Thread by @SandraTayler

As a creative partner whose livelihood depends on Howard producing work, I want to talk about this thread of Howard's and how to support a creative person who has become stuck. First read Howard's thread.

https://twitter.com/howardtayler/status/1376977941364543493

From my perspective, all of Howard's tooling and fiddling looks like Nothing Happening. It looks like Howard being down. It looks like lots of video game hours. This is where communication is important.

Through years of practice Howard and I have developed nuanced communication skills where I can ask him what is going on in his head, share what is in mine, and then we can be frustrated *together* with the lack of progress.

Him and me vs. The Thing is much better than Me frustrated with Him. It saves tension and upset in our marriage, and it prevents relationship tension from adding additional layers of stuck to the creative process.

I have to trust in Howard that he *wants* to create, and that if he is not creating it isn't for lack of desire. It is because something has interfered.

Paradoxically sometimes the thing which is interfering is depression that manifests as a lack of desire to do anything. I have to correctly identify the lack of desire as a symptom of depression rather than a personal failing.

As a support person it is really easy to lose track of which things I'm dealing with are symptoms. It is easy for me to get bogged down in imagining "What if this is just the way things are now?" which means fatigue has created some depression in me too.

When I'm tired, I get unkind and unhelpful thoughts in my head. It is easy to accidentally become the person who says "just get over it" when I KNOW that isn't helpful. I'm just so depleted that I want to push back on any emotional support task.

So a major feature of being an emotional support person is knowing when to step back, step away, leave the person to muddle with their own struggle and do something else for a while.

So while Howard was doing his weeks of staring at blank pages, I would check in every week or two to assuage my anxiety that he was just constantly distracted instead of mulling. Then go back to the work I can control without waiting on him.

And I would rejoice in ANY creative effort that happened. Even things completely unrelated, because any creative flow has a chance to break the large block free.

This sort of creative interrelationship can be complicated, energizing, exhausting, rewarding, and lots of other ings. You have to tend each other and tend yourselves and tend the togetherness of you.

TL;DR: Yay! Howard got unstuck today!

Also, if you have questions about the challenges of living in a household with multiple creative careers and an alphabet soup of mental health diagnoses, feel free to ask.