Hey man, I know what I’m doing. Actually I sure don’t, but lets pretend that I do.
I have the second screening tomorrow for the independent short documentary I am in. You might have heard me mentioning it. I don’t know why you haven’t seen it, but that’s neither here nor there.
In the film, I talk about writing on this blog as regularly as possible, so I thought to myself I should bring something that would point the viewer in the direction of it.
I decided I would make flyers with a QR code to my Linktree. I kind of imagined them like the cover art I make for this blog on Canva. Everything is musical to me, so if those are the equivalent of album covers, I wanted these flyers to be kind of like concert posters. I really like the one I made today, it looks cooler in ink on paper, though.
I figure if people like me in the film, they would appreciate this blog because my dry, dark, yet sarcastically humorous voice is all over both of them. I want more attention for the thing I do better than anything else (writing). I’m proud of it. I might even stop apologizing for being proud of it and relentlessly promoting it. We’ll see. I suppose anyone that is sick of my self promotion is perfectly capable of ignoring me, in fact I’d be glad to introduce you to the un-follow functionality of your favorite social media platform.
There’s nothing wrong with finding out that you can do something reasonably well and wanting people to know, especially if you’ve got the old “gifted child praise kink” thing going on, low self-esteem, and a requirement for outside validation. My last post was about this being the thing i have going on, with not much else. This is the thing I do, because I have the tools to do it.
I was in therapy talking about that child (me) today. A lot of people would always say I was very bright but very lazy. I’m not sure I am lazy though; I just can’t do things that I don’t give a fuck about (see: yard work, small talk or algebra). I have an extremely low tolerance for doing things that don’t interest me, very much to my personal detriment. The more I learn about ADHD, the more I understand it.
If something does interest me, I fixate on it and work endlessly, like writing. Think of all of the work it takes to write 500 posts, improve the craft of writing them, make cover art, and find ways to get more people to read it. It has never felt like work, though. If I were indeed lazy, I wouldn’t have done any of that. If there’s something I want to do, I do it all the way. Unfortunately, a lot of the things I want to do are extremely destructive, self defeating maladaptive behaviors, naturally I do them until they’re overdone, and then try to find a better way to do them.
My therapist wasn’t the only person I was talking about my childhood with in these past few days.
The other day, I called my father, who I hadn’t spoken to in 9 months. I don’t know why I called him, but we were on the phone for over an hour. It was far from a light and jovial conversation (there’s a lot of heavy stuff there), but there is something nice about connecting with someone who has known me very literally my whole life. Being estranged from a parent is maybe as difficult as dealing with the more challenging parts of their personalities, we’ll see.
He said something that a lot of other people (including my therapist) say to me: to give myself a break. He mentioned that I wasn’t dealt a great hand and brought up some early stuff.
I have learning disabilities, besides just ADHD. I have small motor skills deficiencies, so I couldn’t write (especially in cursive), and I could never stay organized. School was hell for me. Imagine that I was in both gifted and talented and special education classes. I have a tic in my neck that has never been explained by anyone in a position to explain things like that, and I’m smaller in stature than your average person. I was not athletic, never cared about sports (I still don’t), and very geeky. For these things, I was on the wrong side of a lot of bullying, until I was popular in high school for being a token stoner. That’s why I was always nice to the kids that everybody picked on because I knew what it was like. This isn’t a self pity trip, man. I write a lot about what a fucked up an adult i am, it seems pertinent to to include that I had a hard time with life as a child, you know, for a bit of context.
My father also reminded me of something I haven’t even considered in at least 20 years, and that is the fact that I used to have anxiety attacks at a very young age, before people talked about having anxiety attacks like they do now. I didn’t know what was happening to me, and it scared me terribly. My dad said my parents had to just hold me until they would pass. That’s crazy to have some fact of childhood revealed that is so connected to the anxiety attacks I still have. Now i actually know what is happening to me, and it’s a little less terrifying…its more like discomfort unless it’s a really bad one.
Oops, I set out to write about making self-promotional flyers for my blogging and slipped into some deep childhood shit. Well, that’s why I like writing because I never know where it’s going to go, and the process is cathartic.
Of course, I’m going to keep linking “Chamber Music” (the film) because I’m proud of it, and I want people to see it. Click the first link on this webpage and enter the password (sober):
I am not in the financial position to leave out the link where someone (like you) could buy me a coffee for all of my hard work: https://ko-fi.com/Manage/
