Samuel Leighton-Dore

Interview by Madeleine Dore

Samuel Leighton-Dore: satirical cartoonist, painter, ceramic artist, filmmaker, and writer

Full transcript

“Even if you’ve got an Oscar on your desk, you still sit down with your own thoughts and the most important help and the most important indicator of success is your relationship with your thoughts and your relationship with the people you love. Shifting the importance onto that has been so, so important and, since I’ve started trying to do that, I’m on a happiness up-tick.”
– Samuel Leighton-Dore

Madeleine Dore: We’re in unprecedented, uncharted times, and there’s a lot of questions that many of us are asking, a lot of confusion, a lot of anxiety, and I’m not sure if you feel the same, but there’s also this pressure, in some ways, to write the next great novel during the pandemic, or do your best work yet, be the fittest that you’ve ever been, the most productive, maximise your output, make sure that you have the best working from home routine.

For me, I don’t think that the pressure is helpful. While I’m a personal project devotee and much of my work and writing is about helping people make time for creativity, I don’t think this time we have right now needs to be optimised for productivity. I don’t think that we do need to seize it.

I think we just need to do what helps us cope and experiment with that because it will change day by day. For you, of course, that could be creating. But it could also be just breathing and feeling.

Our days as we know them have been shaken, and there’s a quote going around at the moment from Glennon Melton’s book Carry on Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed, and it reads, “You have been offered the gift of crisis. As Kathleen Norris reminds us, the Greek word of the root is to sift, as in to shake out the excesses and leave only what’s important. That’s what crises do. They shake things up until we are forced to hold onto only what matters most. The rest falls away.”

What’s left, as this weeks’ guest points out, can actually be joy in the slowness. Gold Coast-based artist, Samuel Leighton-Dore, is a satirical cartoonist, a painter, a ceramic artist, a filmmaker, a regular contributor to SPS Sexuality, and author of the graphic novel How to Be a Big Strong Man. Samuel has this rare ability to be both light-hearted and joyful, and deep and reflective, proving that laughter can be a balm for uncertain times. 

In this delightful conversation, Samuel shares his three-tiered approach to working and balancing various projects, the little things that you can do to feel more disciplined or just have a sense of control. He also talks about toxic masculinity, the connection between ambition and depression, and untangling your identity from this idea of creative success.

We do also touch on some sensitive topics about mental health, so please keep that in mind and talk to someone if you need to.

If any time has shown us just how quickly things can change, it’s been now, this week. So here’s Samuel Leighton-Dore on how he is today.

Samuel Leighton-Dore: I’m good. I mean, I’m good in a post-COVID kind of way. I’ve started thinking of days BC and AC, Before COVID and After COVID, which helps me grapple with the enormity of everything. So for an AC day, I am fine. I’m good.

MD: So BC, I love this frame, I think it’s brilliant and exactly what’s so wonderful about your work, BC, how important was routine to you and what was your relationship to routine?

SLD: Routines always kind of been essential to my productivity. For today, for instance, I just finished my writing work for the day, which always feels like a bit of an exhale, and I tend to go about my routine in a three-tiered approach, I think. So I’ve got my foundation, which is my writing work for SBS, then once I’m finished my articles, normally around 4pm, I do a round of emails and start focusing on my longer-term projects. 

At the moment, I’m working on developing an animated series and applying for funding grants, as well as organising and curating an online-only art exhibition for artists in self-isolation. And then, I guess in my spare time, I work on my passion projects. The third tier is the passion project, which is glazing ceramics, loading the kiln, drawing things for my mum.

MD: Aww, I love that. When did you first come up with this three-tier approach? Is this something that you had to develop after freelancing for a while, or is it always been something that you’ve had innately with your work?

SLD: I think to some degree it’s always been there. Straight out of high school, I bartended for five years, so that was always the first tier. That was what I had to do to pay the bills. And the second tier was the articles I was writing. And the third tier was the dreams I dared to think about and plan for.

As the years have progressed, instead of having this really neat kind of trajectory into success, which is how I imagined it as a teenager, it’s kind of just been shifting tiers. Now my first tier is something I actually really enjoy doing. The first tier is writing. And the second tier is projects I really care about, and third-tier is experimenting and having fun.

