Dandelions

I've given up Twitter AGAIN. Mainly because it eats my brain. I spend far too much time on it and when I'm off it, I think about it. Oliver Burkeman has written about the vortex effect of Twitter in a very good and funny article here.

But I also gave it up so I could get a job done. I'm supposed to be working on some drawings. I don't know how common this is for other PWDFL (People Who Draw For a Living but don't like the word 'artist') but I begin every project with the same paralysing wonder at how I ever managed to draw anything in the past, given that I clearly cannot draw anything now. I take hours reading unnecessary background research (dandelion pollen is mostly sterile, you say, well, I must go and read up about that before I sit down to draw one), I sit looking at the object I'm meant to be drawing, I stare at the empty page. And this is when I log on to Twitter. All the anguish at finding that I am unable to draw slides away as I scroll for half an hour or more through various nonsense. Of course Twitter brings its own anxiety - people spoiling for a fight, depressing news, the abyss of dreadfulness that is popular culture - and when I log off not only have I not drawn anything, I've wasted a half an hour (alright alright, it's almost always more). Stress sitting on top of a mound of guilt.

So I had to force myself to stay with my own gnawing doubts and get the fecking drawing done. Which I have. I've been drawing to a constant barrage of teeth-grinding memories and self-criticism but the first drawing is done & emailed to the client.

My usual technique for drowning out bad thoughts is to listen to audio books, but if a drawing is in any way challenging I can't do it while listening to books or podcasts, although I draw better with music than without. I ended up listening to an album I love, Behold and See by '60s psychedelic band (or were they?) Ultimate Spinach. Strangely and refreshingly for a psychedelic band (or were they?) the lyrics of the album all seem to boil down to 'Get over yourself'. (The lyrics of Where You're At being a good example). Which is the kind of bracing kick up the arse I think I needed.

Years ago when I gave therapy a go the main misgiving I had was the tendency I believed therapists had for facilitating the blaming of people in the client's life for the client's problems. Obviously sometimes it's just a fact that certain people have been badly harmed by others and they need to talk about it, but it does seem that, even when we haven't been maliciously treated - when it's just the case that people around us have been no more than thoughtless or selfish in the ordinary way, and that's not where our own problems started - we nevertheless try to pin point the person and action that made us who we are.

I mention it because I think that maybe we do that because two desires are in conflict: the desire to change and the desire to be consistent. Changing on our own accord implicitly involves an admission that we are in some way faulty. Maybe blaming someone else for our current state of mind gives us an excuse to change - it's like solving a puzzle, or like the crisis in a storyline that causes the character to evolve. An alternative way of thinking about changing could be to think of the brain or mind like a complex machine, which you've been using through trial and error, with a lot of errors, and now you've picked up a sheet from the missing manual.

Here's the best piece of advice I ever came across. If you take it, you too can be as mentally healthy as I am!

There were once upon a time two sausage machines, exquisitely constructed for the purpose of turning pig into the most delicious sausages. One of these retained his zest for pig and produced sausages innumerable; the other said: ‘What is pig to me? My own works are far more interesting and wonderful than any pig.’ He refused pig and set to work to study his inside. When bereft of its natural food, his inside ceased to function, and the more he studied it, the more empty and foolish it seemed to him to be. All the exquisite apparatus by which the delicious transformation had hitherto been made stood still, and he was at a loss to guess what it was capable of doing. This second sausage machine was like the man who has lost his zest, while the first was like the man who has retained it.

The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways, but without materials from the external world it is powerless, and unlike the sausage machine it must seize its materials for itself, since events only become experiences through the interest that we take in them: if they do not interest us, we are making nothing of them.

The man, therefore, whose attention is turned within finds nothing worthy of his notice, whereas the man whose attention is turned outward can find within, in those rare moments when he examines his soul, the most varied and interesting assortment of ingredients being dissected and recombined into beautiful or instructive patterns.

- Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

This has been a bit of a babbling post. Probably because I've been saving up all my Twitter babbling. Well, it had to go somewhere.