I've been struggling over what I want to write here for a couple of days. I have a lot of thoughts that rip around inside my head, careering off the walls, generally causing havoc and driving those around me batty, but somehow none of them are cohesive enough to write down. Which is a bit of a silly thing to say, I suppose; few thoughts are cohesive until written down, and you don't really know what will be cohesive until you've figured out what sorts of words it's made of.
I'm sure it's a common ailment, but at some point along the line I appear to have picked up the notion that anything worth doing is worth doing not well, but perfectly. On the first try, ideally. Every post on this blog must be a magnum opus or it shouldn't be written at all. Every room I tidy must be spotless or I shouldn't even bother picking up my laundry. Every note I hum most be pitch perfect or it's not even worth reverberating in the first place. This tends to create an atmosphere of fearful inactivity, as I'm sure you can imagine.
One of the things I love to do is draw. I love to tell stories, and I love to draw, and sticking everything together makes comics, and I love comics. Through a combination of outside pursuits (well, if college counts as an "outside pursuit") and exhaustion I haven't sat down and drawn anything - let alone a page or two of comics - in about a year, maybe more. I did, just the other day, just to see if I still could. I couldn't. Not very well. My hands don't remember where the lines go, and all my old frustrations are fresh on my skin.
The thing about comics, especially when compared to writing, is you have to draw everything. You can't pick up a thesaurus and find a new word, you have to pick up your pencil and draw a new thing. Drawing takes time, and it's difficult (even if you're "good at it" which I purportedly am), and so much more of it depends on muscle memory than most people who don't draw would ever expect. So if you've never drawn something before, like, say, a tree, chances are the first time you try it it'll look like you tried to draw something you already know how to draw dressed up in an extremely bad tree costume. Which is why, being as I am an enormous horn-dog, all of the new things I draw end up looking curiously feminine. How a tree can have big hips I don't know, but I manage it. (Brings whole new meaning to the term "morning wood.")
This is all related, I swear.
Doing new things - like starting a blog, or drawing a tree - it's hard. Everyone knows it's hard. You don't ever have to tell someone that doing something difficult for the first time will be infuriating and impossible and if they get it right it was probably a fluke, because chances are they already know it, in their bones. You just have to do it. And then do it again. And again. And again. And again. And eventually, in fits and bursts and tiny miniscule almost-imperceptible steps, you get better, just by doing.
And sometimes it is really okay to improve by doing. By doing publicly, and loudly, and maybe even on the internet.
Today I wrote a blog post. Maybe tomorrow I will draw another tree.
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