Dispatches from an in-progress attempt to get unstuck

Hello and welcome to the latest chapter of my midlife crisis, where I’ve done something somewhat impulsive, which is to sign a commercial lease on a (very modest) studio space in Brooklyn.

I have felt creatively stuck for a while, and also just generally disconnected and ungrounded from the immediate physical world around me. So I’m hoping that having a dedicated space to make stuff will encourage me to get myself unstuck. (Also paying a monthly subscription fee a.k.a. rent to another landlord in order to hold myself accountable to fixing my own creative constipation better be enough of a fire to get me moving and stop feeling sorry for myself.)

I think part of the reason why I feel disconnected from the physical, touchable world is that I work in internet but also my main hobby is internet, so I spend a lot of time online. (There are other external forces contributing too, like the general state of the world and the fact that society is crumbling, et cetera. Apparently I’ve been since at least 2022 according to this note I found.) In any case, I’m not trying to litigate the root cause of my blehs too hard right now; I just want to work on fixing what I can control.

What am I trying to unstick, exactly? It’s not that I don’t have creative ideas. I have lots of ideas. My ideas have ideas. They’re just not manifesting themselves into existence. Whenever I have time and space to actually act on a creative idea, I either forget what the brilliant idea was thanks to brain fog, or, if I do remember what it was, it suddenly feels stupid or like I can’t do it and I don’t want to work on it anymore. Or I get distracted by some other thing that seems more urgent and important but in the grand scheme of things probably isn’t. Or I just don’t have the energy. And then before I know it, months have passed and I feel guilty that I haven’t made anything.

I miss the feeling of making or tinkering with or fixing something tangible and getting so into it that I lose track of time and my mom has to tell me to stop and go to bed otherwise I will be tired at school the next morning. That’s the feeling I’m chasing.

This is roughly the sequence of events that led me here:

• I was on my subway commute home on a Friday after a somewhat frustrating day at work. The train was delayed, and on top of it I knew I was just going to go home and eat dinner, maybe go for a walk, and then probably mindlessly scroll to try and distract myself from the day, and I didn’t really feel good about it.
• I somehow started thinking about something that felt kind of original and was also the first idea I’d been excited about in a long time.
  • The loose idea was to have a physical space and also a digital representation of that space (a website like kwon.space) and somehow harmonize them.
  • I didn’t think about it too deeply but shared a half-baked version of the idea on Mastodon (which has lately been my digital third place), just to throw it out into the world.
  • People were super encouraging, enough to make me take the step of casually looking up studio spaces in Brooklyn and domain names in cyberspace, while on the train on the train.
• I bought the domain, kwon.space, that evening¹.
  • I initially wanted kwon.studio but that one is already taken, by an artist named Suki Kwon in Dayton, Ohio. I went down a small rabbit hole exploring her art while browsing domain names.
• Two days later I was touring a physical studio space.
• After seeing a few spaces, I signed the lease on one of them that more or less felt right.
• Three weeks after that initial idea on the subway, I had keys in hand.

So it’s been about a month, and I’ve had 9 or 10 short studio sessions so far, usually less than two hours long. The sessions have been fairly aimless (intentionally) and I’m trying not to be too productive or anything, just have fun with it, so I’ve been working on some small scale maker stuff like building a Raspberry Pi writer deck², woodworking with hand tools, assembling a workbench and other furniture for the space (how [lowercase-m] meta!)

Not to be dramatic, but it’s kind of felt like detoxing from an addiction where the main symptom was draining my ability to focus. The last time I felt that present was when I was in the ambulance after my car accident last summer, wondering if I was bleeding into my abdomen from the blunt force trauma (spoiler: I wasn’t). I was not-so-secretly hoping that it would fix my problem of getting easily distracted and that the focus would persist and that I would magically be able to be fully present and focus forever. Disappointingly (and also thankfully in other ways, but not in this regard), it’s kind of amazing how quickly life went back to “normal” with the usual distractions of the world around me. Also getting into a car accident every time I want to focus on a creative project doesn’t seem like the most sustainable strategy.

I knew I’ve been using my business brain a little too much because one early thought I had about the studio was, oh, I could create and track a metric called “time-to-flow-state”, ttfs, defined as time in mins it takes for me from entering my studio and closing the door to achieving flow state, which would dictate how “successful” I’ve been in any given session. But then I decided I didn’t want that pressure and that wasn’t the mindset I wanted to have.

The very first time I was in my studio space after getting the keys, no furniture, sitting on the hard cold floor under a bright fluorescent light, thinking about my intentions for the space, I felt that I absolutely made the right decision, which was a conviction I haven’t had lately about anything. I was basically sitting in an unglamorous empty white box with a hard gray concrete floor (it really does look like this except a little more industrial) and it felt good to just… imagine possibilities.

There are lots of things to noodle on relation to setting up the physical space and I’m enjoying the process. The biggest project I’ve been working on this month is the studio itself. There has been no shortage of decisions to make and it’s kind of fun and empowering to think about what I want the space to be. For example, there’s no internet in the space (I’d have to get it set up and open a contract with an ISP and everything just like getting residential internet). So I thought, maybe it should be an internet-free zone? I could build a little phone-sized lockbox by the door and lock my phone in it and not retrieve it until leaving the studio. This would mean that the studio space is only for physical or offline projects. Or the other extreme, what if I brought my home internet setup to the studio and used internet ONLY there and not at home? I remember when the internet was a place, the shared family desktop computer in my parents’ room where I would surf for hours, and that was a time when I would get lost. Or maybe I shouldn’t be so extreme — I can connect to the internet if I truly have a blocking question or something that requires the internet to solve, but it can mostly be a physical tinkering space³.

One thing I learned about acquiring creative studio space is that the first thing they ask you is “what do you do?”, as in what are you going to use this space for. That is a perfectly reasonable question to ask, but the first time I was asked I was kind of caught off guard, and “I don’t know but I’m going to use the space to find out” (which was my honest answer) didn’t seem like an answer that would inspire confidence for someone taking on a tenant, so I said something like “uh writing? And maybe some small maker projects like mechanical keyboards or woodworking with hand tools but nothing too loud or dangerous, unless that’s what people like to do here in which case I can roll with it 😅” and the guy was like “…ok so you’re a writer” and then showed me some studios.

The reality is that I have way too many things that I like to do and want to try, but it doesn’t seem like the best idea to do writing, woodworking, bike stuff, soldering, etc, in the same small space (dust, grease, and electronics seem like a bad combination), so I know I’ll need to scope it down. I really just want to be as worry-free as possible about creativity killers like making a mess and breaking things. I had seen another place, in a trendier neighborhood further from where I live, with hardwood floors and clearly new-ish drywall put up, which was more reasonably priced and a slightly larger space, but it felt too clean, almost corporate, and I realized I would be afraid to mess it up, which was the opposite of my intention for the space, so I ended up going with the grittier, sturdier warehouse-vibe space with concrete floors and brick walls.

So that’s where I’m at. The general vibe I’ve landed on so far is that my space is basically my suburban garage, where I can hang out for a couple of hours in the evening after work or on weekend days and just tinker and be loud and make mistakes. The version of me that’s the frustrated grown-up on the subway me is trying to do right by the kid who didn’t want to go to bed because she was having too much fun playing. Let’s see where it goes! (I did put something up at kwon.space as a placeholder, and while I’m focusing on the physical space for now, it’ll be fun to think about what to do with the digital space when the time comes.)

• Midlife
• Focus