I’m finally resuming Shelf Abuse, with one of those tiresome new year posts that apologizes as much as it promises, on resolutions, balancing kindness with productivity, creating while living through interesting times, and finding the joy in the process rather than the project.

Where did it all go so wrong?

Where did I lose control of the things that made me, well, me?

I asked myself variations on this rather egotistical question throughout 2024, which all in all was one of the most miserable years of my life. A year beset by health issues, financial woes and an all-too lucid awareness that, as I reached the ripe old age of forty-four, that my aspirations had slowly been compromised. I’d not consciously decided to give up on my dreams or postpone my craft, of course. It has been, as with much of middle-age, a slow and insidious battle of attrition, one in which time is increasingly restricted, good intentions are worth less with each passing year, and my younger self’s flippant attitude towards money and exercise are far beyond a simple course correction.

As December 2024 succumbed to January 2025, I routinely felt my heart race as I struggled to conceive some magical new year’s resolution that will make the last few years feel more meaningful than stagnant. There’s rarely a realistic middle ground to be had with resolutions; devoting my life to work, exercise and clean eating has proven impractical, but half-arsed measures to limit my less productive hobbies or food intake are also too immeasurable to maintain.

Despite my occasional participation, I’ve always considered new year’s resolutions a rather self-destructive notion. I’m wary of sounding like a crazed conspiracy theorist who refuses to acknowledge the concept of time, but a year is merely a construct, at least in terms of when Earth’s orbit of the sun returns to its starting point. There’s no rational reason why we should punish ourselves at any point in the year for failing to exceed those silent promises we make to ourselves in the name of being a better or happier person, let alone at the end of a thingamajig our ancestors named December.

To summarise it in one mercifully brief paragraph, I’ve also not had the best of health.  After several years of progressively intense migraines that have caused me to sporadically lose my eyesight and experience balance issues, I finally consulted a doctor only to discover that my blood pressure is “high” – so insanely and alarmingly high that I’m at immediate risk of a heart attack or stroke. This came as something of a shock; I’m not thin but I’m physically active, I don’t drink heavily or smoke, and I eat a varied and largely natural diet. Months of blood tests and repeat battles with an indisposed NHS have made it clear that my struggles are probably stress related…

I’ve done this to myself.

Rewind back to 2019 and life was far simpler. I owned a small but cheap flat, worked part-time and devoted my spare hours to this blog, writing fiction and the (very) occasional fun freelance gig or local event. I enjoyed ample time to pursue my ambitions, and while I was not quite where I wanted to be in life I enjoyed regular small successes that energised me whenever I veered towards self-doubt.

During covid, my peaceful (and, I now realise, extremely privileged) situation was flipped on its head. The house my wife and I saved for nearly a decade to get a mortgage on has turned out to be both a money pit and a time sink unlike anything I’d previously encountered in life. My once enjoyable career has become repetitive, unsatisfying and slowly outsourced to AI, and I now work a day extra a week to earn the equivalent of what I did five years prior. I’ve watched too many pets die horribly to adopt any more, and my mother has enjoyed frequent trips to hospital for tests and treatments related to skin cancer and other illnesses, her ailing health a ticking time bomb that looms over any long-term plans. My thirties felt promising, but my forties feel helpless, my time, health and mental state attacked from multiple angles.

For those lucky enough to live elsewhere, post-Brexit Britain has entered a state of rapid decline. Food has doubled in price, energy bills have tripled, wages have stagnated, increasingly far-right governments have cancelled funding to most public art initiatives… it’s all feeling a little futile. Like many western millennials not born into wealth or the promise of inheritance, I can no longer imagine being able to retire, let alone take a break or train towards a career change.

All a bit grim, then, and I write this safe in the knowledge that I’m faring better than most. I have an amazing wife and four wonderful rescue dogs to keep me company, and I managed to secure a home before it became impossible for all but the most privileged of future generations.

