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# In a slump. I have a two-week holiday and drove to Salzburg on Saturday, with all the best intentions of being creative and productive and working and so on and so forth. It's been raining since Saturday, and I'm basically just slumping like whoa. I've read about a third of Die zerissenen Jahre and a good part of the Spiegel and profil copies my parents left me from their holiday, went for a walk from 21:30ish to 23:something yesterday since for a change it'd stopped raining, ignored the drizzle and went for a run in Hellbrunn today, but otherwise mostly slumped on the internet, despite this being an exercise in frustration with the connection as slow as it is here.
Week two of The Artist's Way talks about how you should look at the people around you and consider who among them might be likely to sabotage your creative journey and should be avoided for the time being. Now I barely have any friends to begin with, so this isn't really much of an issue, but I have the sneaking suspicion that the person I should avoid is myself. My issue isn't so much a lack of time/others taking up my time, I'm actually pretty egoistic in this respect, or simply have a solitary lifestyle, but the fact that I'm apparently constantly in avoidance/procrastination mode. I'm sabotaging myself, and sadly the book doesn't give any advice for that, except possibly go back to chapter one and start all over?
(# I would be a lot more frustrated by the current weather if I hadn't been on a [actually a bit too] long hiking tour on the Rax last Thursday.)
# Almost dropped the whole thing at the beginning of last week, it seemed so hope- and pointless. It still does in a way, the last morning pages felt incredibly banal. They're allowed to be, but still... Seeing this linked on facebook Wednesday morning helped a bit (if I believed in the book's spiritual angle I probably would or should say it was synchronicity and sent by God/the universe...), but I'm still feeling unsure.
# As a sort of addendum to week one, I realised that I'm in fact a bit annoyed at my mother for talking me into not quitting university when I was really unsure about whether to continue or try something with ceramics after all. I was in my early twenties, I'm not sure if I was even working on my Diplomarbeit already, and back than I would have had a chance. I was young enough for a change, I'd actually got quite good at what I was doing, but most importantly, I still had the desire to do it. I wasn't sitting around with a self-help book, awkwardly trying to somehow reawaken the creativity I managed to kill off pretty effectively.
The problem here is that it's difficult for me to be annoyed at my mother, because she was (as far as I as a child was concerned) the stable, reliable part in my parents' relationship. I was always on her side, by default. It would never even have occurred to me to ask my father about what to do, to go to him with such problems; or any problems. At the same time my mother and I are pretty much diametrically opposed character-wise, and almost every impulse and encouragement re. creativity during my childhood came from my father. My mother is always about being rational and functioning. It's... conflicting.
I know it was my decision in the end, but I feel kind of... betrayed? I needed help and I got pushed in exactly the wrong direction, with the result that I'm not successful, or earning much money, and unhappy on top of that.
# It's incredibly frustrating and conflicting to produce bad 'art'. I'm trying to look at it as part of therapy, but... it's hard. I know I'm supposed not to care and ignore the perfectionism, but... It doesn't help that I've never been any good at drawing or painting.
On the other hand, there is a desire to create something, regardless of results, and for the first time in years I was looking up ceramics classes last week; I suddenly had a feeling of wanting to get my fingers into clay again, instead of the usual mixture of pain-guilt-self-betrayal-failure, so I guess the whole thing is at least going somewhere? I still feel stupid.
# Not that this is exactly surprising, but I have huge problems with all the exercises that want you to articulate your wishes. It's not even articulating them, or writing them down that's the issue, for the most part it's feeling them. I do know where that (presumably) comes from, but how do I overcome it? Why is it so hard to want something? Somehow, I can only do this defensively, more or less violently not wanting something.
# This vague feeling I sometimes have that I could be something, someone else, but can't quite get there, can't quite see or reach it, and then I forget about it again entirely.