mandarcat

If I added up all the time I’ve wasted on the internet, video games, and crossword puzzles in my life, I would have had enough time to learn another language or several, play piano, and write a few novels.

I started the morning pages, a few days ago, but I just got a chance to finish reading the book’s instructions and the first chapter last night. The first chapter talks about giving yourself permission to be an artist and facing up to old monsters that caused you to block and suppress yourself.

At first I thought this seemed like a silly topic—I mean, I didn’t have parents that yelled at me and told me to be a lawyer instead of a writer or anything, and I thought ‘I’m not terrified—probably just lazy!’

But as I read the chapter, all of these instances from my past started bubbling up. I realized that I went from, at one point while a teenager, spending all the time I could on creative pursuits and being a prolific writer, especially with poems, to my present/recent past, where I don’t do any writing.

Up until now, for a long time, artistic pursuits have been like some faint ache in my bones or some vestigial remainder—I knew that I wanted to be writing and creating art somewhere, at some point, but I was paralyzed and felt like there was no point—I never had any inspiring ideas or astonishing technical skills, so I was inhibited from ever starting anything. I now see that I wasn’t having inspiring ideas because life events had dried and collapsed my inner well and I haven’t yet developed astonishing skills because I haven’t put in the time to develop them.

While I was reading the chapter and while I was doing my morning pages today, all of my old ‘monsters’ and discouragers popped up. It seems very obvious in hindsight. Every time something didn’t work out or someone was unkind, something inside me shut down, restricting my artistic activities, until ultimately I scrapped my plans to go to grad school for writing. In hindsight, it also seems silly that I allowed this happen. I also received a great deal of encouragement and was told that I was good often.

But I did allow it to happen. And instead of working hard with the energy and ambition I once had to develop technical skills and a body of work, I’ve hidden from myself and barely even admitted to myself that I wanted to be a writer and an artist. I was embarrassed! Which is ridiculous! I guess I was terrified of being bad, but how can I be a good artist -or even a bad artist- if I don’t do anything?

What was I thinking? Did I think that everyone else just woke up one day with fully formed plots for novels, or with the perfect ability to play an instrument without even practicing? Man was I hopeless.

The past several years have been filled with particularly stressful events, and I have a job that it is very demanding hours-wise—but still, I could fit it in an hour to write or play music most days, I could spend less time online reading the news compulsively, I could take a week off once or twice a year and work on projects—but I haven’t, and I see now that I was irrationally inhibited.

I’m going to make an effort to push myself to work on writing and art every day, and when I catch myself wasting time instead, I’ll remind myself that I’m just running away, which is silly.

I don’t really watch full programs on tv, but I do often turn it on to keep me company while I’m on at home and wind up watching bits here and there. I’m going to commit to keeping TV5 as my background channel unless there is a show that I really want to watch. Hopefully this spurs me to watch more French programming and I’ll pick up more just having it around.