise, to immerse myself in media, and to just dissociate. This is part of what made me fall in love with all types of media and creativity so much, it was a space to get lost and be somewhere else. It was a way people were allowed to be wild and free

It’s also frustrating how hard it feels to make a good product without spending money. Canva has so many restrictions on what can be done with a free account, which is part of why I switched to the blog rather than attempt to keep the Instagram going. Beehiiv is a natural choice for hosting when I don’t want to deal with substack’s nazi problem or to pay for Ghost. But the site design options are limited for free users, I can’t do polls, it’s hard to get creative with page layout or format, and even if I wanted a larger audience, there’s a hard cap on how many subscribers I can have with a free account.

There have been so many times in my life that I’ve started writing a story just to delete the doc after a few pages. There have been so many times I’ve almost started a tiktok or youtube only to trash the idea because I’m frustrated with my look, or my voice, or my poor editing. My instagram has been dormant all year because I find myself too limited by the format and without the skill or vision to work within those limits.

All of this serves as a convenient excuse to just say “why even spend time on it if it can’t be perfect.” But I know that I want, and maybe even need, to do something as an outlet for my creative energy.

So, what next?

Well, I need to get back to working on my 10,000 hours. I need to try to start writing again because it is something that brings me joy, it helps create structure and routine, and I can recognize that it’s only with practice that I’ll get better. And forcing myself to put work out to an audience helps to keep me accountable.

So, I’m going to try and be more consistent. I’m going to go back to the basics. But I’m not going to just return to the old format because that wasn’t working for me.

I’m going to try to post weekly for the rest of the year. I’d be surprised if I meet that goal, but I still want that to be the goal. I’m going to try to write more during the workweek, and I’m going to let myself write in whatever style feels right at the time, whether that’s rambling and philosophical, or punchy and review oriented.

Part of going back to the basics means reminding myself why I wanted to do this in the first place. To be more engaged with the media I take in, to be more critical, and to share the good things I find with the people I care about. I take in so much media and I want to share the joy I find there with others.

I’m going to lay a groundwork by talking about my formative media experiences, how those works shaped my taste, and what I look for in my media today. Some weeks I may focus on one piece of media, some weeks I might focus on a series, some weeks my focus might be scattershot. I’m giving myself the freedom to be flexible. I do know that I’ll be writing about all different types of media, even beyond the media formats I track, and that’s something I look forward to.

I don’t know how many of these I’ll do. It may be month, it may take me to the end of 2025, it may take me to the end of 2026. But at the end, hopefully you (and I) will have a better understand what I look for in my media, what I value, and how large a grain of salt you should take my recommendations and reviews with. But for now, the most important thing for me to do is to just do the damn thing, however that looks.

I’ll see you all next week.

Soma