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.