A Thing A Week (I think I can, I think I can...)

A week or so before the start of 2019, I decided I wanted to make a thing a week. This is inspired primarily by Jonathan Coulton's project of the same name. He's great, and if you don't know his work yet, you should. (If you're even a casual listener to Ask Me Another, you're already familiar.)

I'm also inspired by all the amazing creative people I know. They've been working hard for hears to construct these epic Venn diagrams of life. They have the thing they do for money, the art they make when hired by others, and the art they make for themselves. Some of the most relentless artists are hired to make their own projects for money. That's the dream, and it takes a colossal amount of work to get there.

I'm *great* at helping other people. It's comforting to pretend this is because I'm naturally a selfless person who truly yearns to toil on behalf of others, but in reality I think three very different things are at play here: 

1. It's hard to feel like I deserve to spend time on my own stuff. I'm intensely critical of my own work, and don't leave myself a lot of room for things to get messy or be weird. That gets in the way of allowing myself to grow artistically. 
2. "Helping other people" translates into some pretty bankable skillsets and, like many people my age, I have both student loans and a therapist. 
3. I'm scared. SO freaking scared. Usually this fear is a super dull roar I can more or less ignore. At other times, it's more like if Jessie Spano skipped entirely over the "I'm so excited" part of her breakdown on Saved by the Bell. Nameless dread is wholly illogical. I don't know why I'm kind of convinced I'll die if I make bad art, but I am. Hi. (Every so often I make bad art to prove to myself that I can survive the experience. More on this rather shitty self-sabotaging tactic some other time.) 

Anyway. I'm tired of my old bullshit. I'm sad that I'm the one person I'm the least likely to show up for. And so I've declared an end to the practice in this shiny new year of 2019. (Also, there are a lot of ideas covered in cobwebs and noise up in my brain parts, and *not* Making Things has started to give me actual headaches that are only alleviated by productivity.) 

All of this is to say, I'm doing a thing a week in 2019. Yes, the Thing this week is this blog post, but everyone has to start somewhere and I'm posting it before midnight on Jan 7th, so it counts. 

Stay tuned. It may be blogs all the way down for January, but I'm planning 5-minute podcasts with interesting humans at least a couple of times a month after that. Occasionally I may even write and sing something. I do not promise that any of this will be good. I only commit to willing a thing a week into existence. We'll take it from there. 

What projects are you committing to in 2019? What are you hoping to achieve? How do you talk down your internal critics?