The rebooting of this blog in 2022 has been a very useful thing for my mental health. It has given me back a sense of creative momentum that had shrivelled to all but nothing in the slow-motion breakdown of the past couple of years.
I really want to succeed in my aim of establishing it as an inviolate part of my practice: a post every Friday, regular as a conscientiously wound clock.
I’m not there yet. (Sneakily, I am shovelling in backdated posts to catch up, and relying on the fact that nobody is reading, as far as I know, to evade opprobrium.)
Thing is, I have a problem.
You’ll laugh and roll your eyes, probably.
Here’s the problem: I only want to publish posts I’m proud to have written. And I can’t get to the point where I consistently produce posts that meet my (yes, all right, delusionally perfectionist) standards without going through the middle bit, where I’m sometimes hitting the mark and sometimes … just not.
It’s like when I studied violin (for three years starting when I was about eight). I never got very far with it, because I couldn’t bear to practise out of tune, and I couldn’t play consistently in tune without practising. I could hear the horrible racket I was making, and I didn’t have the stamina to work through the pain of that to get to the other side.
I’m fully on board with the middle bit as a valid and necessary part of the process, mind you. When my kids studied music, and I went to their beginner recitals and heard all the small children parping their flutes and yowling their violins, all I felt was a fierce, pterodactyl-mama need to defend their right to perform really really badly.
But for me? Nah. Not the same.
Wait. It is the same.
I’m not better or worse than anybody else, and in order to get to the clear, sun-kissed mountaintop of sustainably prolific creative output, I have to be willing to squelch through the swamps and cowpats of intermittently mediocre or even poor work.
That’s the principle, at least.
The practice is … well, publishing this stonkingly sub-par post. Which I do, mindfully, as an exercise in self-something-or-other. Bah.