Day 293: Facing your weaknesses

Day recharging, sipping coffee, playing guitar.

It's interesting coming back to the guitar after years away, seeing with more perspective the areas in which I am competent, and the areas in which I definitely am not.

I've owned a guitar for something like 18 years, but only spent a few of those really playing. And the majority of even those years was not spent productively, but mostly thrashing around with the same old power chords and palm-muted rhythms I could run through without thinking.

I learnt that punk stuff early, found a comfort zone, and stayed there. I picked up technique: plucking, fretting, forming chords, strumming rhythmic patterns, bends and vibrato, hammer-ons and pull-offs - anything I could acquire through rote learning, practice absentmindedly while watching boxed sets or waiting for World of Warcraft groups to form. Running chromatic exercises up and down the neck, chugging through the same 1-4-5 chord progressions, was an outlet for nervous energy, an idling routine, a way to pass the time. Like cruising the streets on Grand Theft Auto. Like rolling a spliff.

But I was always naturally inept when it came to musicality. I can't sing a note. I never studied music theory. I didn't have much sense of rhythm. That whole side of things was a foreign language I fundamentally did not understand.

So when it came to transcribing songs, knowing the chords you can play in a key, understanding chord progressions, playing to a backing track, playing with another guitarist, any of the actual useful skills, I didn't have a clue. I could follow tabs and drill instructions into my fingers, deploy them robotically, but I didn't know how to feel the music, flow with it, play it. If music is a language, a form of communication, then I had memorised the letters of the alphabet, some simple words, but I didn't know how to speak.

And I was aware of this. And I hated it. Sensing that there was a skill that you had to feel your way through, that you couldn't pick up from a book, a skill some people seemed to just innately have, and I evidently did not, filled me with feelings of inadequacy. I have always had trouble processing inadequacy. Even as a pipsqueak child I was a perfectionist - I held myself to impossibly high standards; if I was good at something I was not good enough, and if I was bad at something then it was the end of the world.

I'm not sure exactly what it was, slight ADHD or OCD tendencies, anger management issues, executive function problems, neuroticism, the early seeds of depression - but when I was young if things didn't go my way, if I felt myself to be lacking at all, I would fly off the handle, fill with rage, fall into the depths of despondency. I threw tantrums a lot, felt an exquisite wounding from the world, had a heightened sensitivity to injustice. "It's not fair!" I would yell, ten years old, flinging my paints across the room after a picture hadn't turned out the way I wanted. "It's not fair! I can't do it!"

And although as I grew I learnt not to vocalise my frustrations, they would still arise when I picked up the guitar. And so rather than face the areas in which I was weak and work out how to improve, I instead put them in a room that I refused to enter, and went off to play Basket Case with the gain turned all the way up once again.

* * *

What I'm starting to comprehend about this year of daily blogging is that much of it is about altering my automatic responses to life. Through genes, through development, responses to life events, myriad factors, I have built up many responses to life that are incredibly harmful. Procrastination, addiction, learned helplessness, perfectionism, rumination.

But none of these behaviours are set in stone. They are automatic because they were learnt, and then left to run beneath the level of conscious attention. Like bad habits on the guitar, racing through scales out of time, holding tension in the fingers, pressing too hard on the strings, they may have seemed right or easy at one time, and then through repetition become ingrained into routine.

But they can be altered. How? Just as with the guitar, you slow right down, you break it into manageable tasks, you get those right, and you repeat, in small amounts, day after day after day after day.

And the areas in which you particularly struggle? These aren't to be avoided. They're to be welcomed. Faced. Embraced. Again, you find the smallest thing that you can learn to do - hear the difference between major and minor chords, write a paragraph in your diary, walk your overweight arse to the front door and back - whatever your personal fight is - and you do that again and again. And build slowly up.

You don't have to be anyone but yourself. The demons of the world attack each of us in unique ways. All you have to do is go to bed having gone to that area inside yourself that you fear to tread, and having pushed yourself an inch further than you did yesterday. Make this into a habit and you will be surprised where you end up.

It is in accepting our weaknesses that we overcome them. Along with acceptance of our strengths, which can be equally difficult. And it is here, in a process never completed, that we begin to become ourselves.

Day 289: Middling

Day has been fine. Fair. Middling. Absolutely acceptable. Head was gooped up and mushy this morning, but slurped coffee and slouched around until I came awake. Played a bit of a new free-to-play PlayStation shooter that everyone is raving about with Alex and Mike, we got shot accurately and often, which was impressive to say how much the three of us were flailing around madly. I imagine it was like having to hit a gaggle of burning piglets. Charging every which way, bumping into walls, flinging ourselves off ledges. Still, the enemy players managed to repeatedly make short work of us. Well done, enemy players, well done.