But hopefully one day my foundation or tier will be having fun and experimenting. That would be the goal, but breaking it into those three levels helps me stay smart financially and ensure that I have money coming in, as well as giving me the space to push the envelope a bit and try and progress my career.

MD: This is such a wonderful way to think of it. I almost immediately feel relaxed transposing my work onto different tiers, because it makes me feel like, oh, it’s okay if that tiers a little bit light on at the moment. It can still exist, but I might not have capacity or time or finances for it, and you can shift them around. There are no hard and fast rules with tiers.

SLD: Totally. I mean, the animated series I’m developing at the moment, I’ve been working on it for seven years in some capacity. It used to be a top tier pipe hole dream project and now, after years and years, it’s graduated into a second-tier project, where there’s actually some kind of feasibility with it and there’s some doors opening and things to pursue.

And then, hopefully, post-COVID, it’ll become a base level thing where it’s my bread and butter. But, having things exist on these different levels helps me deal with failure and setback a lot healthier. When a second-tier project falls over or something, I will let myself go into the top tier and work on something I really love.

It makes me shake it up and it never feels like there’s nothing. Nothing on the horizon. There’s always something.

MD: I’ve just been reminded that a friend has this same approach, but to friendship. So she’s got her tier one friends, and tier two friends, and tier three friends, which always makes me think, which tier am I?

But it’s also such a lovely way to prioritise, I think.

SLD: Yeah, I mean, just as you have your inner circle of friends or your inner circle of trusted people, I think you have the inner circle of things you enjoy doing with your time, and prioritising those can be a way to stay happy.

MD: Yes, I’ve spent the last few days trying to think about those tiny joy moments, because I think it’s all being stripped away where we do have to evaluate that. Like if our days are being completely upended, what does a day look like? And obviously there’s so much privilege as someone who already freelances and already works from home, or can.

SLD: I think I’m here to tell you that working from home can be fun. It can be isolating and, at the moment, that is precisely the point, but it can also be fun and rewarding and full of connection, I think. Just as I wrote on one of my smile tiles this morning, isolation and connection don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

MD: Tell us what you enjoy about working from home then? I think people will really need that right now.

SLD: I mean, I like to start my workday in a similar way to people in more traditional workspaces, I guess. So I have email threads and group chat conversations going with friends pretty much constantly throughout the day. Some might say that’s distracting, but I say it’s important to maintain that shared human experience. And also, it’s no more distracting than catching up with a colleague in an open plan office, really.

MD: Oh, exactly. Yeah.

SLD: So I guess you want to avoid the sense of finishing your workday and having not said a word aloud for the entire day, and not having anyone to bounce thoughts and anxieties off of. But I also do little things every day, which make me feel a bit more disciplined, like BC, Before COVID, I would go to the gym at 7am every day, or go for a walk to get coffee at 11am, or I’ll watch a 20-minute video on YouTube while I eat lunch. Little kind of dangling carrots that guide me throughout the day really help because you’re not looking towards 5pm, you’re looking towards your 11am coffee. So little treats. You’ve got to treat yourself.

MD: Yeah, I like how you spaced out those treats. Are you finding ways to substitute those now?

SLD: [Inaudible 11:12] COVID. It’s a process. I suspect it’s going to be a process for everyone for a while, but I’m connecting with other people in similar positions, letting myself graze the projects that are no longer in my near future. But also trying to let this be a moment of connection in that I’m planning this online exhibition, which I’m doing with a bunch of artists, which will essentially be a real-time drop of new original works on Instagram for people to come and look at and buy and talk about.

So things like that are helping me in a mental health way. But I mean, at 11am, I’ll still have a play with my cat. You can let yourself do things.

MD: Well, what I’m seeing a lot of as well is that flip side of taking the time to do nothing, and I think seeing things like, I know it came out a little while ago, your smile tile, which is such a wonderful project and I’d love you tell us more about, but the one that says ‘Rest, you beautiful idiot’. I think that now some of us have more time available, but I’m trying to remind myself or to resist this idea of having to fill it with something and remember that I can rest. So how are you navigating that?

SLD: There’s definitely a sense of everyone feeling like they have to write their great novel right now, which feels a bit inconsiderate. I started doing the smile tiles because I realised I needed to have a creative hobby that wasn’t monetised, so my idea was that I’d create these really simple tiles, 15 centimetres by 15 centimetres, and carve a different smile-inducing method onto each one and just share them on Instagram and not sell them.

