How I deal with feeling “behind”

If there’s one feeling I know really well as both an artist and a teacher, it’s feeling behind. Behind on projects, deadlines, where I thought I’d be by now…pick a category. I can have a week where I get a ridiculous amount done and still somehow end it staring at everything I didn’t finish.

That feeling has followed me through graduate school, adjuncting, building courses, running a studio practice, doing markets, maintaining shops, trying to make my own work, answering approximately nine million emails, and occasionally attempting to have a life outside of all of that. There is always another thing I could be doing, which makes it very easy to decide whatever I’m doing right now isn’t enough.

For a long time, my solution was basically to cram more into the day. I overcommitted, stayed up too late, and said yes to things because I worried the opportunity might disappear. Comparison made it worse. I’d see somebody making more work, getting more shows, selling more things, or apparently launching seventeen projects before I finished my coffee and immediately start wondering what the hell I was doing wrong.

At some point I had to admit there really isn’t a finish line for that. There will always be somebody doing more, and a lot of the pressure I was feeling had less to do with time than with everything I had decided I should somehow be fitting into it.

That becomes pretty obvious when I look at where my week actually goes. Teaching, grading, course prep, meetings, studio work, writing, podcasting, shop stuff, errands, laundry, dishes, general life maintenance…it all wants a piece. My schedule is never going to look like someone who works in the studio full-time, so expecting the same output makes absolutely no sense. Do I still occasionally do that anyway? Of course I do. Apparently recognizing the dumb thing does not prevent me from doing the dumb thing. Haha.

I’ve gotten better at questioning what I mean when I tell myself I’m behind. Behind on what exactly? Is there an actual deadline involved, or am I comparing reality to some wildly optimistic plan Future Cookie was apparently supposed to execute with unlimited time and energy? Future Cookie gets assigned a LOT of work around here.

Breaking things down helps too because I am very capable of looking at something like “update portfolio” and turning it into one enormous miserable project hovering over my head. “Photograph these three pieces” is much easier to deal with. So is “update this one page.” At least then I can actually finish something instead of feeling guilty about all eighty-seven parts at once.

I see students do the exact same thing with bigger projects. They look at the finished version, panic because they aren’t there yet, and forget about all the boring little steps between here and there. I spend a lot of time telling them to deal with the part actually in front of them, which is advice I apparently need to overhear myself giving regularly.

I’ve also had to get more comfortable with the fact that my output is wildly inconsistent. There are stretches where I make a ton of things and others where I barely touch the studio because teaching has eaten my brain or I’m simply tired. I can also spend an impressive amount of time reorganizing supplies, making lists, buying another notebook, and doing everything vaguely adjacent to making art without producing much actual art. Apparently this is part of my process too, whether I approve of it or not.

Talking to other artists helps because almost everyone I know has some version of the same mess happening behind the scenes. Half-finished work, jobs, family stuff, burnout, money, the shop update that was supposed to happen six months ago, the series sitting in a corner waiting for somebody to remember it exists. We just don’t see that part while scrolling through finished work and announcements.

I think that’s where a lot of my “behind” feeling gets fed. I’m looking at the entire unedited version of my own life while seeing whatever somebody else decided was worth putting online.

So when I start thinking I should be further along, I try to ask the obvious question: further along than what? Some plan I made six months ago? Somebody I follow online? A theoretical version of my life currently living in a Notion page?

These days I care more about whether I’m still interested enough to keep poking at things. As long as I’m still curious and finding my way back to the work, I’m probably doing okay.

I’m still going to feel behind because I know myself and apparently I would like to live four different creative lives simultaneously. I’m just getting better at figuring out when there is actually something I need to catch up on and when I’ve invented a race nobody else knew we were running.