Not my hand.
I have already had a few false starts to my endeavour, which I have told you about here already. Nothing major, and time is still on my side, but something that I felt was going well has me feeling really discouraged lately.
In the first few weeks of playing guitar, I felt that I was progressing very nicely, but lately I feel like I’m not just plateauing, but actually sliding into a trough. My beginning chords are still not sounding good consistently and my chord changes have truly started to regress. I sincerely sound like I did weeks ago. Without the accountability to y’all, this is the time where I would have already given up.
I’m not giving up, but I do think that I have to schedule a day off now and then. I have not missed one day of practice since I began on October 2, and I think that my fingers legitimately need a bit of a rest. Both the tips of my fingers where the calluses are forming and the thumb joint on my right hand. I have De Quervain's tenosynovitis in both hands, courtesy of eleven years of working in a bookstore and more years of being a file clerk, and cook etc. I have it much worse in my dominant left hand than in my right, but I do notice pain starting in my right hand about ten minutes or so into practice. My left hand does not seem to be bothered by the picking and strumming required of it, so that’s a relief. I can barely make a fist with my left hand as it is, so I cannot afford to have it injured further.
I’m not taking off today, but I think that maybe Sundays from now on will be a day to rest the hands. And maybe my brain too.
All of this seems very logical, but I am really trying not to break the streak of practice days. Everytime I take a day off of anything, be it dieting, practicing a foreign language like French, exercising—that day seems to turn into two, then a week, month, year—then years. I know that this is rooted in my perfectionism and other anxiety-borne magical thinking, but if you think that my heart isn’t racing and my stomach tied up in knots at the mere thought of missing a day of guitar practice, you’d be wrong.
I often feel imprisoned by my own brain. I want to scream, “Let me out! You are killing my joy in life. And your harsh and strict manner sure is not having the desired effect.” I don’t want this process to be without joy, and it is not, so far. Sometimes I’m just playing a little bit of a song and I don’t worry about what I’m doing, and it all just works. That’s a great feeling. Also, the people who have dropped me a line or two of encouragement have really made me feel seen and appreciated. Every time I post a new newsletter and you guys read it, it makes me very happy.
I don’t want y’all to think that all I am going to do on this blog is complain, but I also want you to know that I am going to be honest with you. I won’t sugarcoat this process. I am proud of the fact that I am telling you guys about my frustrations and continuing to press on. My usual behavior after a month of trying something new would be for me to quit when it started to get hard, and then build an airtight (to my mind at least) defense of quitting and a case for rationalizing why I quit and why it is for the best.
Me representing myself:
I fight this urge to isolate, to seek shelter and to hide away every day. I am by nature avoidant and I feel exposed and vulnerable telling my thoughts and feelings to friends, family, and complete strangers all over the world. But I am doing what is very uncomfortable for me, because I have to in order to grow.
I have spent my entire adulthood trying to hide myself from life. Too afraid of failure to really pursue my artistic goals, I spent years pretending that they did not matter to me. Waiting around for the perfect circumstances to align where I would finally become the writer, actor, and director that I wanted to be. Were those years wasted? No, not entirely. I was still loved by my friends and family. And I loved them in turn. I still met and fell in love with Jennifer. I would occasionally write something or act in a short film or play. But in the parlance of my Sunday school, I was hiding this little light of mine under a bushel.
To my fellow Sunday school alumni:
Are we supposed to hide our lights under bushels?
What are we supposed to do?
Amen.
The thing is, I’m terrible at hiding anything. So the only person who was fooled into thinking that I didn’t care about expressing myself was me. I used to think that if there was one skill I had mastery of, it was self-delusion. But there was a problem with even that. Only the conscious part of my mind, the part that agreed to believe my lies, was deceived. The murky interior, my subconscious, the seat of my true desires, was not fooled at all, and I was in constant conflict with myself.
The mind can only take so much of that at full strength, so I numbed those feelings in the best (but unhealthy) ways I knew how and continued to ignore the truth. I remember begging my old therapist to help me learn how to not want to be an artist, so I could stop torturing myself for being a failure at it, to be happy as a shift leader at a bookstore, and he said that he would not engage in something so pointless as teaching me how to better avoid my own desires for a fulfilling life. I think about that often. That is exactly what I was doing. Afraid to fail, my life became a series of failures of omission. An ouroboros of indecision, inaction, and self-flagellation.
Legitimate mental illness is a factor in all of this, and some of my avoidance was no doubt an attempt to keep myself functioning through long bouts of depression. I am not using this piece as a cudgel to beat myself with, but I am using it as a crook to reach out and pull myself out of a self-imposed rut. I wrote in an earlier post about this project being an exercise in learning how to fail and trying again. To give my best even if it seems pointless—I am still committed to this. I swear to you.
For good or ill, I am an artist, and I must express myself. I want to erase the last sentence, this whole post—hell, this whole blog rather than expose myself to potential failure and judgment. But I cannot run away from myself any longer. I’m terrible at running, so that should not be my first course of action anyway.
This was originally going to be a short post about avoiding burnout on one of my skills, but it has turned into a manifesto of sorts. Funny how these things work.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
Feel free to drop me a line at: jeremydnichols@gmail.com
Follow me on Twitter: @jeremydnichols
Follow me on Instagram: @germynickels