Last month, my team did a really nice thing where everyone was given two days and $50 dollars to pursue whatever creative or personal project they had always wanted to do. The rules were that it couldn’t be work-related and it couldn’t be something you already did regularly. The idea was to push yourself out of your comfort zone a little bit.

Strangely, I really struggled to figure out what to do. For a while, these were the only two options I considered:

1. Building a city in Cities:Skylines shaped like the Google logo. Vetoed because it couldn’t be work-related, and just building a regular city seemed too self-indulgent, because I’d already been spending all my free time for weeks doing that already.

2. Walking from the San Francisco office to the Mountain View office (about 37 miles). Vetoed because I didn’t really want to figure out where to camp overnight, and a motel room and food would have been over $50.

   

I had fleeting thoughts of pursuing creative endeavors – needlefelt, embroidery, and the like – but it felt all too much like… work. (I wish it didn’t!) I just wanted to do something completely different, something that would feel new.

Around that same time, Jake and I listened to Dr. Anna Lembke talk about addiction on Hidden Brain. She studies how dopamine and the imbalance of pleasure/pain play a massive role in addiction and anxiety.

During the interview, she brought up the concept of a “dopamine fast” - in which you reset your brain by abstaining from addictive behaviors and activities.

Dopamine fasts are not yet scientifically proven, etc., etc. but I’m a big believer in the placebo effect. There are many different ways people have gone about them, but this is the method I cobbled together:

• No caffeine, alcohol, or drugs

• No refined sugars

• No digital screens of any kind, including e-books

• No artificial light after sundown (candles OK)

• Cold showers only!

And so that’s what I did for my two-day project!

Here is what I spent my $50 on:

• Dr. Lembke’s book, Dopamine Nation - $15.46

• A 60-minute sensory deprivation float - $10 (I had a gift card)

• A yin yoga class - $22

• Yoga mat rental - $3

The fast itself was incredibly uneventful, as you might have expected. With my TV, phone, and computer all locked away, I couldn’t consume any media or do any work (which maybe wasn’t the smartest idea since I’m still on a final art deadline for my next book!). I couldn’t talk to any friends or family. I found myself missing my analog record player, which I’d given away years ago, along with all my records.

Time moved

SOOOOO

SLOWLY.

I cooked, cleaned, walked my dog. I did a bunch of chores I’d been putting off (deep-cleaning the rug, washing the sheets, and giving Wolfie a bath). I finished two books (the aforementioned Dopamine Nation, and Kate Beaton’s Ducks) and started a third (Dr. Becky Kennedy’s Good Inside; all my fiction was on my Kindle). I meditated. I fell asleep on the couch in the middle of the day, which is a new thing for me – I do not nap. I wrote in my journal extensively – I think I filled around 10 pages. My mind was completely empty. When I went outside to do my sensory deprivation float, the pink mood lighting in the spa felt unusually stimulating. Candles after sundown were not conducive to staying up late, so I went to bed each night around 9pm and woke up at 8am. I slept like a champ, guys.

Overall, my biggest takeaways from the activity were:

1. Coffee definitely makes me anxious. I wasn’t at all anxious during my fast; it might have been the most tranquil I’ve been in years. When I started having caffeine again the day after the fast, I noticed myself getting anxious after lunchtime and into the evening. It’s very sad, because I’ve been having four shots of espresso a day for years, but I’ve now switched mostly to drinking chai.

2. I spend many hours of the day looking for things to distract me on the internet, which is both the cause of a lot of my anxiety, and the crutch I use to try to alleviate it. I wish I could figure out how to have a phone without getting sucked in.

3. Cold showers are awesome. It’s silly, but I felt so powerful afterward.

4. Every now and then, I need to become really, really, really bored in order to sustain my personal creative practice. My mind is full of other people’s thoughts and priorities, and my inner voice is very quiet. I feel like I poured out some of the gunk that had been sloshing around in my head, and something deeper is more accessible to me, for now.

I’m super glad I tried this, and I might try to make it more of a regular practice! It’s like putting your brain through the washing machine.

