I don’t think I should really be surprised by how I’ve been feeling this last week or so – I worked extremely hard over a sustained period of several weeks in order to reach my self-imposed deadline to finish the Survival album and finally be able to move on to working on other projects. (It turns out I do need real deadlines even if I am not going to be 100% rigid about applying them – the release date for Survival was moved back by a week after I’d committed to it. Deadlines are motivating for me and oddly quite liberating – they force you to focus on the immediate priorities.).

After weeks of being full of adrenaline, by the time the album hit the online shelves, I was cream-crackered. Putting all my energies into finishing the music, I’d been neglecting my diet and my sleep routines – if you can call them that – had flipped over to Aussie time.  Again!  A week ago, I looked like a ghost in the mirror, and was having trouble staying awake. Zero motivation to get stuck into the to-do list that I’d been saving for after the album release.

Rather than have a big fight with myself and a major guilt trip about how much I wasn’t getting done, I’ve had to be sensible and accept a certain level of defeat, recognising that I had been burning more energy than was in the bank for a few weeks there and that I needed a bit of time off for my body to recover.  Out with the vitamins! I’ve still done some productive things the last week, but have also slept a lot, letting my body call the shots apart from the couple of days when I had to be somewhere – a hospital appointment with Dad and a carboot sale with a friend. I’ve now got some colour back and am feeling motivated to do some song-writing collaborations with other artists. That wasn’t strictly part of the do-list, and has appeared somewhat out of the blue, but it is a nice treat to work with other musicians after months of being quite isolated. Plus, if it gets me fired up again about making music, I’m in.