Spent the evening editing photos for work’s social media, after filling my camera with shots over quiet shifts last week. I put my kit lens back on, mostly at 18-24mm ish, after months shooting with only my 50mm prime, and it was great to experiment with the wider angles. My camera, as I think with all DSLRs cheaper than about a grand, is a cropped sensor, so it only captures the centre of the image - so with a 50mm lens you’re really zoomed in. It’s great for a can of beer at work, a close-up of someone’s face, but for anything wider you have to stand down the other end of the pub, which isn’t ideal. There were some nice pictures came out of it all, and it’s always good to know I’ve got the next week or so’s posts lined up. It’s just another stress when everything is getting on top of me to know I’m going to have to take time out of an already busy shift to figure out something to photograph, line it up, edit it, fiddle with computers and phones. Everyone in the company, friends of bar staff, have been saying how good the pics are, but how my brain takes that is now there’s an expectation that I have to consistently live up to, which expectation is obviously unfounded and it’s only a matter of time before they all discover what a revolting fraud I am.

Idiot brain. But anyway, good to have a load of pics on my Google Drive and for that pressure to recede for a week or two.

Other than that, had a day of chores, washing and the like. Played guitar, did the exercises I am currently working on, little 1-2-3. 2-3-4 patterns up and down the major scale, outside and inside string picking, strumming specific numbers of strings, that sort of thing. Basic, boring stuff, but it’s my homework, so I’m doing it. And then a bit of improvising over a blues shuffle with the minor pentatonic in positions one and two, which I’m too embarrassed to do with the amp on lest my neighbours hear how much of a beginner I am, but it’s still lots of fun.

Work early tomorrow, best get off now. Ta ra.

……

Music: Nothing’s Real but Love, by Rebecca Ferguson. You know what, I didn’t know this was a song by an X-Factor finalist. That’s because I’m not a complete loser, like you are. I don’t waste my time with that rubbish. I just play videogames inexpertly against teenagers and work in a pub. But this song is good! Nothing is real but love. Cups. Shoes. Payment protection insurance. It’s all made up. In our heads. But love is what moves the cosmos beneath its shifting illusory forms. Maybe a shame it takes a reality television star to remind us of that, but whatever. Take grace where you find it, I say. Byeee!

Day 286: Strings

Restrung my electric guitar tonight, my old Strat, old ramshackle Fat Strat, humbuckered and notched and dusty between the machine heads. My fingers rusty and ungainly. Remembering clunky bits of riffs, old C and G and D, old A minor, old chugging power chords, not a lot else.

At 15 I wanted to sound like Billie Joe Armstrong and Tom DeLonge. Memorised some tabs, ingrained them deep, till they were chiselled roads. But no avenues between them, no knowledge of landscape, no room for musical life to build and develop. I was not naturally talented and it made me feel like a failure and so, after years getting nowhere, I gave up.

But trying at things at which we are not naturally talented is often where we meet ourselves, where we transform ourselves. Methodically practising at weaknesses can be so rewarding. I picked the guitar back up a few years ago, went through an online beginner’s course, and though much of it seemed so simple to be unworthy of my attention, plenty of it was not, and I did it all anyway, forced myself not to skip whatever was either boring or hard.

There’s a correct pace at which everything happens. You could call it the Tao of the universe. I didn’t want to go at that pace at 15, I wanted to leap to chugging punk rhythms and lightning riffs, to get the reward without the effort. Learning notes on the neck and lackadaisical country western strumming patterns and arcane modal shapes was too dull, too uncool. So I skipped what I hated, avoided what I couldn’t do, and instead laid down these fragile thin roads of knowledge that linked to nothing - roads over which I could run back and forth, but from which I could never deviate.

I fell away from guitar again after the beginner’s course a few years ago. But I think I’d like to get back into it now. When I’m not working or writing it’s a nice hobby, learning a new skill, that does not come easily to me, and thus is probably worthwhile. Going slowly, assiduously, enjoying the difficulty and the glacial sense of progress, enjoying it for its own sake. And it sure beats videogames, YouTube videos, phone scrolling, as something to add structure to an evening.

……

Music: Strange Brew, by Cream. Bit of psychedelic blues rock, just what my guitar-awoken ears are craving. Oh yes.