Unfinished work 1/2

a few thoughts about fear and a strategy to nudge myself forward

unfinished work 1

I haven’t been drawing so much caught between navigating health issues and intense anxiety that hardens my brain and my body into a rock that can only vibrate to one overwhelming negative frequency. When I’m like that all my skills, my ideas, and my whole self if I’m being honest, get erased, flattened by the weight of worry. Among the many types of anxiety plaguing me, the worst is performance anxiety. If I have to demonstrate what I know, my brain shuts down, even though under relaxed conditions I’d do great. It’s been a truly crippling thing to deal with as I moved through life. Sometimes I do it to myself. That critical voice detaches from the rest of me and looks at whatever I’m making, frowning, and says: “Don’t mess it up.”

Stops and starts

Which means I’m either going to mess it up or abandon it, too afraid of ruining a good thing. It’s insane considering no one is forcing me to make art. There are various artistic practices that are truly joyful and don’t scare me, whereas others, the ones where I force myself to draw more figuratively, to make sense of proportions, space and light in more conventional ways are still hard.

When I’m in low energy states, anxiety is higher as well; because why not have something hard be even harder (I hate you universe, you’re just all wrong). Then it becomes a battle to push myself, or to allow myself to fail. On the rare occasions when I’m energetic and more myself, failure doesn’t shatter me, I can look at whatever didn’t work and move forward, but processing and integrating receive fewer resources when there are already few to go around.

A wealth of colour

Looking through my stack of paper and notebooks I regularly rediscover drawings I started and then never continued because I was afraid I was going to mess them up. Then I’d start others and so on. I have messed up drawings in the past by getting the values wrong, by picking the wrong colour that made everything too dark, unclear, unbalanced, too chaotic or some other state that ruined it. All of those times were great learning moments, but the idea that ruining a piece is possible messes with me in states of unbalance.

The things we forget about ourselves

When I’m too tired from my many afflictions, it’s hard to take the correct decisions, or I become impatient, I want to get lost in the act of drawing and I can’t because I’m not sure how to continue adding colour to a shape so it fits my mental picture of it, how to harmonize a part of the drawing with the rest.

Of course this is part of learning and I should just go for it and learn from the mistakes, but even that decision seems too much for my brain.

I’m writing this in part to open myself up to the vulnerability of failure. I get stuck in certain boxes in my head, usually when I don’t articulate the difficulty, the fear, the obstacle. They appear layer by layer, like 3D printed objects trapping the joy and expansiveness I should be focusing on.

You have already seen some of them scattered throughout this article, there’s a few more below.

I will probably make an “this is an AI free space” for the next article, but for this one know that all you read and see here is entirely and slowly made by my two hands and my two eyes.

If you got here, thank you. And if you enjoyed my offering know that liking, sharing and subscribing will make me a little bit happier than I was before, knowing I reached a few people.