You can’t change it if you don’t name it was how we kicked off FM’s overall narrative back in Jan, and I’m patting myself on the back as I think about how this has remained a through line for the last 6 months. Something that doesn’t happen often enough is naming the middle, the in-between of a creative practice, which is often too boring or ignored since it’s not the start nor the finished piece, and brings back creative cognitive security. It’s about learning to protect your own attention to stay in the middle and actually hear yourself through the noise as a crucial part of a visual practitioner’s toolbox in our accelerated ways of seeing.
What’s ironic about navigating writing a newsletter that centers on theory, trends, and practice is trying to balance actively talking about it, doing the thing, and documenting it in a way that doesn’t diminish my credibility. Six months ago, one of the predictions for 2026 was the Advice Complex Collapse/fatigue, the shift to more process, talking about mistakes, but even now, our mistakes are curated and edited.
June’s theme of maintenance felt dizzying for me, but it’s a bigger framework that’s coming up because it’s working towards a part of FM’s mission: building creative cognitive security. This was about re-establishing the long-term part of a process while living in a deeply hybrid social-engineered world. While the weekly roundups look random (bootleg culture, AI moving, the Knicks, a laundry list of pop culture), it’s actually a map, an attempt to break down a framework of what I’m seeing and why I’m responding to it and hopefully influence you to think a second longer as to why you’re also seeing or being gravitated to the things you do too. I often think - what is my originla reaction? Is it mine or did someone tell me and I’m actually enjoying the conversation? How much does that ground me vs distract me and how does this feed into my mind and my body. Like food, it’s like opening the fridge and wondering will this actually make me feel good and fuel me, or be a quick fix.
But this month, we watched some of the last six months’ predictions actually manifest, some faster than others. Apple raised its prices yesterday on Macs and iPads by up to $300, after we flagged in March that memory and storage were going to skyrocket. Bootlegs took over national and global sports. And Tech start ups attempting to build AI certifications to ensure work is certified as not AI-made.
FM’s field notes showed me how, even seeing trends six to twelve months out, I can still be impatient because of my own breeches of COGSEC- espeically in moments when i’m feeling unsure or uninspired, how quick it is to fall into a track (I turned off my IG timer 3x this month), despite knowing that the very thing that claims to brings inspiration impacts my own ability to process and troubleshoot. I learned in June how you can be bad at the exact thing you’re good at observing. For me, that’s balancing the act of giving advice rather than saying what I would do.
A few days ago, Feed Me’s No Day's Off looked at how 21 newsletter writers approach taking time off (paywalled, but the sneak peek says it all). TLDR: When you run on a cadence of bi-weekly or daily to deliver with consistency, it’s hard to log off and often times it’s attempt is to share a reason for a break rather than push through— it’s not easy to name what it means to be at the point of rebuilding your creative cognitive security. This is the experiment I tried this month, and from first hand, working through it and writing through this highest level of discomfort (I took one day off!) it’s hard to be aware of your own needs, experiment in the practice, and build in that. Like Sundberg’s truth that newsletter writers are usually one person versus a team, it’s the same for a creative attempting to do it all at once.
This month, I found more love in community when I accepted that I wasn’t searching, I was really watching, and I had a hard time articulating it. I saw the collective joy of artists taking the opportunity to sell and give back as a kind of sportsmanship and it made the city alive in a way that normalized buying hyperlocal, having one-of-a-kind pieces for a historical win rather than buying the latest drop. In this, it reminded me about the beauty of art, where doing it under community, when people are collectively together rooting for their team or country, can bring enthusiasm to the individual craft because it shows safety through collective enough to embrace uniqueness. In that, I saw how pivoting doesn’t mean losing credibility as long as you stay consistent with what drives you. This is the early-middle.
When I named maintenance at the start of the month, I didn’t anticipate how much fear crept into something I assumed was like being on cruise control; fear of losing opportunity if I slowed down. Fear of what I’d have to feel if I weren’t distracted. The hard part was that the quiet made me realize how much I needed to balance my own upkeep and navigate insecurities. I hope you’ve found some type of rest, joy, or rebalancing this June, and a way to find true rest to spark creativity.
Practicing discipline long enough to shut the noise and hear yourself, rather than narrating around it. Are you responding without thinking, how much is feeling driving the inspiration vs you’re own valued thoughts?
As a creative, this can be that strange part of the process where questioning/doubting creeps in. What can or should take up your time, money, and choices. This is because we often race towards the result instead of leaning into what feels like a never-ending middle. Your vision could feel like it’s already alive, and yet a feeling is festering in the back of your head with all the steps with it. I say playing with personal pivots and avoiding looking at the bigger picture (a huge part of the process). It came up about breaking apart the larger picture with photographer Dazmon Yates’ Work In Progress, as we picture fully the final result, instead of taking a moment to pivot when you’re in the midst of work. I don’t know a single creative whose work results in exactly how they anticipate from the beginning, even in a coloring book. The hardest part is awareness, and knowing isn’t the same as taking small bites to tinker.
If you’ve been thinking about something in your practice that’s been blocking you, maybe it’s time to recalibrate, ask for help, or put it down. Your mind may be a few steps ahead in saying that it needs time, a new experience, to sit in the discomfort of moving too fast. It can also mean having the tough conversation with yourself, looking at whether you’re competing with yourself, asking: if I were my own teammate, would I want to stay complacent, or would I try a new strategy, reset, regroup?
Maintenance showed me I need to take stock inward. What that means is sharing the process of rest through the eyes of creativity. We’ll take breaks, but I’ll show you what breaks mean, what comes up in between.
The creative COGSEC work is the ability to understand where you’re protecting your mind in the digital space to allow for more currency of your own attention. It’s the knowing and the doing. This is why it can’t be a tidy how-to, and why sometimes I’m bad at selling it, but it’s a practice precisely because it’s an innate skill we need to relearn.
If you don’t know where to begin, start here with Fresh Mercado.
— Nicole
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