And it’s been this really cathartic thing where it has just become almost like a meditation that I do here and there, when I have the time, which I now do. And also just seeing how they resonate with people is really special. But I do think it’s important to not see this as an opportunity to be extra busy and extra proactive for those who have capacity to start. It should be an opportunity to stop as well, and understand the huge privilege in that, in that a lot of people are currently in a position where they have to hustle for more work because they don’t have the work they had.

But I am trying to stop and meditate and let myself inhabit my own little world beyond the giant world that is currently on fire. Because I think, when we shrink our worlds down to our immediate environment, into the things we have control over, like changing the cats’ litter box, giving my husband a massage, listening to a podcast, meditating, writing my dad a letter. You know, there are things that I can do that are based in my human experience and are important because it’s reconnecting with the one thing that will always be there for as long as I am, which is my head.

MD: Yes, that’s so well put, I love that. For a long time, I fell into this trap that I had to find this extraordinary routine that I would apply and follow perfectly, but actually very rarely do people have routines. They have little tiny clusters of habits, like you just mentioned, those small things, and that’s all we can have control over. We can’t have control over the perfect day. We can just introduce those tiny little things.

SLD: And it’s a constant lesson. I’ve always said that it often feels like having a career in the arts is like building a sandcastle with dry sand, and if you step away it’ll crumble. But I think it’s more like putting down bricks that take a lot of effort to lay, but once you’ve put it down, it’ll always be there. And you’re allowed to take a step back and look at it and go oh, that’s a pretty small looking wall, but each of those bricks is a huge amount of effort and represents this huge part of who you are and it tells your story.

And I think, as creatives, there is no fast track to success, so finding joy in the slowness of it is key because worst-case scenario is slowing down for a lot of us.

MD: But it’s interesting you mention success there, because I know that you once said that, if you were to give a TED Talk, which you definitely should, you’d want it to be on that intersection between depression and ambition.

SLD: I was diagnosed with depression when I was in primary school, quite young, like six or seven. So it’s kind of always been this thing that permeates everything I do and there came a point when I was 16 when I overdosed and it was this really fork in the road moment where I realised that the way I was living my life wasn’t sustainable and wasn’t conducive to the kind of success I wanted in my life, in terms of having a family, in terms of having a career I enjoy. 

And I remember it as clear as day. It was a very clear moment where I had to make a decision to make good work, despite of the way I feel. And soon after that, it felt like I was making work to prove my depression wrong. Did that make some angry work? It sure did, Madeleine, but it eventually helped me to channel my sadness and my anxieties into my work, and make work that encourages vulnerability, and I think that’s become the cornerstone to everything I do, it’s vulnerability. 

But I can’t help but look back at that moment of incredible depression, and look at how it motivated me too, and made me quite ambitious as a creative person. But having said that, when I fail, and I fail a lot, I don’t often post about it, but it happens a lot, and when it does happen, the first instinct is to fall back into that despair.

By letting my depression motivate me, it feels like I’m always setting myself up for a fall back into it, which becomes this… it just swings back and forth, it’s a pendulum.

MD: Is it also like the higher you climb, the further you have to fall sort of thing?

SLD: Totally, but it’s more like that video of the kid who is holding onto a rope in the water and he thinks he’s drowning, and then his mum comes and stands him up and it’s like ten centimetres high. So it’s kind of all in my head, but it does feel like you’re setting yourself up for a big fall, the further you move along this imagined idea of success, of this success trajectory. You feel like you’ve got more to be taken away from you, and it gets scary. But I think that is an illusion. I try to remind myself of that.

MD: I’d love to hear how you remind yourself of that in a moment, but you also mentioned that you fail a lot.

SLD: Oh, I fail so much, Madeleine.

MD: As you say, you might not post about it, so in my eyes, what could that be? But I’m also curious, what would you even consider a failure? Because that’s such a subjective thing.

SLD: To be honest, if somebody signs off an email in a really abrupt way, I think I have failed. So that’s my baseline as a person and I’m naturally very apologetic and have ongoing challenges around self-worth. It doesn’t take much for me to feel like I’ve failed, and that’s something I’m still working through with my psychologist. Pending. The answer for that is pending.

