Something crystalized for me this morning, and I don’t know yet how I feel about it, nor where it might take me. Those are good things. The catalyst was reading vrk’s ‘How to draw a cover: An essay against AI art,’ and then reading her profile.
Oversharing time. Close this now. Seriously, this post contains references to suicidal thinking patterns that may be disturbing for some readers.
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I never had a midlife crisis in my 40s. I was just trying to survive a bunch of really bad financial decisions and was just starting my real career after a long series of jobs that started with randomly joining the Navy at 18 because I enjoyed taking/did well on the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) test one day.
Yes, that’s an example of my typical decision-making process for most of my life.
Also, apparently it is possible to be too busy surviving to have a midlife crisis.
Anyway, I’m having my midlife crisis now, or something very like it, although midlife is doing a lot of work there, unless I somehow live to be 130 years old, which… unlikely for a bunch of reasons, including that I don’t do anything to stay healthy, but. Yeah. Different topic.
A bunch of (much needed) therapy starting about 6 years ago helped me figure out that a lot of my life was a reaction to the years of bullying I lived through, roughly from age 8 to 18, and from dealing with an untreated personality disorder, likely partly due to said bullying combined with some pretty bad family tragedies and the very typically bad parenting experiences.
Anyway, the therapy helped me get my head screwed on straight for the first time in my life, but it is clear that I’ve been missing one important thing; any real reason to live other than sheer momentum. ‘No reason to live’ isn’t an exaggeration. I haven’t seen much point of anything for a long while now.
I suspect that I’ve spent the last few years looking for a bit more meaning, and not finding it.
vrk’s profile brought something into focus for me; a huge portion of my life, inside and outside of work, has been an attempt to exhibit competence. Not just to be competent at something, but to show it. To get people to affirm my competence. At almost anything, really. Performative competence as a way to pay for permission to exist. Because I have mistaken competence for two other things;
First, I’ve mistaken competence for personal worth. All my life I have believed very deeply that I am not really worthy. Worthy of living. Of having a place to live, of having friends, unless I can prove my value somehow. I have a very obvious pattern (obvious in retrospect, not obvious at the time) of taking up hobbies, getting just good enough to demonstrate some competence with the skills involved, then abandoning the craft and going on to something else.
I think now that I’ve had something close to an addict’s need for hits of validation; proving my worth by proving my ability to learn things quickly.
Secondly, I have put competence in a role that should have been filled by creativity. I’ve frequently said over the years that I’m not creative, but that’s not true. I do have a creative streak, and it’s been visible to me in the creative problem solving I’ve done at work recently, coming up with ways of using software to help people get their work done. It has been intensely satisfying, and I suspect that a lot of my struggle to find something to be good at has been a misplaced desire to be creative. Or rather, a misplaced attempt at executing creativity. For example, I’ve mistaken artistic competence I see in others as evidence of their creativity. But the creativity is in the choices they make, the problems they’ve solved, the ideas they’ve discovered, not in how well they’ve executed the work.
I’ve recently been practicing sketching, and have been playing with ideas of various artists I’ve found on Substack and on YouTube. My interest has been caught by artists like Andrew James (coffee in drawings out), whose drawings are not ‘true to life,’ but are somehow truer to life than any attempt at photorealism. Andrew’s creativity is the key.
I think that what I’ve been missing, perhaps for my entire life, is permission to be creative, rather than skillful. I know I can learn the skills. Can I let myself be creative? Can I finally do something for myself, not to impress someone, not to prove my worth?
My constant chasing the fix has been exhausting (and expensive).
It’s going to be hard to give myself the room to learn who I am, or who I might be.
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1 vrk: substack.com/@vrkmakes
2 How to draw a cover: substack.com/home/post/…
3 Andrew James https://substack.com/@ajamesdraws
4 The photo below is from yesterday’s journal entry. I had a sudden urge to draw a mechanical gear, and the five numbered drawings are the steps as I worked out how to do it. I’m not sure why I’m sharing it. Maybe more of that fix-seeking behavior.
