Arting With Chronic Illness
Energy Management
Some things I learned about working as a cartoonist with chronic illness:
Will power will not fix it.
Diet and exercise will not fix it if there was nothing wrong with your diet and exercise plan in the first place.
Exercise can actually make you worse because exercise you used to think was normal can now be too stressful for you.
You need a lot of recovery time, so keep exercise routines short. Maybe 15 minutes to start. If you hit your wall, you may not feel the backlash for a day or two and not understand why.
On the days you used to feel bad, doing easy work was the productivity solution for that day.
Now you must do the hard work first thing because it may be a long time before you get energy again.
Your energy reserves are like battery packets.
A normal person gets 20 battery packets. You get 10. Or 5.
The normal person can use those battery packets to go out with friends, to the grocery, to the movies. Then they have ten battery packets left every day to work.
You only have ten battery packets. So if you do all the things other people think are normal, you will have absolutely no reserves left for work.
The high value work has to come first every day simply because you will run out of energy for the art by going to the grocery, or to the movies, or cleaning the house.
The other day, I had to go into town and thought I’d have lunch with a friend. I was wiped out the rest of the day.
Prioritize the art, the most difficult part of the art, for the first two hours of every work day. After that, when you're drained, you can relegate the energy you have left to less stressful art.
But it's most important to get moving on the hard stuff before you run out of steam, because if you don't, you lose the whole day without even realizing where it went.
For me, writing and layouts usually come first. Then inking, and then coloring. Spotting blacks or decorative areas and hatching is reserved for when I'm really wiped.
Every day is different, so you feel good for awhile, blithely announce you feel great to your co-workers and can totally do All the Things, then you crash and feel like crap for letting everyone down.
Playing catch up all the time is demoralizing.
I carefully monitor every action with the Rescue Time app. It helped me train myself from a work day of about 2 hours to an average work day of about 8 hours. If my work hours trend downards, it may indicated a need to tweak my medication.
Exercising in the morning may not work for you. It can blow your energy for the day and leave you with no juice for work. Some light stretching or yoga is OK. But what works for all the gurus may simply not work for you.
Do not go on the internet in the morning. Social media will sap all your mental energy.
Target your prime work hours (I track mine using Rescue Time,) and cut social media use and interruptions during that time.
You may never have as much energy as other people. Don’t think of it in terms of time management. Think of it in terms of energy management.
This is so well put. It took me years to realize it's not a personal failing to not have the same energy levels/ability as other people. I've finally started saying "no" to things, even if I'd like to do them, because I know they'll steal energy from the things I have to do.
Your wisdom here extends to dealing with aging as well as chronic illness (I won't call it an "illness," but it definitely is chronic!). It's been a little shocking to me in the last couple of years to discover that my body just doesn't work as well as it did even five years ago. When inside my head I don't feel all that much older, my body (especially knees that are now severely arthritic) says otherwise. I have come to realize that I need to conserve my energy in the ways you describe.
I've also learned to protect my Rest Time as well. My body favors eight hours from every twenty-four for sleep, although not necessarily all in one block. I can wake up after four hours of good sleep feeling great, but I have to remember that I will need another four hours somewhere else in the day, or I literally fall asleep in my desk chair mid-to-late afternoon.
I admire the mindfulness you apply to handling your health, and frankly have learned from it. So, thank you and bless you!