MD: A thread I was going to pick up is how do you celebrate your success?

SLD: I think just as my failures can range from a clunky social interaction through to losing a $20,000 grant, that is the spectrum of failure I deal with, I guess, but the successes are similarly varied, but it feels less natural to hone in on them. A small failure is something I might hold a magnifying glass to and look at for a week, whereas a small success I’m inclined to move past without acknowledging it.

So I’m always working to take more time to celebrate my wins, like my book coming out last year. I feel like that happened and I was in the moment, and then it was over, and I feel like I never really celebrated it with myself. I feel like I never sat in that moment and enjoyed it. It was all moving here, moving there, promoting it. It became a business thing, as opposed to this labour of love that I worked so hard on for a year.

MD: On that note, why don’t we celebrate that now? Your book was How to Be a Big Strong Man and it came out last year. So if you could go back to yourself, what would you say?

SLD: I had wanted to release a book since I stapled my book together when I was five. The book was called Mermaid. Just Mermaid. And it was done in crayon on recycled paper. So I would go back and remind myself of how long that was something I had wanted and aimed for.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, because when you have something like a carrot, or something that you’ve chased and you see as being this epitome of success, when you reach it, there is that moment of what now?

For me, I guess it’s just looking back and really letting myself soak up the achievement of it and having people send me messages on social media still today about how much they like it, it’s also rewarding and special. But it does pass you by real quick.

MD: It reminds me, have you seen Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech Make Good Art?

SLD: I have. It is what I used to watch when I was on drugs in my early 20s, doing silly things with other creatives. Someone always whips it out, then you just sit down, you listen to it, and you just go, wow. Whoa. So true. And then you email it to your auntie and she’s like, what are you doing?

MD: Well, I think we can’t be reminded enough of the advice of enjoy the ride.

SLD: Enjoy the process, enjoy the ride, and that is what I try and come back to throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the month, throughout the project, whatever it is. I try to be informed, first and foremost, by making things that bring me joy, making things that are informed by my values, and making things that would’ve meant something to me as a child.

So those are my three go-to’s, and when I stick to those, it becomes easier to enjoy the process and even enjoy the failures and the successes because even if all that acknowledgement was taken away, I still created this thing that I look at in my little studio and it makes me happy.

MD: Because it was something that you wanted to do for such a long time, how did you approach writing the book? Was there a bit of fear about it? Or did it come quite easily?

SLD: It came surprisingly easily for something I had fought for for so long. But no. I did one illustration about masculinity and put it on my social media and was really surprised by the interest. I hadn’t quite tucked into the [inaudible 24:15] of toxic masculinity yet and it was something that had always really affected my life growing up and, when I realised I could do these little drawings that conveyed big ideas and that men were actually engaging with them and not feeling defence about them, I thought I was onto something special.

I then wrote up and [inaudible 24:39] and sent to a couple publisher’s and one of them, luckily, decided to go with it. Knowing that an illustrated adult’s book about masculinity wouldn’t be a best-seller, they believed in it and I’m grateful they did because the process of making it was so rewarding. It was such a treat just to be able to sit with a project for so long and turn it into a ritual. I think I did one page a day for about nine months, and obviously culled it back and they helped curate it. But it really is just a book filled with drawings that offers some kind of commentary on what it is to be a man.

MD: People should definitely check out your work and the book, but what would you want to share about toxic masculinity?

SLD: I think what it comes down to is when boys and men don’t feel like they’re able to express difficult feelings and emotions, those feelings and emotions don’t disappear. They get pushed down and they come up like a bad zit in a different form, and often that form is anger.

So I think, for me as a kid who cried all the time and who now makes work of men crying, I think it was important to just start a conversation around where do you think this anger comes from in men? Men are angry. They’re killing women and they’re killing themselves. That doesn’t sound like a happy place to be in. No one’s winning.

So, for me, it just comes down to clearing the passage between men and their expressions, and trying to bolster other men to share their vulnerabilities more often and trying to lead by example. So I try to be open about my mental health struggles, open about my experiences getting a mental health plan and trying three bad psychologists before I found a good one. It’s important that people don’t think the process is easy because it’s not.

