I have never been good at adjusting to change, which feels ironic coming from someone who just moved countries twice to be with the love of their life.

It has been an incredible, terrifying, overwhelming journey to get here. Moving from the United States to Wales, getting married, and then moving to a country where I do not speak the language has radically changed who I am and how I live my life.

For a long time, I think I was in survival mode.

I am slowly peeling back habits that were formed from years and years of isolation and chosen loneliness. I am the luckiest person on the planet. I have a garden, four insane cats, and a brilliant wife who I cannot say enough good things about.

I am also realizing that I am not quite yet the person I want to be. I’m on my way there, but I am moving much slower than I would like.

For the first time in a long time, I feel like I can breathe.

That should make making art easier.

Instead, it feels foreign.

I am making things again for the first time in years, and every morning I have to fight with myself to get started. Once I begin, I can work for hours and hours. The problem is never the work itself. The problem is getting to the work.

I am out of practice with my practice.

For many years I’ve been fascinated by the idea that the artist suffering is not the way to make work. That the more needs are met the more work will be produced. My life is very good now, I have very few complaints, and the pressure has been taken off. Now I have to figure out how to redirect that energy. I was not making work when I was sad and now I’m fighting with myself to make work when my needs have all been met.

I believe that the adjustment period to a new place has something to do with that. I am still adjusting to the feeling of security.

It’s strange just how much nothing needs to happen for me to make anything.

I’ve read piles of books about creativity and artistic practice. David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke. All of them touched me in a way that I can’t fully explain. Many of the techniques work for me in the short term, but I have never really stayed with them long enough to see where they lead.

I have started this blog entry about a hundred times.

I know why I am struggling to write right now, and I know why I am struggling to make work.

I am afraid of being both good and bad at it.

Frustrating, right?

Because if I am good at it and still fail, then the failure is mine. But if I am bad at it, then what was all that time for? What was art school for? What was the belief that friends and family had in me for all those years for?

If I am good at it, I have to continue to be good at it. At least that’s how creating feels right now. You don’t get to have a sophomore slump anymore; you have to keep churning out things that people want to consume.

Like most people, I just want to leave something beautiful (and weird) behind, and I am having a hard time thinking that anything I make will represent me the way that I want it to. I would like to know that this hiatus from making meant something in the long run. That I left and came back with art that means something, that tells the world who I am and what I believe.

I don’t think I care about having shows or changing the world, I just want to prove that I existed, that I made a difference to the tiny group of people that got to meet me. I think most artists just want someone to get them, to understand who they are and why their work matters to them.

Living a lot of life in between the last time I tried to make a series of work should, in theory, make the work better. The more life you’ve lived, the more you have to inject into your work. The frustrating part is that making art is very much like working out, and no matter how good your ideas are, if you don’t put them on paper, no one, including you, will ever know if they are good ideas.

Not knowing if I can “pull something off” is very silly.

I tell my students all the time that they do not have to be naturally good at drawing to get good at drawing.

So why am I so afraid of being bad?

That is a lot of pressure to put on someone so out of practice. I need to forgive myself a little for not creating because I think the anger at myself is also pervasive. Maybe I need to make art about that.

Process has always been my favourite part of making work. I love planning. I love talking about ideas. I love experimenting.

I enjoy making a piece for about seventy-five percent of its life.

Then I feel the fear of finishing.

The closer a work gets to being complete, the closer it gets to becoming real. It can succeed. It can fail. It can be judged. It can disappoint me. I can disappoint it.

Maybe that is why I have always been more interested in process than outcomes.

Or maybe that is just another excuse.

As long as it remains unfinished, all of those possibilities remain open.

Though I’m starting to think that my love for process and my fear of finishing go hand in hand. All of the things I don’t like come at the end of making art: contacting galleries or group shows, advertising yourself, talking and writing about the final piece, speaking to other people. That part of the art world is exhausting and scary.

Either way, I am making things again.

And for now, that feels like enough.