I’ve been in therapy for a number of years, and it’s been good for me in ways that I’m not sure I could have even imagined back when I first started; I’ve not only learned a lot about myself — which is kind of the point, isn’t it? — but I’ve undone a lot of learned behaviors that weren’t particularly good for me, including plenty I wasn’t even aware of beforehand.
I say all this not to congratulate me on a job well done, but because in the last few days, I’ve recognized something new in my head that I’ll have to add to the list of things to talk about: my seeming inability to let myself do something just because it seems fun. Or, specifically, the fact that — since stopping work on the THR newsletter at the end of January, I haven’t really done anything in terms of image making, despite the fact that I want to, because I feel like I don’t have a “reason” to do it.
When I write it out like that — really, when I stop to think about it for even a second — I realize how genuinely nuts it seems. Simply wanting to do it should be reason enough, and if I were talking to anyone else, I’d make that argument to them in, I suspect, an exasperated tone; when it comes to my own dumb brain, however, I have this strange wall that I hit where my brain says, but if there’s no specific purpose for you to fuck around with Pixelmator and come up with images, then what’s the point you should do something more productive instead.
The upshot of this is that I’m finding myself craving an excuse to just make marks and strange pictures again, like I did last year when I attempted to make something every weekday for here. But even then, there was this “point” to doing so, to fulfill some entirely random mission statement that I’d invented. Perhaps that’s my solution, to just give myself permission by giving myself fictional goals to attain. That seems to make sense, right?