AngelTear

I want to feel a passion for the things I like, and stop feeling it for these things I don’t really like. Does this sentence even make sense? Let’s make it different: I want to like the things I know I like. But perhaps I’m confusing terms. When one says he likes writing, it’s a lie. What he likes, is the feeling after finishing writing, or the product. The act itself is a pain. At most, one can like the oblivion the act of writing gives him, or the challenge. Same with music. One likes playing an instrument, but all the necessary learning and the training… no one likes that.

What I want to achieve is a level of self-brainwashing that would let me concentrate on the end and go through the means. If one can exercise scales and arpeggios with the thought of a concert to play in mind, it’s even enjoyable. Shift of focus. Or rather, imbuing actions with meaning. I want to live in a different world where I don’t study, but I learn. Where I don’t train, I train for a future concert. What one likes is taking steps towards the meaning.

Two main problems: the repetitiveness issue, and the issue of belief.

Maintaining the necessary level of motivation for a boring, repetitive action over a long span of time is increasingly difficult, to the point of alienation and nausea, and to Sartre’s Nausea.

But the most pressing point for me is the other one: I can’t really believe in anything to begin with. Why? Because I am self-aware. Rationally self-aware, and emotionally dead, but still. I know I won’t ever, ever play a concert. I know I won’t ever have a band. Also, I know I will never be good enough; therefore I will never have a chance to get anywhere with it (and I don’t mean it in a “having success” way, but simply in a “being able to create something and be satisfied of your own effort” way). If there’s nothing to look forward to, the shift of focus is impossible, my actions will never have meaning.

And of course, the opposite as well. I can play videogames as much as I like and only pretend to myself that I feel guilty about it afterwards, because I know I will never get anywhere; I may as well, do something just as pointless, but that I enjoy doing.

There it is, the real issue underneath, blocking everything else. Self-deprecation. Absolute lack of anything vaguely similar to a ruined black-and-white, out-of-focus photograph of self-esteem.  Strangely, though, I consider myself just good enough to know that I’m not wrong about this. There was a wonderful quotation about some aspiring writers who are too intelligent for their own good, and tend to give up soon after beginning because they know that their current works are just horrible, and cannot stand it. They would become amazing, if they gave it time and went through a slow learning process; it also implies that others, more mediocre ones, go through this necessary training phase without noticing the insignificant nothing they are and perhaps will always be. {The purposely cruel choice of word is due to envy on my side, and it is not meant to offend anyone}

Well, despite knowing all of this, I still can’t shake off the sensation that I know that I’m not one of those. I am the only exponent of a third category, the ones that are no good, never will be, and know it. For one who has no idea of what self-esteem is, that’s pretty presumptuous, isn’t it?

My only wish right now is for someone to slap me in the face and then hold me tight until I start believing that maybe I am worth just a bit more than a speck of dust. (After all, the reason why I can’t keep a diary regularly, is the underlying feeling that I am not worth keeping…)