Picking back up

I am, at this moment, working through the end of a collapse.

These things happen to me occasionally. It's a part of a pattern, which is, in turn, part of who I am: I take on things, and take on things, and assure everyone I'm fine, and take on things, and joke about my workload, and take on things - and maybe I begin to incur a sleep debt I can't seem to pay off, and maybe I start finding my social life a burden - and I take on things, and begin to feel hunted and oppressed by the stress, and maybe I start to consider that I have possibly made a bad choice at some point, but usually before that can happen some small thing occurs and I hit critical mass, and I drop everything with a fury.

Ignoring my own limits has, at times, helped me achieve things: I left school with a reputation as one of the most driven students in my class, for one, and during my senior year I soared. But the crash always comes, and it always sucks.

It's often tied to depression, though not always, and I'm not really clear on what the specific cause/effect relationship is. I do know that multi-directional stress, especially when related to planning things, is a huge danger zone; I also know that I can stave off the crash to greater or lesser degrees of effectiveness by paring down my load, but by the time I start doing that it is generally too late and all I'm doing is making the angle of descent a little less steep.

This crash followed the pattern. Multi-directional stress, a large chunk of which had to do with taking point on finding and renting an apartment, and a sleep debt that felt like a black hole, and a whole load of minutiae that by themselves wouldn't have been stressful but which added up to be a monster - yeah.

I'm just angry that this one came when it did. The actual day of the collapse was the day that the Illustration Masterclass assignment email hit my inbox, and I just can't work through the lingering emotional exhaustion to get excited over them. I'm having to approach it using logic, since my actual artistic impulse is currently in the toilet: I'm doing A Midsummer Night's Dream, and within that I am going to paint Titania, because of course I am. I know my palette is going to be cool, and that her hair is going to be dark, and there are elements that have occurred to me as being lovely --

-- but I am thumbnailing from a dead place right now, and it's frustrating when I remember how incredible the rush of inspiration was for Tristan and Isolde last year.

I know with certainty that the spark is there waiting for me to dig it out, but the process is hard.