I do think that, if we teach young boys to express their sadness and express their hurt and express their disappointment, then I think, eventually, there will be a lot less anger in adult men because it’ll be coming out as sensitivity.

MD: Yeah, exactly. And not that bottling up that you mentioned. As a follow up for the creative process, because your work does have that joy and that lightheartedness with such heavy topics, you could say, very nuanced topics, how do you approach that?

SLD: I think a spoonful of sugar helps medicine go down, my nanny used to say. My nanny being Mary Poppins. I think so much of the conversation around masculinity and mental health is so clinical and over intellectualised, and it becomes something that doesn’t feel accessible to a lot of men and a lot of young men who fear being judged and fear what these words of conversation are going to mean. 

And everyone loves laughing. It’s so simple but it’s true, and a lot of people know how to laugh at themselves and a lot don’t. A lot don’t realise that they’re laughing at themselves when they laugh at my work, and that’s half the fun.

I think humour, and I think particularly the very simple naïve style of my work, I think it just cracks a window and lets a lot of men feel the cool breeze of healthy masculinity upon their faces for the first time, and I think that’s what I’m most proud of with the book. I’ve seen middle-aged straight men pick it up and buy it, and that is so special to me.

MD: See? Neil Gaiman would be proud of you with looking back and reflecting. I’d love to zoom in a little bit more on those three things that you try to incorporate into your day. I may be zooming right in on your day, and you mentioned at the moment that you like to go to the gym, but that might be replaced at the moment, but I guess even before then. Are you someone who wakes up early in the morning and has that green smoothie? Or what does it typically look like?

SLD: I live in Queensland, but I work in New South Wales time. All my colleagues for my SPS work are in Sydney, so I wake up at 6am Queensland time, which is 7am Sydney time, and then I work backwards from there, so I go to the gym at seven, which is 100% more of a mental health thing than a physical thing. That lets me get a coffee and walk back and be at my laptop by about 9:30 Sydney time.

For the most part, I’m a coffee breakfast boy, but then I’ll have a nice hearty lunch and a good dinner.

MD: So you’re starting work, which is for the SPS on Sydney time, so how does that work? Are you working per article for them or do you have set hours, or how does that function when you’re working remotely?

SLD: Yes, I write three to four articles a day for SPS Voices and SPS Pride, and they vary from interviews and features to more entertainment muse type stuff. I’m paid per article, as well as for producing and doing the social media side of things. So it’s not a regular 9-5 gig, but it ends up feeling like a 9-5 gig, so I probably do 9-4pm most days.

MD: Right. Yeah. And do you have to come up with pitches all the time, or are you assigned articles as well?

SLD: A bit of both. I’ll start every morning with trolling the internet for story ideas and then I send a pitch email to my two editors, who are amazing woman, Natalie and Danielle who do a job share as managing editor. They’ll come back and say yes to one and two, no to three, or whatever, and it’s a back and forth until we settle on a few that are looking solid. Then I’ll go about writing them.

MD: Do you ever procrastinate as you’re writing, or what’s your process there?

SLD: I’m actually pretty good. I think because I’ve been doing it for so long, I know what I… back when I was really struggling to start out freelancing, empty time felt like death. It felt like you are failing, you are not making money, you’re not going to be able to pay rent, what are you doing, Sam?

So I’ve come to value the structure of the workday as this thing to really honour because it means that I’m doing okay. So I kind of really cherish the Monday to Friday work week structure but that may just be hangover from years of very disrupted work.

MD: It’s also so hard to create one completely ourselves, so I can see the appeal of adopting something and applying something that works for most of the world and following that. It’s quite clear.

SLD: Absolutely. I don’t procrastinate, but that’s only because I do create these little spaces for myself throughout the day to do things, like watch YouTube and listen to a podcast and go for a walk. If I didn’t do those things, I would definitely get distracted, but I just gear myself up to do a two-hour block of writing and then I enjoy my little pop culture frivolity moment.

MD: I like that approach, it’s quite realistic.

SLD: I’ve always been good at sprinting, but I could never run a marathon.

MD: I’m so delighted by all your metaphors. I’m going to write them all down. I was also thinking, in terms of putting out such wonderful work on social media very consistently, and consistently witty and consistently full of feeling, how is that being built into your day? Or how do you… I don’t want to say produce so quickly, but how have you learned to share and put it out there so consistently?