Another shift in attitude I’ve had to make from the 2010s to the 2020s is how much time I spend helping others. Over the past decade I’ve taught at a community college for peanuts, ran art classes for children, involved myself in local creative projects, and of course promoted the indie comics and art that I enjoyed here on Shelf Abuse. I’ve come to accept that I no longer have the time for my own art that I once had… and when I did have that time, I too often spent it on others. I could have written several novels with the hours I spent trying to network or endlessly sorting through the dozens of review submissions Shelve Abuse received every week.

I’ve just reread my most recent blog entry, written way back in the September of 2021. I distinctly remember writing and posting it, because about an hour after doing so a tap tail under our bathroom sink exploded and flooded our home. This sort of situation that has come to be expected. Anyway, the blog post: yet another series of excuses and broken promises. Still, none of those plans have changed. Yes, Shelf Abuse will continue in some form, yes it will feature comics, no I’m not receiving indie comics anymore. Yes, I still have some books in development that I’ll be publishing via this site instead of my old Bothersome Books label. No, I no longer review indie comics. Yes, I will finish that second novel, and I absolutely should not have started a third novel before doing so. Yes, there will be a comic project released on here eventually. Yes, I’m still sporadically working on a zine. Nope, sadly I can’t make an exception for your indie comic.

That’s a lot of balls to juggle at once, then, and ruining my body and mind with stress has forced me change how I think about my creative work. Before the pandemic, I was forever chasing imaginary deadlines set by whatever self-publishing project I was working on. It’s a tempting commitment to make, to add urgency to your life as a form of motivation. But when the day job, home renovations, marriage and animal rescues failed to fall in line with my plans, I was too often left with a sense of failure and guilt, a self-inflicted punishment too readily encouraged by online virtue signallers, hustle culture bros and influencers who want you to believe that, despite the mansion and trust fund, we’re all playing on an even field.

Fortunately, and I say this with the utmost of sincerity, both the world and the industries I’ve worked in are so fucked that it doesn’t really matter what I plan to produce. No sane person would pursue a life in art or publishing, the United Kingdom is falling apart before my eyes, and AI is devaluing my abilities at an exponential rate.

Against all this, I’m beginning to accept the rapid degradation of my personal sphere. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Franz Kafka’s short story A Little Fable, which is so concise that I can include it here:

“Alas”, said the mouse, “the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I am running into.”

“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.

Kafka’s twisted parable used to haunt me. I was a smart lad who grew up poor with what could best be described as insufficient guidance, losing my twenties to a plethora of bad decisions and poor mental health, only discovering how adult concepts such as self-employment, taxes and mortgages worked in my early thirties. Like many working-class people who manage to clamber a few rungs up the ladder, there’s forever a gnawing sense that you’re several steps behind everyone else.

As bleak as Kafka’s two perfectly formed paragraphs may be, however, there’s a certain clarity to be had from realising that one’s life is largely beyond their control. I think of my uncle, who was three years younger than I am now when doctors gave him two years to live.

Consequently, I’ve recently found myself cycling through multiple ongoing projects with no sense of finality. I guess you could call this new list of projects a bucket list, as it is comprised of every goal I’d like to eventually fulfil in no apparent order – finish a second novel and an anthology, finish a graphic novel, get a painting in a gallery, get a zine on a store shelf… and so on. I have a loose rotation system in place, moving from one project to the next when a certain piece or draft is complete.

I still have every intention to finish most of the works I start, but the finished project is no longer the end goal; rather it is the continual development of my voice and my skills that encourages me to sit at this desk for an hour each evening. I might not be alive in ten- or twenty-years’ time, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t devote my spare hours to long-term dreams. Something about journeys and destinations and all that. A more pragmatic outlook, one in which we all take joy from the process rather than the product, may be the most positive thing we can take away from AI and an increasingly bleak future.

Now that’s out of my system, I will be returning to blogging on an irregular basis, with a monthly or bimonthly or quarterly (again, no more deadlines) piece on creativity, media and storytelling. Future entries will hopefully be less self-indulgent.