As I said in a previous post, I’ve decided that my creative endeavors would be better supported if I had a better work environment, so I took a spare bedroom and turned it into an office. It includes a desk that’s in a big U shape, giving both me and my wife a nice L-shaped work area.
1.
I’ve been seeing a therapist since September. He’s been doing the difficult task of helping me break the habits of isolation that come from a lifetime of social phobia. He’s good at what he does. He often has concrete suggestions, both for social challenges I face every day at work, as well as unexpected stumbling blocks that crop up as I begin to get more engaged in my community. I could say a lot about this, and I guess I probably will in a future blog post. But this post isn’t about that. It’s about the impact he’s had on this blog, and a conversation I had with him on Wednesday.
Now that I’m working to improve myself, I’m hearing from all kinds of sources that there is a method to achieving long-term goals. Start small, incredibly small, but be consistent.
For example, the idea goes, if your goal is to get into physical shape, going to the gym just five minutes a day can make a huge difference, not because you burn so many calories in those five minutes, but because of the invaluable habit it gradually starts to create.
And so, when my therapist suggested I start writing again every day, I immediately recognized that it was a good idea. In fact, it’s something I should have started a while ago. I’ve been doing it for three weeks now.
I’ve decided to start writing again. There is a collection of short stories I’d like to finish — an ambitious collection that may end up being 500 pages long. But that’s a huge weight to lift, and I’m in no shape to lift it after a full ten years of no exercise.
So what creative work should I do next? Well, there is this blog. But I want this blog to become a constant, something I do every day, regardless of whatever my main creative effort is at any given time.
For my main creative effort, the likeliest candidate is a computer game. That’s right, a computer game, one that I began working on a full eleven years ago and nearly finished that year, until life got in the way and several years went by. It’s an ambitious game that I’m proud of, and since it’s so close to done, it makes sense for me to do that next.
Continue reading I decide my best first move is to pick up dust
Not sure where to begin, so just beginning.
I seem to recall reading a book about people who were comparatively indifferent to normal stimuli. For these people, good was no better than bad. Or maybe good was better, maybe they knew this on a cognitive level, but the difference felt so slight that no effort to achieve good ever seemed worth it. I thought I read an anecdote about such a person being slow to run from a burning building. They didn’t feel that running was so much better than staying put.