Ironically now that the pressure is off — I still find I have things I’d perhaps write about.
Perhaps. What is this perhaps.
Unsure what green light I’m waiting for, blue risographed permission slip entreating me to embark on a field trip somewhere I’ve been before.
The last three days I’ve been mainly working on graphic design for a project, highly detailed work in Illustrator. Which, after two decades in Photoshop and only a handful of days of diligent work, I often times am flummoxed why a point converts to a line, why a symbol didn’t copy over a cropping mask, why the files take minutes to save. Flummoxed like visiting a foreign country, stumbling over the proper predicate form of a verb conjugation.
For everything that Photoshop does well, there’s a precision to Illustrator and vector editing in general – a lack of forgiven, a lack of fudging things.
When I let the flummoxing and input/output angers go, usually I google the problem. Ther/ an answer, if I make the time to ask the right question.
It’s good work. I’m worried about hidden typos or errors not likely caught. Can’t google those kind of problems away.
When I first sat down to tackle the project, the critical voice, and I can’t emphasis this enough, it’s a perfect ventriloquist, hypnotizing into a depression the thoughts, “you won’t know how to do this, there’s no way you can figure out how to put all of this together, it’s way too much work and not enough time to learn the details and navigate all of the info and folder structures and then put everything together.” Then it speaks in some other language, of abject fear. Like somehow there will be a firing squad at the end. Somehow you can’t understand it but this isn’t what you should do.
I imagined turning back before the journey had begun – letting someone else down. That, deeply, for some reason, felt like the worse failure. So instead I trudged on, one screen at a time. And the fear doesn’t go away – in fact the resistance is still there, shapeshifting, counterarguing, creating soft bunny cages.
You can’t google away your fears, or think them away. But you can google small problems that are getting in the way.
Can you write away your fears?
You can write through them.
Design your life through then.
Speak loosely held guesses about your true self, letting the nature of action silence the inner critic.
Fourth Context 