I used to be able to draw.
People tend to get upset when I put it this way. They read it as me putting myself down; sight unseen they’ll try to reassure me that I can still draw, I’m just rusty, I just need to get back into the habit.
But ultimately the timeline is the other way around. I didn’t lose this ability because I stopped using it. I stopped drawing because my hands stopped working how they used to. They don’t shake, exactly, but as my chronic pain has gotten worse over the years they’ve started moving differently, in ways that don’t quite map to my intentions. This makes it difficult to draw, and because I remember how it used to be, I find that rather disheartening. I struggled against it for a time, but couldn’t figure out how to make art the same way I had before.
And then, yes, I largely stopped drawing.
***
People tell me that I do a lot. They point at things I’ve done and tell me I’m impressive and that I should take a break. If these past couple sentences seem vague to you, well, they feel vague to me. I know, intellectually, that I’ve done cool things sometimes, and could probably list some of them if pressed. But I don’t, as a general rule, feel like I’m getting anything done.
I was raised subject to a sort of “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean”-esque psychological warfare. I was expected to never do anything fun or for myself if there was homework I hadn’t done yet, or chores I hadn’t done yet, or or or…
Obviously I tried, but this isn’t actually a winnable system. There’s always something else that needs doing, no matter how much you get done. The actual skill you’re supposed to learn as you grow up is how to balance productivity and leisure. I never learned this. To me, anything fun I do is something I’ve stolen from time that I could have been using to get more things done. Trying to take explicit time for myself is extremely stressful to the point where it really feels like more trouble than it’s worth.
Is relaxing a learnable skill? Is this something that practice will make easier? Maybe. It hasn’t yet.
***
In 2018, I decided to write a poem a day for the entire year. In retrospect this was wildly ambitious, given that my follow-through is lacking in full generality, but I only ended up missing two days and they were both in December. Most of the poems were even pretty good, and this definitely made me better at poetry and also writing in general.
One of the nice things about that year was having a defined task that was completable every day. One of the things that sucked that year was realizing at 11:50 PM that I hadn’t written a poem that day. It was a stressful year, with strange pockets of reprieve on days where I wrote something in the early morning. I wasn’t allowed to write ahead, so I didn’t. Each day was its own discrete unit, not bleeding into the next, and the next, and the next.
I considered repeating the poem-a-day thing this year, but I tried that in 2021 and didn’t even make it through January. I had more on my plate in 2021 than I did in 2018, and much more now than in 2021. I’m not interested in setting myself up for failure in this particular way at this particular time, and more specifically I’m trying to be more responsible about not continually taking on additional projects I can’t reasonably budget time and energy for.
Which is to say, I’m trying to be more responsible about budgeting time and energy.
***
I am learning, slowly, to engage with the fact that I am disabled. This is a frustrating and scary thing to have to do, but acknowledging that there’s a problem is the first step towards solving it.
The simplest way to keep someone from acknowledging that there’s a problem is to steep them in shame. This worked on me for most of my childhood, and I’m still carrying a lot of shame that was taught to me back then. It’s almost certainly my single biggest psychological problem, because it tries to prevent every problem-solving attempt before it even starts. I assumed I’d be fighting against it forever.
And then sometime in October, something clicked in my head and I went, oh, shame isn’t real and I don’t have to experience it.
It was like finally waking up.
It didn’t take long for shame to reassert itself, but I’ve seen how thin it is now, and it’s much easier to push past it. Why shouldn’t I share art I’m not certain of? Why shouldn’t I make my opinions known? Why shouldn’t I be open about what I’m struggling with?
***
For 2025, I’m going to create something every day. I don’t have formal rules for this, beyond that whatever I create only counts for the day I create it on. I’m hoping I’ll succeed in this goal, but it’s okay if I don’t, because it’s not my real goal.
How am I planning to judge whether something counts? I don’t know yet. I’m on track to post this before midnight, so I’ll count it for January 1st. I finally went ahead and got a physical planner this year—my first one since I think 2015—and I’m going to keep track of what I make each day in there. (This is already a huge win for me on the brains front! I’ve historically had a huge flinch reaction to things like planners and calendars!)
But as far as where the line is, what makes something worth going “yes, I created something today”—I’m going to have to figure that out. “A poem” is a meaningful unit. “A blog post” is a meaningful unit. Realistically I’m probably also going to count streaming and maybe editing. But what about something incomplete? A thousand words that aren’t shareable yet? If someone isn’t telling me that I’m good enough, am I really worth anything?
So that’s my real goal for this year: to learn how to perceive for myself that I am creating. To really and truly understand what everyone else is seeing when they tell me I’m doing so many things. I want to learn how to work in a way that encourages rest, and maybe learn how to rest.
And I hope to learn how better to work with my body as it is rather than as it once was. I find myself regularly rereading Erin Roseberry's Fantasy Is A Metaphor For The Human Condition, trying to work up the courage to acknowledge that there is a problem and that by acknowledging it I might begin to solve it.
I'd like, this year, to finally learn how to draw.