SLD: I guess my work has always been really responsive to the world around me, so there is a self-imposed pressure to be constantly engaged with political issues and responding to real-time, which I enjoy doing because I enjoy inserting a smile into a really otherwise ugly political discourse and it is literally just a tools down moment where I will be working away, maybe writing for SPS or glazing a bars and then I will say that, I don’t know, [inaudible 33:59] done something and I’ll be like, oh god, what has he done now? 

And then I will come up with an idea, I usually run it past my husband because he’s kind of my ethics compass, I guess. He is much more considered than I am, so if it passes the Brad test then I get out my iPad or get a piece of paper. I do work quite quickly. I guess you need to. You don’t have time for process when you’re trying to create something that speaks to the moment you’re in.

MD: Do you think, in some ways then, process can be overrated? I’m wondering if it’s sometimes a disguise for fear, you know? Having the right process, having the right [inaudible 34:48].

SLD: Totally a disguise, yeah. Everything’s a disguise. We’re all faking it. Anyone you think is confident on social media is faking it. In my opinion.

MD: Well, yeah, from what I’ve scratched at the surface is no one has it all together and there’s definitely no right process. It’s actually just about putting it out there.

SLD: Yeah, and I think that, if anything, that is my process. I’ve always just thrown shit until it sticks. That was the first five years of my creative career, was just throwing stuff and waiting until someone acknowledged it or liked it or validated it or opened up a door so I could continue throwing shit.

So it really is. I don’t put a lot of thought into when I choose to share stuff. Or whether I should share stuff. I make work and I share it, and I don’t let myself try and stop me, if that makes sense. I’m covered in tattoos and I’ve never thought about one of the designs for more than a day before getting it.

MD: Oh, wow.

SLD: I guess I’m spontaneous.

MD: And I just agonise over every decision.

SLD: But the spontaneity has kind of become my process, in a way, because I’m kind of guided by this giggling toddler in me who just wants to engage with everything. So when I can hear the toddler giggling in my belly, I’m like okay, let’s make something and share it.

MD: That’s such a great barometer. It also means that you’ve ended up with such an interesting and diverse career. You’re a filmmaker, director, writer, columnist, painter, ceramic artist, author, and it’s maybe as a result of all this experimenting, but how have you felt about being all those things and trying all those different things? Has it always felt joyful or has there been difficulty navigating being a slashy?

SLD: To quote Delta Goodrem’s first single of her second album, “there has been a lot of mistaken identity” in my creative life. I think I felt a lot of pressure early on. I mean, to start with, I’ve just always drawn, and I’ve always done art, so it’s always been a way of expressing myself personally. As well as writing. I’ve always enjoyed it.

Straight out of high school, I went to film school and got my diploma in filmmaking, which I then left and was like, now what? There was no kind of structural… there’s not really a good system in place for emerging filmmakers in this country. Or it could be better, we’ll say. So when I realised that my dream was to be a director and a writer of film and there was so many gatekeepers and my first short film got into Sydney Film Festival and it won Melbourne Queer Film Festival and I was like great, now there will be a second opportunity, and there just wasn’t. It was like this ladder with five rungs missing in the middle. You’re looking up to the top of it from the bottom and there’s nothing to climb.

So I returned to writing for a little while and started to feel like I was suffocating, being a writer, being my own voice. I was always in my own head and I would read so much and every time I read a book, I would hate my own writing more and it became this really toxic thing. So I needed to free myself from expectations, which is why I started calling myself an artist and sharing the creative work I was already doing and had always been doing. And letting myself smear the lines a bit. Letting myself be like, okay, I can create an aesthetic through my art that can then be adapted into animation.

And now I’m screenwriting again. I use a lot of text in my ceramic work, so often ideas that I flesh out in essays will end up being reincarnated into a vessel that I exhibit and it’s become this really comforting umbrella that I just huddle under, calling myself an artist, because it’s just allowed me to make work without thinking about what it means in terms of identity, I guess. And try and move away from having my work being my identity.

MD: Yeah, and as you say, it frees up that feeling of being suffocated by yourself by just making that flip from being one singular identity to artist, the umbrella.

