Tag: pain

060a – making things vs sharing things

It’s all quite painful. But sometimes I genuinely think I’m meant to feel so much (especially the negative emotions) so that it can fuel my creative work. Which is also something that I think I’m meant to do. 

A lot of the creative results/outcomes I’m truly proud of have really come out from moments of deep suffering. I don’t think I can yet come up with melodies without feeling deep pain or deep negative emotions. I hope this changes though. I really want to work on making more original music (I don’t know why, yet) and I wish I can do that even without so much pain.  

Brain-chatter around “motivations for making art” have been at all a time high. 

Lately I feel really called to music and writing. 

Most of the time, I’m happy to “just be creating”. I’m happy to just be making things. Whether it’s a blog-post or a song cover or even doodles, surprisingly enough. However, I’m spending 20-30% of my active brain-power on the question around sharing the stuff that I make. 

The sharing aspect is not something I enjoy very much. 

With writing however, it’s low overhead, this blog is pretty easy to manage, and the more artsy write-ups sometimes even end up on Instagram, and overall it’s easy. 

With music though, the overheads are pretty high. Recording stuff just takes so long, and for some reason I don’t enjoy it very much. Add to that the engagement on my music account has been pretty low lately, so that then adds certain amount of negative feelings and you have to regularly keep recovering from it to continue to keep posting. 

Sometimes I think it’s okay if I don’t share the things I make right away as well. For instance, I wrote a bunch of poetry around three years ago which I shared with friends at the time, but I only started sharing it at open-mics and on socials a few months ago. And it felt.. okay. Almost right. Like it was finally time for it to be shared. And it’s also saying something that if you look at something you wrote three years ago and still felt like sharing it, that’s good signal for yourself too. 

I also think maybe I have certain icky feelings around the sharing aspect because parts of it overlap with the “how can I monetise my art” aspect and I’m just not ready to address that question yet. 

This helps for now. It’s almost 6 am, so I must attempt to sleep. 

051b – late twenties are tough

Dating is hard. One minute you’re deep into the fantasy of falling in love with a new person you might have met, and the next minute you’re grieving the fact that they left you on “Seen” (albeit for a day). I’ve worked a lot on myself since my first dating-apps-sourced heartbreak of 2020, but there is only so much work you can do with the past and the present. There are scenarios that come up every time you meet a new person that bring up so much new stuff for you, and no amount of self-work, therapy, healing, non-fiction / self-help books can really prepare you for the real thing. I think. I shudder to thing how much I might have been affected by said scenarios if I was still the same person I’d been in 2020. 

Dating is realising that the knowledge of your attachment styles, communication preferences, following @therapyjeff etc etc doesn’t actually prevent you from feeling shitty when things don’t go as expected. Partly because the people you meet may not have engaged in all of this. But also partly because at the end of day, lived experience will trump everything. Bottom line is, while you can look at your feelings with more awareness (and knowledge), there is no way to avoid them altogether. Pain and suffering is the price we pay for living. 

Last couple of days have been tough. House-hunting was paused for a bit because I couldn’t really find good options, but overall I’ve been unable to focus on other things until this piece is figured. I think that’s the tough part for me, parallelisation. It does take around a month in most places to find a place, so I’m trying to just remind myself that, but overall optimism has been hard to find when it comes to this. I’m also conflicted about the area/neighbourhoods I’m looking in and whether I should compromise a little bit on that (since I’m unable to find good places in my most preferred areas). I don’t know. 

I found a music open-mic event that’s happening somewhat nearby to my current house, thinking of going and participating in that. I was practicing singing today and realised that it does recharge me, even though I often forget that when I’m not actively engaging in it. So maybe it’ll be nice to engage in this goal of mine and get that done with. I also enquired about drums classes nearby and going for an intro session today. Excited about that though! Been meaning to try this out forever so if I can engage with this, I might feel good. 

I was supposed to have therapy this Monday which got canceled which I think is the primary cause of why I’ve been feeling so low last few days. I mean, not the root cause itself but something which could have alleviated everything. 

In summary, dating, house-hunting, physical tiredness, a canceled therapy session, potential pms – these are the things that have got me down. Let’s see what shape the week ends up taking. Onward!