Again. And I hate writing the first one. It’s the same reason I haven’t been able to make any art lately.
There are too many things to say, too many things to paint, too many things to be.
My indecisiveness has plagued me at every stage of life since I was given the ability to decide things. I could blame this on a lack of confidence in my choices. I don’t know where I come from, but I’m either contrarian in nature or just a product of a Lutheran upbringing taken to heart despite a very conservative home state. (Yes, those things contradict each other imho.) Either way, I find myself second-guessing many of my impulses. I could attribute that to humility, level-headedness (haha), or checks and balances, but it’s probably more like fear. Like, a what if I do what I want to and then everyone can say they told me so when I fail kind of fear.
This has led to a lot of compromises in life.
And who knows? Maybe it has saved me from utter failure and hard times.
It leaves me feeling like every choice I make is a door closed on another, so I think I’ve postponed a lot of choices in my life. And I tend to remain not entirely committed to others. And it’s also stopped me from pursuing a lot of things. I sometimes feel frozen. Stalled. Writer’s blocked in life. Like every commitment is furthering my life path in a direction I can never return from. And it is! But, so what? What’s my hang up? This is what it’s like for everybody, right?
Even journaling. I almost didn’t start this post because it could have been about anything. I could have written a post about ideas for the future of American politics, nostalgia for the landscape of my childhood, the struggles and rewards of being a public educator. Or I could have become overwhelmed and written about nothing.
I guess what I need is discipline. Discipline to just move in any direction, rather than sitting and thinking about how many different directions there are, and trying to pick the perfect one. The paradox of choice?
It’s the same feeling I get when there are 29 different shampoos to choose from.
Overwhelmed. Shampoo doesn’t matter but how I spend my leisure and work, where I live, who I surround myself with: these things do. What I create matters, but it doesn’t matter that much. I think the point is to get messy and have fun and forget about the judgment of the world completely. I know you can’t create art in a vacuum, but maybe, yeah, you kind of can. And maybe I need to shut out the noise and really look inward.
My soul isn’t a vacuum, right? If anything it’s a bridge.
So if you read this, thanks. I’ll be trying to do more of it.
little bit jane 