Winter is not dead
There's a part of me that often feels a sense of impatience with my progress in things. With things that I'm learning, trying, working on, it can be easy to get frustrated with why I'm not progressing sooner.
(Of course, the subconscious comparing with peers doesn't help.)
But what if taking the long way could in fact be what I/we need?
I was listening to an interview today with comic writer Deniz Camp and in this one segment he talked about what happened after his first published project::
I disappeared for many years. And I was working on my work and trying to figure out what my voice was going to be. And everyone that I knew that started around the same time as I did became much more successful than me much earlier. And I think that was really, really good for me. I wasn't ready to have any kind of a bigger platform or success. I didn't know what I wanted to write. In my opinion, there's no shortcuts to becoming a comic book writer. Like the years that you take trying to figure out all the different jobs and being able to have opinions about lettering and coloring and art and being able to have strong opinions about what kind of work that you want to do so that that doesn't get subsumed by whatever, by editorial or whatever. That's really important. — on Off Panel
Camp realised the time away from the spotlight was crucial to his development because it taught him to have a clearer sense of himself as a creator. That was a refreshing perspective. Rather than be bitter about how slow his career was taking off, he chose to see the opportunity presented by his time in the wilderness. By seeing it as a time to learn, reflect, and refine, Camp came out of his quiet period a better creator.
Just like winter is not a time of death, but rather a time when things are happening unseen beneath the soil, our professional or creative winters could also be a time of unseen renewal and growth.