I just wanted to draw my favorite snake.

I classify snakes in the same group as birds, scorpions, and spiders: organisms that have beaks, pinchers, or unpredictable attack patterns that leave me constantly anxious of their possible attack. What makes snakes even more terrifying is how calm they always appear to be. They’re just resting there, all coiled up in a heap, like a docile gardening hose. Except they may or may not be poisonous. And they may or may not bite you if you get too close. It’s the kind of non-fun gambling even Las Vegas would not allow.

Kaa’s last appearance, in Disney’s 2016 CGI-soaked remake, held none of the hypnotic power of the 1967 version. In a misguided attempt at hyperreality, Jon Favreau and his team put Kaa in muddy green shadows, making any distinctive features possible to locate. To me, it’s a very similar comparison in looking at the original 1986 Transformers animated film, with its simple, understandable silhouettes and shapes and any of five(??) CGI-laden Transformers movies, in which Michael Bay often bragged about the 20,000-some moving parts the ILM animators kept track of, never recognizing how his quick shooting style made it impossible to appreciate or even understand any of all that detail. You still hear people talk about the traumatic death of Optimus Prime in the original animated film. I have not heard of one recent Transformers memorialized in anything but a GIF.

Perhaps that should be the lesson: if you want to make an impact, keep it simple. Give people distinguishing figures they can empathize with and be drawn into. Before the emotion of it all unexpectedly attacks them.

As a young Deaf person often operating in hearing spaces, I often looked for something that might make me look just cool enough to be on equal footing with my abled peers. I fully recognize the internalized ableism in that mindset, but at the time it felt like the only logical way to look at the world. So what did I do? I grew a soul patch. Not only did I grow one, but I kept it in its place below my lips and above my chin an embarrassing amount of time. I never said it out loud, but you bet I internalized conversations where people asked me about it and I would, with a slight drag and puff of a conveniently-available cigarette, say, “Because I got soul”. Let’s just say there have been many people in history – both real (Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti) and fictional (Dean McCoppin from The Iron Giant) – who have pulled it off wondrously, and that list does not include me. And I’m okay with that. We’ve all made mistakes.

But I did another thing I hoped would bring me up a level to my hearing peers: I took great delight in puns. Rare was the passing moment I did not have a pun to throw out. Where most people kept their brain wheels spinning for important shit, I kept them burning smoke in an ongoing search for the next great pun. I felt like a slot machine, every understood comment from a hearing person a yank at the wheel, with all the possible words of the dictionary furiously running in a large, never-ending circle. And each time, I’d keep waiting for the punch line that would never quite come, the “Wow, for a Deaf guy, you’ve got some unheard-of puns.” I even remember developing a script idea involving a kid who came up with the most elaborate, yet dead-on puns, the kind that dialed up the level of difficulty beyond what anyone imagined possible. But it became a house of cards collapsing under the weight of exhaustion. It’s not as cool when people can see you sweating.

And so here, in this third paragraph, is where it all comes together: the soul patch. The questionable facial hair choice meets the exhausting wordplay, a chance to rewrite the narrative of the past into something far simpler. There, you will find the patches of things that have rescued my soul in peaks and valleys, rainouts and droughts. They made walking feel not only possible, but comfortable. They made me always feel like I was on even ground.

Sometimes what keeps you crispy also burns you out. I think about this a lot whenever I’m going through yet another newsletter or chasing another YouTube video for insights, when I’m looking for something that will help me finally get something together – be it my creative process or my ideas or sense of disorganization – and spend far more energy entertaining possible solutions than just doing something. Or, you know, resting.

For a while, I couldn’t escape the Instagram pushes for ultraproductivity. The calls for starting your day at 4am. The hand-slapping for not having the financial house in order. The workouts with all kinds of resistance band variations. It felt like I was constantly behind the ball while the person telling me what to do – often at a desk and with headphones – had all the answers. After a while, I started to realize these up-and-coming productivity experts were disciples, which begat more disciples, which beget an entire, trickle-down industry of diminishing returns. Every Starbucks I went into had one of these people. They were always on the phone. They were advising people to quit their jobs and purse their passion. And you just knew that person was going to, in fact, quit their job, buy a set of Air Pods, and set up shop in another Starbucks location. It would only be a matter of time before the head ate the tail.

Once I saw the vicious cycle of it all, I found it easier to let go. I stopped checking the emails. I went inward, reminding myself of all I had accomplished instead of all I had yet to accomplish. I recognized rest needed to truly be rest, and that playing video games or watching a movie or zoning out on Twitter did not mean I was wasting time. I was, instead, giving my body exactly what it needed.

The other thing about avoiding burnout is you gotta unplug. There is a very real thing called vampire energy. If your appliances and electronics aren’t plugged turned on or charging, they can still be drawing energy as long as they’re plugged into a wall outlet. Sometimes we think we’ve actually unplugged – we’ve put our phone on a counter face down, we’ve turned off the TV – but it’s still plugged into the system that wears you out, and it still finds a way to utterly exhaust you. It’s like a subscription service offering a free trial – they just want you to plug in your credit card, hoping you’ll forget to cancel as they bill you a little bit of money each month. The goal is for it to seem a small enough cost you don’t do the work to cancel. But it still adds up over time.

I still feel the pangs of not doing enough. I still wonder if I’m letting things pass me by. But it isn’t met with a deep dive into the tail-eating world of hyperproductivity. Instead, I look for ways to simplify my life further. To say ‘No’. To declutter. To eliminate down to the essence.

The real sparks come when you ride the wave of creativity. When you know there will be moments where you’re stuck and unsure where to go next and need to go into a more idle mode, busying yourself with random tasks such as taking a shower, going for a walk, or driving around the neighborhood. When you know the inkling of an idea comes to you at a very inconvenient time – usually while you’re sleeping or you got a child restless in your arms – and you gotta figure out where you’ll put it; in a Note on your phone, in the margins of a newsletter, on a soon-to-be-ripped napkin. When you know there’s a time to buckle down and commit to the keyboard, the paper, the whatever it is that allows your brain to meet execution. And then you ride the wave some more. Over and over again.

I spent so much of my life blocking off time for writing. “I’ll write all morning,” I’d say. “I’ll write until I got 20 pages down,” I’d challenge. I did all of these things, over and over again, with very little to show for it. Instead, I’d take detours into my email, checking off all these newsletters I was behind on. I’d get sucked into the internet browser and down another rabbit hole. I would do everything but the thing I set out to do. Which only compounded the frustration.

It wasn’t until I understood my brain was a lightbulb, sometimes dormant, sometimes aspark, riding a wave I had no weather report for. There was no way to predict when things would show up. There was only accepting it would be a ride worth being patient for.

Can you connect four emotions?

So much of the writing process can feel technical. Certain things need to happen by certain pages or certain points in the story. But when you go too far in the direction, you lose what makes it last: the emotion of it all. I become a far better, more engaging writer when I track the emotions of my stories. When I really think about what each character is feeling from scene to scene. It makes it more accessible for an actor to later to do something with it. It makes it easier for a reader to fall into the story and get comfortable. It makes the world go round.