This took me my surprise recently. I was alerted to this little corner of the internet and I had no idea it existed. It was February 2020 and the strict Covid 19 lockdowns were less than a month away, not that we knew it at the time.
I was invited by Creative Mornings Glasgow to give a talk on the theme of Invest. I was so delighted to be asked - and enough people turned up to the talk that I didn’t feel embarrassed, so it was pretty much a win.
This talk never made it to the internet at the time and I assumed it was consigned to the cutting room floor
- or worse - that the organisers were polite about it at the time and then just binned it. I’ve known about the existence of this video for months but have only just forced myself to watch all thirty minutes of it.
I would definitely do some things differently now (my slide layout, for instance) but by and large I stand by this talk.
I was way more vulnerable and honest about mental health than I would have given myself credit for seven years ago, but here’s the proof. There is no mention of comics, so that’s definitely something that has cropped up in the past few years
Things I said to invest in (and how I feel about that now):
Practicing (yep, still got to put pen to paper - or whatever)
Your interests (Yes! Let your passions lead you)
Experimenting (Always - I would now call this play!)
Not in social media! (Amen, I am slowly trying to leave instagram)
Health (YES. In post-covid motherhood, certainly)
Local (Look after your community and neighbours, whoever they may be)
Doing things properly (who was it that said, “don’t half arse it, whole arse it”)
Expression (I am now updating this blog for that reason, but also now I have COMICS!)
Love - but not too much (Still working on my reaction to rejection, it’s better than it was!)
Time to not do things (Rest! Have fun! Take breaks! Be silly!)
I stand by ALL of these statements now in my practice. If I were doing the talk over again, maybe I’d say different things, but the general sentiments hold fast.