New Years Resolutions are fucking stupid. I think approximately everyone can agree with this sentiment; there's a joke(? it may just be the truth...) that gyms get 90% of their sign ups in the first 4 weeks of the year, and 90% of their cancellations six months later, and I feel that energy permeate the entire conversation about "resolutions".

People claim they're going to be better than last year in nonspecific, often unattainable ways. They lead themselves to believe that if they just work really really hard, they'll be able to achieve anything, when in fact the opposite is true. Throughout my life I've found that small, consistent daily efforts far outstrip grandiose intentions of progress at every corner. And yet, we keep falling into this trap. I think there is something to be said for the "it's just human nature" argument though: people want to change. We all have things about ourselves we don't like. We all have parts of ourselves we wish we could hide from the outside world, and given an opportunity to publicly decry that part and declare it no longer a piece of our psyches feels good, even if it's about as useful as using a squirt gun to fight a forest fire.

One of the things I have been doing recently in therapy is what the sikoanalists¹ call parts work - the idea that your conscious mind can occupy a space at the head of the proverbial table of your mind, elevating itself to the "higher self". The other parts of your psyche, the anxieties and addictions and maladaptive behaviors are all welcome as well, but the key idea is to give them the space and empathy to express why they have us behave in ways we don't like. It's kind of a freaky exercise; even as an autistic person who usually struggles with this soft-n-squishy part of therapy, I have found good uses for this technique. The key one recently has been to understand the starving artist and the stimulation addict rattling around in my brain. And despite my screed above against new years resolutions, I am going to try and craft a...no, not a new years resolution. A new habit. A new habit to nurture and support both of these parts. I want to start growing in a few specific ways, and it's extremely fucking unfortunate that this has all come to a head on the one day of the year where everyone's going to call it a new year's resolution because it's a new year tomorrow.

The Starving Artist

Ever since I was a kid, there has been a part of my brain that craved being artistic: from tracing and eventually freehand copying Yu-Gi-Oh cards to forcing my parents to let me take 8th grade art (only to drop it when I got bad feedback on one piece), from game design to writing, I have always craved creating something. I've always kinda sucked at it though. If you know me in real life you'll know that I'm a classically trained pianist, and I was so very good at playing other peoples' music. I played Rachmaninoff and Copland and Beethoven and Bach and Satie for my senior recital when I was 18, and I know I performed fabulously. But I struggled hard with improvisation, with jazz band, with writing my own music. Here was an art form I had complete technical mastery over, and I could barely play along to middle school level jazz standards. One of the most crushing defeats in my artistic career was not making the jazz band my freshman year of high school; I had always assumed that I was the best pianist by a mile in my grade, and that was true until I auditioned against a kid who had been playing jazz piano with his dad (a locally famous trumpet and french horn player) since he was a kid. I had absolutely no chance against that, but it made me believe I was bad at music for years afterwards. I believed I could regurgitate, but I couldn't create.

I have hard drives full of failed projects due to impostor syndrome and the belief that I will never get good enough at doing <insert craft here> to create what I envision in my mind. But that's just it, isn't it? Art is about execution, certainly, but it's also about vision. And something I've realized relatively recently is that I do have vision. Photography has been an amazing outlet for me because the technical aspects of photography, bluntly, are shit-ass simple. There are still things I'm learning, of course; I'm getting better at editing and capturing the shot I want in camera rather than having to rely on a bunch of post processing, and using flash effectively is still a bit of a mystery, but on the whole I am steadily improving. And the execution of photography just...happens. You push the shutter button and an impossibly detailed image is rendered by a stack of glass lenses to a tiny sensor filled with millions of little light recorders, and the light you see is painted directly onto a displayable medium. All you have to do is line up the shot, light it correctly, and boom, the art is created.

Okay, okay, obviously there is way more to photography than just that, but the short distance between vision and (at least the first glimmer of) a work of art has helped rewire my brain to start trusting my vision more. I've noticed this in my pottery practice, and in my writing, and even slowly in my occasionally boring professional day job. And yet the artist inside me still starves.

This artist doesn't starve in the sense that he has little to nourish himself physically; he starves in that he has nothing he feels he can point to as having created. He feels creatively starved, as though this body he inhabits is a bleak, dying midwestern town and there is no one within a hundred miles who will even understand what he is doing. And even if they did, would they think it was any good? Probably not, says the starving artist. But he's trying to give my life meaning, to show me that there is still good and justice and beauty in the world, and that my mind is capable of creating something that is worth celebrating. He's just terrified to do it because he fears failure, and that fear inhabits me.