Thank you so much for getting this far! Here are some other things I’ve been up to since my last post, eight whole months ago:

• My debut author-illustrator book, TINY TROUBLES: NELLI’S PURPOSE, comes out next April from HarperCollins! I’ll do a proper cover reveal soon, along with a post about the process of writing and creating the book. It’s about a worried succulent named Nelli who is having an existential crisis (are you surprised by this, given the content of this post?). She and her best friend, Worthi, go on an adventure to look for her purpose. My editor tells me it’s very funny, and I hope you all think so too.

• I’m in crunch time for final art for my next picture book, A NAME FOR SISTER, written by Charlotte Cheng! It’s about a baby who is visited by the five elemental Chinese spirits to figure out what her name will be.

• I’ve been weightlifting every week and I’ve almost hit my squat goal that I set on New Year’s Eve! My goal is to squat 145 lbs. for five reps. Last week I did three! My next goal is to do five pull-ups.

• We are still renovating our house, and it’s almost getting to the end!!! Actually, I think I know why I haven’t had much creative juice for personal work this year; it’s because I’ve been making so. many. mockups and mind-palaces for the house project. I am really looking forward to being there and lying down for a very long time.

• Not book related, but Cities:Skylines 2 comes out in October, and I am SO EXCITED. I sadly do not have a PC, and I’m not sure when it’ll come out for Mac. In the meantime, I am planning to devour all of the CityPlannerPlays content. I love his laugh; it makes me happy and reminds me of our old bar trivia host at The Dubliner in Noe Valley, who did his job so professionally and made every Thursday night feel like a professional game show.

I’m not a very organized person, but I’ve maintained a directory named “-personal” in my Google Drive with annual folders dating back to 2013, when I graduated from art skool and moved up to San Francisco to start my job at Google.

(Which begs the question, what about 2012 and earlier? I was definitely creating things – my Tumblr from that era is incredibly robust – but where the files ran off to, I honestly have no idea.)

Each year’s folder contains .psds of sketches, comics, Christmas cards, anxiety journaling, client work, etc., etc. I can digitally thumb through them and be reminded of what the heck I was doing. Snippets below:

But when I get to 2022…

WHAT??? That’s it?! ONE personal commission for a sweet, amazing couple that I cancelled before I even started??! And now I’ve decided to stop taking personal commissions because I couldn’t juggle them anymore with my job, my freelance, and my little life?? (Though you wouldn’t think I had very much going on if you only looked at this folder.)

I mean, I’m still working. I’m working full-time and I’m illustrating four kids’ books, including one that I wrote! FOUR. I keep them in a separate folder (named “-Kids Books” in case you’re curious [I’m not very creative]) because books take way longer than a year to come to fruition. But the smaller stuff – the one-off pieces, the unexpected reactive channeling of inspiration – none of that is in here.

I didn’t do a single thing that could have been recorded in this time capsule. And I thought I would be upset, but it’s been two days since I opened this box and a bunch of dusty flies flew out (figuratively), and I’m really okay with it! Because when I think about 2022, I think about how during all the years that came before, in all those folders, I was making stuff that culminated in a lot of neat things that happened In Real Life this year. Like:

• A comic I drew in two hours in 2021 led to an author finding my work and suggesting me for her next book, which led to me going on a book tour in January/February (worst time to visit the East Coast but I found the bomb cyclone magical), which led to getting on the New York Times’ bestseller list

• A pet project I did in August 2016 led to an editor finding my zines and encouraging me to turn them into a children’s book which is now coming out in April 2024 with HarperCollins! P.S. support the strike

• An application I filled out in November 2018 led to my acceptance into an artists’ residency scheduled for summer 2020 which led to a two-year postponement and me finally sailing around the coast of Svalbard for three weeks in June 2022

  • and honestly, this might be the lede buried beneath all the fuss, because after I came back from living on a ship and getting Covid with everyone and seeing a new glacier every day, I didn’t want to make much art, or share anything online, because I wanted to just sit quietly and watch water drip off ice until my butt froze into the landscape

So all in all, I think of 2022 as a year where I cashed in some of my saved up credits from previous years. You gotta do that, once in a while: trade your tickets for a big stuffed polar bear. And one day, I’ll make stuff just for myself again.

Happy December, friends.

Sophie