SLD: Yeah, and there are so many people, if you go and read the early life chapters of people’s Wikipedia pages, you’ll see so many people who have traversed these different career paths and landed in a really interesting place because of it, you know? My work in film informs a lot of my work as a writer, my work in writing informs a lot of my work as an artist. And my work in hospitality has taught me a lot about character.

MD: Yes, as it would. I love to see that stage in any Wikipedia page, the hospitality part or what have you.

SLD: Yeah, got to throw in a bartending [inaudible 40:09].

MD: I actually have quite a toxic relationship with people’s Wikipedia pages in that I often look at them and just trace people’s trajectories, making sure that…

SLD: That you’re not falling behind?

MD: Yes! I was just going to ask you, do you struggle with comparison?

SLD: That’s why we all love Jacki Weaver. She’s the universal [inaudible 40:26], like don’t worry, I’m not in my mid-60s yet.

MD: Ah, can’t wait for that. Mid-60s, it’ll be my prime.

SLD: I know. The boom. No, there’s so much comparison. Straight out of high school, I had surrounded myself with a group of creatives who each individually went on to do pretty remarkable things, like win Logie’s, go to the Oscars. Really next-level stuff, which was just terrible for me. 

Because you do. You just feel like a failure. You feel like, oh, I’m not keeping up. I don’t have a TV show on HBO. I don’t appear on talk shows. I’m not in these galleries. I’m not having memoirs written. It’s easy to compare, especially when you hold yourself to a certain standard, but I think, and this is going to sound really dark, but because I do have depression, I like to read about really successful people who are depressed. 

If you look at people who are at the peak of their game, professionally career-wise, but still are in turmoil, you just realise that, oh, that mountain I’ve been looking at, thinking of climbing my whole life, you get to the top and there’s nothing there. You’ve just got a view. 

So it kind of reminds me that, at the end of the day, even if you’ve got an Oscar on your desk, you still sit down with your own thoughts and the most important health and the most important indicator of success is your relationship with your thoughts and your relationship with the people you love, and shifting the importance onto that has been so, so important and since I’ve started trying to do that, I’m on a happiness [inaudible 42:24]. It’s good.

MD: That is good. And does that help keep you moving, rather than feeling stifled by feelings of depression or anxiety?

SLD: Yeah, I think so. I think, for me, being creative has always been a bit of a coping mechanism. It’s been a way for me to navigate and understand big ideas, complex ideas. I guess, in that sense, my creative work has relieved this pressure valve in my brain, which feels really healthy and expressive, but there is that challenge of your identity being tied up in your creative work, which happens so easily and you can find yourself in a position of being unable to escape busyness, being unable to just sit with yourself because you don’t recognise who you are without the work.

So for me, that’s where things like meditation have really helped. But also one thing my psychologist asked me, where do you get your sense of self-worth? And I said my creative work, and she said what if that disappeared? I sat there and was like, oh, I’m not sure what would happen. I guess I wouldn’t have much self-worth. 

And it was this really confronting thing where I realised that, to put my value in what I made was to put my value in what other people thought of what I made. And that was a slippery slope because if all of my self-love was open to criticism, then I’ll never have any peace and quiet. I need to love myself in a way that can’t be criticised.

MD: Yes, oh, I love this. It actually reminds me of, although it’s very different but I think the root is the same, so I used to think that being single was a failure. That I’d done something wrong. And then a therapist once said to me, well, what if you’re always going to be single? What if you’re 60 and single? And I remember thinking, oh. Until stepping into it and seeing that it’s not being single that’s the flaw, it’s the expectation or the judgment of it, and I think that any kind of identity, single, artist, successful, they’re the block to actually [face? inaudible 44:50].

SLD: I think when we stop looking at happiness as anything that will ever be arrived at, because it’s never going to be a stagnant thing that we have and that we have finally made it. It’s never going to be something we have in our grasp.

As Lana Del Rey says in her new album, “It is a butterfly.”

MD: That’s it? That’s what she says?

SLD: Yes, happiness is a butterfly. 

MD: I was waiting for the rest of the quote. But that’s it, that’s as simple as it is.

SLD: Like with many of Lana Del Rey’s quotes, they don’t quite land, but you’ve just got to let them hover.

MD: Well, that’s very butterfly-like in that case. On that note of being a butterfly, what does fluttering around in the afternoon look like, and the evening?

