Wednesday 24th January, 2024
Check, check, 1… 2… 3…
This thing still on?
I’ve been a bit bold & skipped two weeks of journalling. Things have been a bit crazy this January. Not a good kind of crazy. The ‘watch all 11 seasons of Will & Grace in under three weeks’ kind of crazy. There’s a complex layering of problems that have happened around & to me over the past month or so, & I didn’t meet the challenge particularly well.
But then something kind of clicked in me, & it gave me the drive to make something great again. A feeling that’s been absent from me since I made the circus show for December. Writing it out now, it doesn’t seem like a long time to be creatively vacant… but it’s felt like an eternity. It’s hard to survive an eternity.
A huge part of my crippling mental health definitely came from avoiding my college work. I’m still not sure why I leave my work until the last minute & then let it ruin me for two weeks. It’s so easy to see it coming. It’s not like an asteroid careening towards me… but it is more like the iceberg up ahead. Speaking personally, as the Titanic, it’s harder to change direction than most people expect.
When I did finally get my last assignment in, I had also just been introduced to the most creatively stimulating thing I’ve seen in a VERY long time. Fever Ray’s performance for ARTE was shown to me by one of my college lecturers. We had a good heart to heart & then nerded out on our weird creative influences. Immediately after this, I got into the studio with Brian again to work on the next song… & suddenly the world felt like a place that might want me, or a place that I might belong, or a place that I might find some people who get me.
It’s becoming clearer that the more I filter myself to please people & seem approachable & pleasant, the more I obscure myself from the few people out there who get it, who get me. I’m weirder than I let on… & I think I need the weirdos out there to find me. Looking around at my friends… they’re a bunch of weird misfits. I seem very normal next to a lot of my friends. :P I can be intense, I can be obscure & obtuse… Unfortunately, I want people to like me. Unfortunately, I need them to like me so that I can make a living from my creative impulses. So no matter what I do, I will always need the approval of people, regardless of how secure I am in myself.
This is where we find artists going crazy. It’s where the most successful ones exist alongside the least successful ones. Only, one has a house & the financial ability to do almost anything, while the other has the terribly freeing knowledge that they can do whatever they want creatively cause nobody is looking. We don’t have a solution for any of these problems… it’s why certain people last in this world, & most don’t.
My heart is a lil broken, my personal life has to bleed into my creative one of course. It’s hard to write a song when you’re so sad that the only movement you make is to flip yourself like a pancake because your face is sore from lying on the floor in one position for too long. (that was a behemoth of a sentence, I apologise). It’s another fine line to walk. The discomfort of sadness is what drives us to make a lot of work when we need to, but a little too much can shut everything down.
I’m working on coming back to social media, & coming back to live music again. It’s a little scary, & a lot of work to get ready… but with a bit of work & some good shows, I think I’ll find another motivation to keep me standing on my floor, & not melting into it.
Okay, I’ve rattled on. I hope you’re well.
Nathan
