259: Premeditated Posting

I'm hitting this one crazy early (it's currently 4:02PM) because I'm going to be on a plane when this post would be normally going live.

I was on the fence about whether "today" counts the weirdness that is intercontinental travel, or if I just write one larger post tomorrow, so I decided I'm going to kinda do both. "Today's" post (259) is going to be a filler post, and then I'll write a longer one about the journey when I'm going to sleep tomorrow, in Amsterdam.

Today's post, then, is going to have to be about something a little more disconnected that I can just yap about for a while, and I'm not really sure what that thing is yet, to be honest.

I think maybe I've put too much pressure on myself to write something long and well-put-together today, because I'm sitting in the Phoenix airport for the next 4 hours as I write this, I have plenty of time to theoretically produce quality work, but I'm just not there. It's really hard to quantify or even qualify the human experience of creative block, but that's what I would call my current position. I have thoughts and ideas all the time of things I could or should write about, but motivation is a seemingly random process for me, and right now I just don't have it.

This rolling ebb and flow of motivation is something I've grappled with a lot in my life, and I think it prevents me from being a better artist, but the thing it really interferes with is my own perceptions of my abilities. My internal requirements and expectations are very robotic and capitalistic, and have been all of my life. I'm working on getting better with those and allowing myself more room to breathe and make mistakes, but it's been such a rigid position for so long, I still struggle with it sometimes.

I will say I've definitely gotten better at lowering the bar of quality of my work, I used to be a much worse perfectionist than I am now, but that might have been an external change more than an internal one. As I moved from high school (where most of my classes were relatively easy) to college, and especially this school year, my normal pattern of doing the bare minimum and getting good grades started to fail, which required me to step back and reevaluate my studying habits. I still definitely don't work that hard, or at least I don't think I do, but I did have to kick it into gear when my classes actually got hard.

A big part of that kicking into gear was also an adjustment of expectations; my first quarter at Cal Poly I really struggled in Calc III, I literally did every single practice problem in the book the week before one of my midterms, and I still got a B- in the class, which was a serious kick in the pants, and a huge change from the effort-grade ratio I was used to.

In hindsight, it didn't hit me too hard, but if I'm going to be totally honest that was because my opinions of myself were already pretty low (kinda still are, I'm working on it), so it all just checked out. I like to think that I appropriately adjusted my expectations, but I have still done pretty well in most of my classes since then, and I'm generally happy with where my GPA lives.

There's a concept I bring up (what feels like) a lot that I learned from Hank Green (love him) about the "top three". It applies all over life, when I see someone that's really good at something, someone who's super fit, someone who makes all their own food from scratch, someone with a 4.0, I know those things are in their top 3 priorities, but they're not in mine, so I don't have to hold myself to that standard.

My answer to what exactly my top 3 priorities are is going to change depending on who asks and when, but it's probably some combination of: minimizing my impact (on others and on the environment), building whatever I'm working on at the moment (changes rapidly), spending time with my friends and loved ones, being informed, and being as respectful as possible in social situations (using the right pronouns, terminology, and customs).

Most other things aren't forgotten, but they have a steady-state level of input that I maintain, and I just don't worry about them that much. Grades are one of those things; I spend the time I feel is reasonable studying, I get every assignment finished on time, but I don't worry about my grades or specifics that much, I rely on the baseline that I maintain being largely enough for what I need, and it almost always is.

There is an emergency overdrive mode where if I missed something or my understanding of material is so bad that I'm not confident I can pass a class I'll kick that thing to the top of the list for a couple days at a time, but it never stays there, usually just until the test or assignment is done, then it fades back to steady-state.

At risk of repeating myself, I'm not going to go back through the stuff I talked about in #255, but it is definitely relevant to this conversation.

I think a large chunk of it (that I didn't talk about on Wednesday) is that I may not have that high of opinions with myself (which is changing), but I am thoroughly comfortable with who I am. I've done a lot of internal work to come to terms with who I am and how I work; the last couple months have gotten me the closest to my true self I've ever been, and it's also been the best time period of my life (especially the last 13 days). Those two things are definitely causal, and I actually think it's a positive feedback loop.

I bring some walls down and loosen some filters, and then I have more fun with my friends, so I bring the walls down further, etc, etc, get asked out, fall in love.

No complaints from me 😉

And look at that; talking about how I didn't have anything to yap about got me yapping about the meta-systems that put me in this situation in the first place.

I think this kind of thing is the usual conclusion to creative block: if I don't feel about doing one thing, I sit on it for a minute, and I'll get the drive to do something else. In this case they were both writing, but this definitely isn't the thing I had intended to write about. I think it's part of why I always have so many projects running, because when I get tired or annoyed with one of them I can switch gears and refocus my drive into something else.

It's also why my empty time is so important to me, because if I don't have empty time for motivation to strike, I'll never get my little projects and personal things done. I haven't had as much of that empty brain time recently, so I haven't been able to hit all of the little projects I've been wanting to do.

I'm scheduling this one for tonight, when I'll be en route to Amsterdam (more on that tomorrow!).