Inertia
Sample Text
I decided to write a blog post because I'm trying to figure out how to respond to a friend. About a month ago I agreed to help them edit the player character model for their senior project game because a) they're my friend, and b) I thought it would be good practice. I've been struggling with it for a few reasons, but mostly because I'm depressed and I'm not very good at this 3D shit, at least not yet. A few months ago I "committed" to learning 3D modeling/animation/texturing/whatever. It's far from the first time I've decided to dedicate myself to learning something and ended up slowly losing interest, and it won't be the last. Maybe I set myself up to fail by putting too much pressure on myself. I dunno. But I do know I'm fucking tired of being so sure that something is a good idea one day, and then completely ignoring it the next. And I'm really, really fucking tired of excitedly telling my parents about this new thing that I'm totally committed to this time, I promise! It goes for my friends, too. I've tried not telling anybody about the thing I'm working on, but sooner or later I let it slip and before I know it, I've given up on it. The shame weighs heavily on me.
Anyways, I don't know what to tell my friend. Even if I ignore the fact that I'm a complete amateur at this stuff, I'm not entirely sure they know what they want, so I feel pretty lost. Wow, maybe I should just tell them that. I'm also considering just saying "I don't think I'm in a place to do this right now, you should find someone else. I'm sorry for wasting your time." But I'm not too sure if I'm ok with giving up just yet, in part because this is the only thing keeping us in touch right now and I tend to completely forget about people I haven't interacted with in a while.
Oh yeah, intertia. So, I've been really depressed this winter. I'm really trying to climb my way out of this hole I'm in, but I keep falling back in. I've been here before, I know that's just how it goes. Incremental progress and lots and lots of setbacks. It's frustrating. The last two days were those kinds of days were you can't seem to get any satisfaction from anything, so you wind up just kinda sitting there, bored out of your mind but unable to do anything about it. I went to bed before 7pm two nights in a row because there was no point in being awake. Might as well roll the dice and see if I wake up feeling any better.
Last night as I was sitting on the couch staring out at nothing, I decided I wouldn't let this shit disease waste any more of my life if I could help it. I ended up going to bed anyway because I was tired and I felt like shit, but I resolved to try to turn this ship around in the morning. This morning I actually cooked breakfast. I didn't end up eating much of it because it sucked, but I was proud that I folded the omelet perfectly in half. I did some laundry for the first time this year. God, did I need that.
Right before this I made some Max for Live effects and a couple instrument racks in Ableton. I'm trying to learn how to have fun again with music production, at least, more consistently. I miss the delight of discovery I felt when I just started learning production about 5 years ago. I still feel it at times, though not as much since I quit weed last spring. The motivation comes in bursts for me. I'll spend twelve hours straight working on a song, then not touch the software for a week. Back in the fall, I was really proud of myself for spreading out the making of a song across a few weeks. I kinda had to, because I was recording vocals and guitar, and I simply couldn't do it all in one sitting. I want more of that. Especially the energy. I was working a full-time job at the time. The job ended up leaving me burnt out pretty quickly, but for the first month it did wonders for my motivation.
Today I was reading through the general chat of a music production Discord server I'm in. Someone quoted Virtual Riot talking about how in order to get to his level of mastery, he spent 5 hours a day working on music and sound design. I desperately want to do that. Or more accurately, I want to want to do that. I want to find a way to open Ableton Live and do some work in it every day and be ok with that and not give in to whatever dumb fucking whim my brain has decided is today's fixation. It's important to me. You know how I mentioned all the skilled I've started learning and given up on? There are too many to count. To this day, the ONLY one I've stuck with has been music production. For the life of me I can't figure out how, but I've kept doing it. I don't know what makes it different. Maybe it was just arbitrarily chosen because I happened to get interested in it at the right part of my life. I guess it doesn't really matter why. But at this point, I figure I might as well go all-in on it, given it's one of the only consistensies in my life. But it's still not consistent enough. Not to, say, make a career out of it or anything like that. See, the core of my dilemma here is that whenever I try to "get serious" about something, I lose interest. All the actually good work happens when I'm just having fun with it. But how do I try to have fun with it regularly enough to really make progress and not think of it as "getting serious" about it? I get the feeling that the answer is obvious and I'm just approaching this all the wrong way, but I genuinely have no idea what to do differently. Besides "jUsT dOiNg It" or whatever bullshit people like to tell you when they don't have an executive function disorder. Not that I'm blaming all this on my ADHD. I see it as a personal failing. I just don't need to hear that kind of snappy catchphrase shit you see on Instagram.
Most of the time when I go to start a task that requires any complex decision-making, I'm having a constant back-and-forth between the part of me that wants to get the thing done and the whiney child in my head flailing about, screaming "I DON'T WANNA!" Sometimes I give up, stand up for a few minutes, and start again four or five times before I actually get into a flow with the thing. Much more often I get five minutes in, hit Alt-F4, and fuck off to something else that'll provide a more immediate dopamine hit. The kicker is that I'm conscious of this mental battle the whole time. I know my tendencies and I know when I'm doing something stupid. I just don't feel in control. Sometimes I think that if I didn't constantly have to wrangle my own brain into doing what I actually want to do, I'd be a couple years into a successful career by now. But that's just a fantasy. I wrote in my notebook once, "If you want to get good at this so bad, then why aren't you doing it?" I tormented myself with this question for a while until I realized how ridiculously oversimplified it sounds. I even wrote a shitty song about it. But even knowing how useless a question is it to ask myself, I can't help but continue second-guessing myself when it comes to my ambitions as a musician. I'd really like to find a way to stop thinking like that.
Anyways, I'm hungry so that's gonna be it. Still gotta figure out what to tell my friend. Still gotta figure out how to stop hating myself for not doing the things I alledgedly want to do "more than anything." At least I don't have homework for class tonight.