It's been pretty quiet around here lately.
The main reason is that almost all my creative energies have been spent on making music. This (hyper) focus has meant there is nothing left for anything else. Especially writing.
I've found it hard to concentrate on music for the past couple of days 1 so have found myself writing again – both on paper and screen. It's a perfect example of my obsessive nature and not being able to task switch.
Multiple passions cannot coexist. It's one or another, never both or all.
Even when I've sat with my phone in hand, almost desperate to post something, the words have eluded me. It's like a wall rises up between different areas of thought and I can't climb over it. I have to be done on this side before I can cross to the other.
Even when feeling like I might post I battle with myself over the worthiness of doing so and what I might consign to the blog.
Tracy had a lot to say about blogging's emotional obstacles following a Homebrew Website Club meeting which resonated very strongly with me. The usual suspects of topics were covered:
- perfectionism,
- deciding what to share,
- how personal to be, and
- the risk of publishing
That last one goes back to the underlying fear pervading the web.
When I'm not in a blogging headspace I can't escape each of those points. Nothing seems worthwhile of being added to the noise; no commentary or opinions worth sharing.
To quote Tracy:
It's an ongoing practice to choose how much to disclose about myself, how strong of a stance I feel comfortable taking, and what I think is worth responding to.
The only reason I am able to write this now is the problems I'm having with music. Again, the spectre of perfection reigns supreme. What I thought was pretty decent starts to dull, loses its sharp edge, as imposter syndrome starts to kick in.
A bit of me wonders if it's down to not having yet processed last week's CBT session – at least in part. I say CBT but it's really still the 'getting to know you' phase I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.
The therapist is learning what makes me tick, trying to open me up to get to the juicy meat inside so she can do her job. She has been giving me a few things to think about, different approaches to thinking about them. Less of the negative and more of the appreciative – finding the good bits so that I can offset them against the bad.
I need to work on acceptance: this is how things are and, even if there are bad bits, how they allow me to do what I want to do. Work is unfulfilling? At least it's well paid and supports living where I do. That kind of thing.
I had to draw a pie chart of triggers and work out the relative percentages of their impact on my mood. I drew three segments of external triggers but forgot probably the most important one: the internal triggers. I still really struggle with self-compassion so the thoughts about perfectionism, and subsequent self-beratement, felt like a blow to the head.
I'm not sure why I would forget that in a therapy session. It may not necessarily be my biggest trigger by volume but it most definitely is by impact.
I may now have Y but X remains beyond my grasp, not because of what I do or don't have but because of skill, or lack of practice, or childish impatience. I know this but it can be so hard to act accordingly, to not try to run before I can walk.
I need to give myself permission to go slowly, to fail, to accept and grow with each failure. I guess that's why I'm going to therapy.
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partly due to back pain but also a loss of confidence in what I am doing ↩