SLD: Returning back to my tiered system, after I finish my writing work around 4pm, I give myself a pat on the back, look at myself in the mirror and say, “You did it again,” and then I move onto my second tier creative work, which is a lot more relaxed. I sit down and have a glass of wine, then I’ll put on some music and it becomes a bit more casual. It’s kind of like a shoes off vibe and I’ll do my emails and read stuff out to Brad, see what he thinks. We work on a lot of stuff together, which is fun.

And that tapers off into dinner, which we always eat in front of the TV. We are guilty of a couple of Uber Eats meals a week, but we do try to keep that in check. But also cooking a meal and freezing a bunch of it, so it’s an easy quick thing at the end of the day.

Although, speaking strictly in COVID times, Brad has lost his career, which means I have gained myself a chef. I call these my COVID Connections.

MD: Where it’s like find the silver lining, however faint?

SLD: Yes, like my divorced parents back on the phone for the first time in a decade this week. And it went well.

MD: Wow. That’s quite amazing.

SLD: Yeah, it’s like an end of the world catch up.

MD: Yeah, nothing like impending doom to…

SLD: Bring people that hate each other together.

MD: How else are you switching off then?

SLD: So I said dinner in front of the telly. We don’t watch a lot of TV, it’s just because I watch Survivor at the moment that we watch it Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, otherwise we’ll normally watch a documentary or something. I’m trying to make myself sound smarter. Lean into the trash, Sam. Okay.

And then after dinner it becomes third tier work, which is essentially things I can do without thinking. So I like to glaze my ceramics at night when I’m listening to a podcast, or listening to music, or just talking. It’s my version of knitting, I guess. 

So then I’ll do that until I go to bed, normally. But it’s all very auto-pilot kind of painting type stuff. And that is kind of my turning off. Is doing stuff that I don’t have to think critically.

MD: And what time will you go to bed then? 

SLD: I go to bed at probably 10:30pm, but then I do have a bit of insomnia so it can be a bit of an interesting thing. But in a perfect world, I fall asleep by 11pm and wake up at 6am.

MD: And I guess acknowledging that that’s rare, the perfect world stuff.

SLD: Yeah, it doesn’t happen very often, Madeleine. Most often I wake up at 2am completely covered in sweat, move to the spare room, put down a towel, lie there, think about things, worry, fall asleep to a podcast, wake up at 4am to the chat meowing, and then…

MD: Rinse and repeat.

SLD: Yeah, you do, really. You have to rinse. The rinsing is essential. 

MD: Well, it sounds like you do have quite a system though.

SLD: I do. It’s not a pretty system. It’s not a system that you’ll find in Frankie magazine, but it’s a system that works for a mentally ill gay married man with a cat.

MD: And it is about finding what works for you, isn’t it?

SLD: Yeah. And also just not holding yourself to those guideposts, those markers. Just looking at them as blueprints to follow, but it doesn’t really matter if you draw the line wrong.

MD: Exactly. So well put.

What’s perhaps difficult about what we’re experiencing globally is that there’s no certainty. There are no answers, everyone’s making it up as they go along, and hopefully doing the best that they can. So it’s really unsettling not having answers to big questions like, will we be okay? When will it go back to normal?

But what I found comforting about this conversation with Samuel is that we might not have the big answers, but we can refine the questions themselves. Uncertainty forces us to address what might have long been under the surface, so things like who are you if you’re not a creative? Who are you without the busy schedule? What small things do you need to give yourself to provide some kind of semblance of control? What tier can you put to the side for the moment? What pressures do you need to let go of? What system might not look pretty, but is the one that works for you?

When the outside world feels just like that, the outside, out of reach, maybe we can only really use the questions to lead us back to ourselves. I’m reminded of something Nietzsche wrote in his untimely meditations. 

He writes, “For the most important inquiry, there is a method. Let the young soul survey its own life with the view of the following question: What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted at the same time? Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law by their nature and their order. The fundamental law of your very self. Compare these objects. See how they complement, enlarge, outdo, transfigure one another. How they form a ladder on who’s steps you have been climbing up to yourself so far. Your true self does not lie buried deep within you, but rather rises immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you commonly take to be your eye.”

When you don’t know what’s going to happen next, assemble what you have loved and start climbing back to yourself.