i'm feeling old as hell today. I'm 23 and in a few months I'll be 24, but mentally I still feel like I'm 15. I guess the biggest factor in this is still living at home, and even though I have a job I feel like that kind of just replaces school as 'the thing that keeps me busy'. My role in the household hasn't changed since I was 9, and even though I could drive anywhere I want whenever, I find that I'm not sure where I'd go or what I'd do. I'm sure I could launch into a whole essay about how alienting suburbs are, and how that's built into their structure. But we all know this. Actually dealing with it and overcoming it is a whole other thing.
but what eats at me even more is the way that I've never really been able to do any cool creative work while i was younger, even though I've always wanted to be that sort of person. I used to do photography in high school, but after I feel off with that and became interested in music, art, and theory, I feel like instead of actually doing something in those domains I've been stuck in this state of active stagnancy, like a truck spinning it's tires in the mud. And since I'm hyperaware that this is the case, I keep on doing this sort of meta-writing talking about what I need to get started, what's wrong with me, etc. But that's obviously not helpful most of the time because writing about being blocked isn't really the same as creative engagment? And if you keep doing and it's clearly not helping, you should proabably try something else? like...actually trying to make something and share it? I guess I haven't completely neglected that prospect, but I feel like every move in that direction has been more like a gesture than an earnest attempt, a false start in the truest sense.
I've also been doing this weird thing more recently where I've been cutting myself off from my friends, passively but semi-intentionally. There's a deep sense that I don't fit into anyone else's life right now, and that there's no getting around that. Creative lifestyles are often solitary ones, so I'm starting to get used to the idea that this is just kind of how it's going to be whether I like it or not so I might as well embrace it rather than try to fight it. I feel like I've been doing a lot swimming upstream and shoving mysel into boxes to be in certain places wwith certain people. And it's certainly been fun, but it's obviously not rewarding in the way I need it to be. I guess I don't even know what I want from the relationships in my life, and up till now I've only been able to make them work by taking a really passive approach.
Creatively and socially, there's this sense that my personality is more or less defective in some way, and I think for the past year I've been trying my best to fix it, mainly with reading, journaling, and therapy. I don't know how much progress I've really made. I think moving out and getting the oppourtunity to start from scratch - especially somewhere cool - will be a big help. I'm lucky to have even gotten myself into a positiion where I might be able to do that. But for right now, I have a check list of different things mediums I'm interested in, and my plan is to make one thing for each on and see how I like the actual process of doing it. Lol I can't beleive I'm only thinking to to do this now. But I'm saying this because I'll keep the void updated with any progress and maybe share some stuff here.
P.S. I also 100 percent recognize the irony and absurdity in feeling like your too old to be creative when (a) your never too old and it's stupid to think that way and (b) 23 is like unambigously not that old. For me, this doesn't really make me feel much better but only highlights how pathological this feeling is. I read somewhere that continually telling yourself that it's too late can really just be a way of avoiding the work because of fear or laziness or something. I think something more along those lines might be what's going on with me, though it still doesn't feel like the heart of it? idk but I do think that all these pretenses I carry around don't help. So I'm trying to drop those.
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