The Big Kid Behaving

Written by Ben Tallon

Just steam in, get the fucking money, and get out. It belongs in a Guy Ritchie film, but this is the kind of self-loathsome self-talk I must carry out to keep myself organised and sane. Since an early age, I’ve struggled to apply myself to anything that doesn’t excite, intrigue, or amuse me. It costs me in the sense that I operate at my desk – painting, drawing, making, ripping, recording – under the shadow of loose ends that will slice my mood like paper edges. Brain? Neuro stuff? Maybe that’s Pandora’s box of its own, but I haven’t yet gone there. Either way, when I do get in there and attack the niggling banality of whichever murderous chore I must commit, I feel exhilaration like no other. This morning I had five emails and one LinkedIn message to reply to, and I needed to stop putting off logging onto my banking. Last week it was sending my accounts for 2023/24 to my accountant. I can’t help but feel this must be rife in the creative industry, given the value of our extremely broad range of brain types when it comes to our currency: imagination, innovation, ideas, and so on. The flip side is that we have a tendency to make monsters out of the mundane.

The exhilaration following the completion of my accounts last week and my admin tasks this morning emanates from the blue skies behind the heavy grey clouds. With a brain like mine, happiest when making and innovating, with all that adult shit cleared, I can wholly immerse myself in the play I need to exist. Today, 4 illustration projects and a biography I’ve written in a short story prose format. Without the weight of the unwanted, I can put the music on, light the room, and disappear into flow states and imaginative wormholes. Had I been the big kid I am too often, today might have degenerated into sullen meandering through social media mazes and irritable subpar creations. It still might. But probably not.