So, to him I say we will create, and we will create every day. It will be slow, and taxing sometimes, and sometimes we're going to feel like utter failures, but we're going to do it anyway. If only to miss failing entirely and sail into the success we wanted instead.

The Stimulation Addict

I am so goddamned addicted to my smartphone it's not even funny. And it's not just my smartphone: when I work I usually have a twitch stream playing in the background, when I'm watching TV it's often hyper-stimulating garbage (shout-out to Selling Sunset and hyper-nerdy YouTube channels), often accompanied by scrolling on my fucking phone. This wasn't always the case: I used to have focus, at least for the things I loved, so that I could play video games for hours or practice piano for hours or read for hours. Now I can't do any of those things, sustained, for more than 15-20 minutes at a time.

And the content itself...ugh. I get stuck on stuff easily, and there are whole classes of content (porn, cringe, witch hunts, political toxicity and ragebait) that just eat my brain up and make me unable to focus. And they're everywhere; it's impossible to scroll Instagram without finding at least some winking nod to one of these things that really damage my psyche. And once I find one it's down the rabbit hole, scrolling for hours on end, and it's nearly impossible to dig myself out short of some extremely negative self talk and sometimes literally lying on a pincushion² to snap out of it. I hate the cycle: engage, fall down, get mad at myself, engage, fall down, get mad at myself. It's exhausting and makes me think I'm just universally a bad person in all aspects of my life. I'm so tired of it.

The stimulation addict is harder to empathize with at first though; the artist starves because he is anxious his work won't be appreciated, and the compassionate thing to do is to feed his desire to create and give him a safe outlet to do so. He wants to give my life purpose through art, his desire to help is obvious even if his actions don't always bear this out. The stimulation addict, on the other hand, fears loneliness. He fears that if we let the silence consume us even for a second, that we will fall into an endless depression and never claw our way out. He guides us towards these shallow, simple, un-nourishing sources of input just to keep the lights on, keep the white noise machine running, avoid the dark creeping in. He is maladaptive, but still trying to care for us in a way.

The hardest step of parts work is to accept that there are no bad parts, and that every part plays a role in shaping your life, arcing towards helping you to the best of its ability. Many of our parts fall far short of the mark, not because they're wicked or intentionally sabotaging us, but because they don't know how to attain the goal they're reaching for safely. This part comes from an obvious place upon further, deeper examination, and it's my bouts of depression from middle school onward. I had sometimes weeks-long periods where I could barely get out of bed, ate to forget or forgot to eat, sat in my room all day instead of going to class or hanging out with friends. It's better to a large extent now thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, but the hurt isn't gone; those days of absence, of sitting with the only person in the entire world who occupies my body, and whom I didn't like very much, filled me with a desire to escape. If I just drowned him out long enough I wouldn't have to think about him. I wouldn't have to sit with the emptiness of depression, the long stretches of nothingness that feel like a small death waiting for the large one.

So, to him I say we will create, and we will create every day. It will require us to slow down, be thoughtful, allow the silence to fill our mind, so that we can focus on the joyful act of creation, but we will do it. And the practice will desensitize us to the silence and show us it isn't something to be feared, but a revered part of existence.

Okay, but what are you actually going to do?

I'm so glad you asked, imaginary internet stranger! The answer is simple:

On this blog I will post every day. At least 1000 words. And at least one picture.

It doesn't matter what it is, though I think the writing will tend towards the new novel I'm cooking up. The photograph and the writing need not have anything to do with one another, but they both must be posted by midnight local time every day. I will accept fewer words, I will accept a less than stellar phone picture, but there has to be something every day.

I'm going to try to post excerpts of the novel I'm working on as I go; my goal in writing this year (goddammit there goes that new years resolution bullshit again) is to finish a full draft of a novel. This will be my fourth go-around at finishing a full draft: my first was a NaNoWriMo in 2022 which resulted in a 35K word pile of mush, my second was around 10K words and too heady and weird to continue, and my third was earlier this year, which reached 40K words and was nearly coherent. My goal this time is simply 50K words, coherently written, arcing towards a conclusion.

I didn't really think of how I was going to close this when I started, so now I'm left here staring blankly at the hushed audience with the final number unwritten. I guess I'll conclude with this: the act of creation itself is a triumph, and something I'm going to celebrate for myself even if no one else watches, and even if no one else cares. Writing is a joy, and photography is a joy. I will give them the joy they deserve, and I will heal the parts inside me that desperately need healing.

Here's a picture of a Cormorant.