It’s been months since I had an appoint­ment with my ther­a­pist. I’ve need­ed the time to work on myself before mak­ing fur­ther progress with him; a sign that I’m at a point where there’s a sense of direc­tion, instead of relent­less con­fu­sion and dread. Now it’s a mat­ter of absorb­ing the con­cepts I should know by now, devel­op­ing health­i­er emo­tion­al habits, and let­ting time heal what rea­son can­not. As my body recov­ers from the phys­i­cal reper­cus­sions of depres­sion, find­ing the ener­gy to do these things gets a bit eas­i­er each sea­son¹.

As a result, I’ve been pick­ing up new respon­si­bil­i­ties in my pri­ma­ry rela­tion­ship, which I have to care­ful­ly bal­ance with my per­son­al goals. Maybe that’s why my wants have become such sim­ple mat­ters. Some days, I look for­ward to noth­ing more than eat­ing ice cream after din­ner, or play­ing a game until my thumbs are raw. The dis­til­la­tion of my dreams has giv­en me anoth­er child­hood, which I’m deter­mined not to squan­der.

Part of the rea­son I stopped tak­ing pic­tures is because I need­ed to believe Heather was real. To prove to myself that she would­n’t sud­den­ly dis­ap­pear and only exist as a col­lec­tion of pix­els on my screen, like oth­ers lovers of my past². Mostly it was because every­thing was ter­ri­ble, and just being con­scious was a bur­den. Some days I was too sad to walk or eat, let alone decide what lens to put on my cam­era or how to frame a shot. The start of any rela­tion­ship tends to be a time of won­der and excite­ment for me, but I don’t remem­ber those years with par­tic­u­lar fond­ness³.

Now that she’s giv­ing me the time to pur­sue the goals I so choose, I have the chance to learn new skills and delve into unfa­mil­iar medi­ums. The prob­lem is that I con­stant­ly feel like an adult stuck with a child’s vocab­u­lary. Most recent­ly, when it comes to music: the com­plex emo­tions I want to express all end up com­ing out hap­py or sad, major or minor. It’s frus­trat­ing when any direc­tion I take is met with the real­iza­tion of how lit­tle I know about the­o­ry, how lim­it­ed my gui­tar skills are, how unfa­mil­iar the gaps between keys on the piano have become.

An added chal­lenge is that I’m not sat­is­fied with medi­oc­rity, or even ade­qua­cy. I want to bend gen­res. To do some­thing my own, and fuck­ing love it. But I need to under­stand so much more before I can take apart what works and recon­struct it as some­thing new, while still mak­ing musi­cal sense and sound­ing good.

My moti­va­tion has always been dri­ven by the results I can achieve. When it feels like it’ll be years before I’m at where I want to be in any­thing I want to do, the biggest bot­tle­neck in my long­ing to cre­ate seems to be patience.

Maybe that’s why I still come back here, even though I’ve giv­en up being as clever or com­pe­tent as oth­er writ­ers. I used to enjoy hav­ing my own voice; now all I’m left with is a sense of hon­esty and a desire to express. The trend seems to be mov­ing toward small­er snip­pets of infor­ma­tion to catch shrink­ing atten­tion spans — click­bait lis­ti­cles and pic­tures of pithy phras­es in fan­cy type­faces — a direc­tion I’ve been active­ly resist­ing. I don’t want to say any­thing unless my words will mat­ter, and noth­ing sig­nif­i­cant in my life nowa­days can be summed up in 140 char­ac­ters.

1. There have been many steps back on the jour­ney for­ward, enough for the progress to be indis­cernible from a week-to-week (or even month-by-month) basis. [↩]
2. It’s strange to real­ize that my dri­ve to pho­to­graph things was par­tial­ly a way of deal­ing with my aban­don­ment issues. [↩]
3. At least I feel secure in the knowl­edge that Heather stuck by me when I was lit­er­al­ly at my worst. [↩]