Little Oracles

S04:E06 | Rekindle: On Burning Out, Learning Grace, and Making Art for Yourself

• allison arth • Season 4 • Episode 7

Share episode

Let's burn your vision board! Not really! (But kind of?) In this episode, we're talking about taking space, practicing grace, and reminding ourselves of why we make what we make ... and for whom, and why it's not the best move to let your calendar control your creative work.

Heavily inspired by a great Bluesky thread about making art for yourself by game designers Sean and Navi Drake of A Couple of Drakes.

Resources

IG: @littleoracles

[Intro music]

Hey everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I’m Allison Arth.

Well here we are in the final month of the year, [chuckles] if you can you believe it. And as I look back on my year as a creator, I’m a little stricken, because I’ve really just come back into making in many senses, primarily as regards this podcast — and if you missed the little three-parter I did at the beginning of the season, where I broke down what brought me back to creativity, I’ll link those episodes in the show notes — but today I want to pump the brakes, in a manner of speaking, because today, I wanna talk about space.

And I touched on this way, way back in Season One, in an episode called Getting Good at Being Lazy (and I’ll link that in the show notes as well), but I think it’s worth reviving and reevaluating now, especially as we head into this final month of the year, when I think a lot of folks feel pressure to, like, check the boxes on yearly goals, or rush to finish projects, or just generally impose a ton of pressure on themselves to get things done before the calendar clicks over to next year.

And while I definitely respect developing the determination to do the creative, or let’s call them heart-and-soul-feeding things that you set out to do, because I see that as a manifestation of self-empathy — you know, of tending to yourself and to your dreams — but I do think that a dogged pursuit of those objectives often comes along with a lot of arbitrary and often unnecessary schedules and deadlines and due dates.

And I fall into this all the time, lemme tell ya: I made 54 episodes of this podcast last year in, like, 50 weeks, and I was so regimented about episode cadence and sequence and variety. And, yeah, I loved bringing this show together for you — and for me, because I do love thinking and writing and talking about creative process and practice — but let’s be real, maintaining that rhythm, which was totally self-imposed, was a one way ticket to Burnout City.

And compounded with all the life that happened in the nooks and crannies of making those episodes, I really needed some space from this thing that I’d built, and this thing that I love. And not just space, because space can only restore so much if you’re constantly berating yourself for taking it, you know what I mean? What I really needed to make that space meaningful was grace — I needed to extend time and leeway to myself to drop off for a while, to slow down, and to relieve some of that pressure I’d been exerting on, and that intensity I’d been applying to, my own work and my own creative mind for so long.

And I bet you’ve been in this position before, too, where you’re basically funnelling yourself into productivity, and you’re setting all these expectations for yourself, and your output is whatever it can be in the time you’ve allotted yourself, and suddenly the schedule is more important than the substance. And it’s in that moment — when the thing you built, and the thing you love is just a thing that’s overwhelming you — it’s in that moment where the grace comes in; it’s in that moment that I encourage you to take a beat, and to remind yourself of why you do the creative things you do, and (this is the important part) for whom you do them.

And I’m thinking now of something I saw on Bluesky a few weeks ago, now: Sean and Navi Drake — who are game designers operating under the sobriquet A Couple of Drakes on social media — they had a thread about sitting down one afternoon and just going full-send on designing all these fairy characters — not for a current project, and not for some nascent future project, either, but just because. And the post in this thread that really got to me was this: they wrote, “Because sometimes it's nice to make art for yourself and hide it from the world because you only made it to make the demons stop howling.” And I think there’s something really vital and wise underpinning the whole sentiment: sometimes it’s nice to make art for yourself.

And I would amend even further: it’s not only nice to make art for yourself, it’s necessary. Because when you’re doing the most; when you’re sprinting from project to project; when, like I said earlier, the calendar controls the creative, then you’re not giving yourself the latitude to settle, to wonder and ponder and play, and just live in the nebula between “concept” and “product.” You’re depriving yourself of that crucial creative star-stuff that is the making. The doing and the reevaluating and the farting around and the discovering: the act of imagination and invention and creation; the mess of it, the crude of it, the you of it. Remember what A Couple of Drakes said: “Sometimes it’s nice to make art for yourself and hide it from the world.” Sometimes it’s nice to make art for yourself. It’s nice to make art for yourself. Make art for yourself.

To me, that’s the grace we need in the face of burnout. That’s the mantra; that’s what matters: making art for ourselves, because it’s what we love to do, not because it was on our 2024 vision board. And that’s what can remind us all, as we race toward the end of the year, that making art for ourselves doesn’t suffocate our creative fire, it kindles it. Creativity isn’t a goal, it’s a practice. It’s a process. It’s a present continuous: it’s making, not made.

So, practically, for me, that grace and that making-art-for-myself ripples into this podcast: it’s things like shorter, more focused episodes, like this one; it’s a more relaxed cadence, based on when I’m inspired or intrigued enough by something to write and record; it’s stepping back from interview episodes for the time being; it’s lightening the load on satellite content like the blog and the now-dormant Little Oracles Instagram. So I wonder, what does this kind of grace look like for you? What does it look like, and what does it feel like, to make art for yourself, whether you share it, like I do with this podcast, or “hide it from the world,” like A Couple of Drakes? What happens when you shift away from clinging to calendars, and toward cultivating your creative self?

So that’s my invitation to you as we head into the last few weeks of this year: figure out what it looks like when you make art for yourself … and make some art for yourself, too.

And that’s it for today. If you wanna hang out with me on social, and, like see what I’m reading, and look at pictures of my cat Mitchell, you can find me at arthograph — that’s a-r-t-h-o-g-r-a-p-h — on Instagram and Bluesky. And if you’re in the mood for even more big book energy and creativity content, you can find every episode of the podcast at little oracles dot com. Until next time, as always: take care, keep creating, and stay divine.

[Outro music]

[Secret outtake]

… based on when I’m inspired or intrigued enou– [cat meows] Sir. [cat meows again] Do you wanna have your own podcast, Mitchell? [cat meows insistently] Yeah, what would it be about? Salmon treats? [cat meows more insistently] That sounds exciting.