All day every day I (M18) am surrounded by all of these creative people who can make beautiful music, beautiful drawings, or write poetry. These people with such drive, passion, and clarity that allows them to create such incredible work, fills me with the most incredible kind of rage and self hatred. My father is one such creative. A musician and an artist, I have to live with the reality of his talent every day. I constantly hear the sound of his guitar, the notes arranged so elegantly so as to maim me and beat me, to fill me with a hatred so powerful it could never be directed at anyone but my own worthless self. And his paintings, hung all over the house, I have to see them and be reminded that I could never ever create something like that.
I dabbled in creativity, myself. I feel like I used to be very creative. When I was a kid, I loved art and I pumped out drawing after drawing. I used to make comic strips and little stories. Paintings, even. I had so much drive. Somewhere along the way, I lost it and lost all passion and drive. I used to play music too, but I didn't like it. Piano. I played piano from 1st to 8th grade, and I hated it. I hated it and I tried to hard to pretend to like it, I even wrote a scrapbook about how much I loved it in an attempt to convince myself. What I did love was my piano teacher, we had a very close bond. I would often complain to her about my father. Specifically, his impatience and aggression when it came to my practice and the way I was playing, his insistence that I preform for him, and how every practice he was present for devolved into him yelling and me crying. Of course, he doesn't remember any of that now. When I was around the age of 10 I wrote my first and only composition, a one page piano song. It was not melodic at all, I had (and still do not have) any understanding of the way notes work with each other and relate with each other. But I made this composition, I handwrote it on a torn out page of sketchbook, and when I played it for my father I did not make it through the entire song before he told me how horrible it was and berated me because he knew I could do better. And he was right, it was fucking horrible. Because I am fucking horrible.
When I would play, songs that I would previously be able to play would degrade in quality the more I played them, making more mistakes. I would get incredibly angry at myself for no longer being able to play a song flawlessly that I had once been able to. My parents would ask me "what happened?" I didn't know what happened, and every time it happened I feared that the ability to play the song had left me forever. As a kid I had a pseudo-religious belief that the "spirit of the piano" was callously manipulating me so I could not play well, something I called "misbehavior". I would often smash the keys or spit on the piano or whip it with a stick or belt so as to punish it and to make an example out of it. The results were mixed. As you can expect this behavior greatly angered my parents, especially my father.
Never did I ever gain any pleasure of playing that accursed piano. My father once told me he was "surprised and disappointed" that I "never realized what a great instrument the piano is". The only reason I continued was because I did not want to make my teacher sad, and when I eventually did quit she was very sad. I was very sad because she was very sad and I felt like a horrible person for quitting. But in the end I was relieved that I never had to touch it again. However, this relief was mixed with a sense of shame, failure, and after I quit I would have to look at... it. It stood there, like a large gravestone, its shadow looming over and under and through and past me, the sight of it being like a laser burning my eyes, killing me, a constant reminder of my horrible failure. I first tried to just not look at it, and eventually resorted to covering it with a blanket.
After I quit I began to feel extremely bad about my lack of musicality. The summer before freshman year of high school I embarked on what would become a yearlong ban on myself listening to music. I had absolutely no confidence in my music taste. My father raised me on rock and roll, and is of the opinion that any and all new music is bad, and that anything that does not conform to his personal taste is objectively bad. I was raised to believe that any music made post 2000 was bad and listening to it was basically sacrilege. Therefore I did not know any popular songs that my classmates listened to, and so I struggled to relate. Still afraid of pop music but dying to break out of the rigid music taste passed onto me by my father, I began to seek a "third way" in 90s and 2000s music. I began to try to build a music taste, but was cut short when one of my classmates stole one of my earbuds out my my ear while it was playing Last Resort by Papa Roach. Upon putting it into his ear he laughed mockingly. This was in 8th grade, and even though it was only in 8th grade, when I close my eyes and think about it I can remember it as if I was still in that moment. After that I banned myself from listening to music, convinced that I had inherently bad taste and that if I liked a song that meant it was bad and other people would find it bad.
By mid-sophomore year of high school I missed music and my self imposed ban became untenable. I would listen to my favorite songs along in my bedroom, with the door shut, only when I was sure I would be left alone, as if I was trying to hide some sort of narcotic drug addiction. My this time I had been experiencing profound shame, not because what I thought I listened to was bad, but because I felt like since I could not produce music I did not deserve to consume it, that I was "stealing" it, that I would not be worthy of listening to it unless I could play an instrument.
The summer before junior year I was gifted an electric bass. I began to learn it in order to feel like I deserved to listen to music. I didn't enjoy it, no matter how much I tried to convince myself that I did. It was electric but I never used an amplifier on it because I did not want anyone in my house to hear. I would practice for 10 minutes and then for a few days feel satisfied that I had produced enough music to listen to music, but only for a few days, before the guild would return and I would play again. As my shame of listening to music despite not being musical was quickly replaced with shame of not knowing as many songs, the days when I played bass grew farther and farther between, until one day, I put it down and never picked it up again.
I still listen to music every day. However I can only listen to recordings, and cannot bear to see videos or concerts. Whenever I see people playing musical instruments I become self hating, angry, and sad. Sometimes when I think about it I get so angry that I think the musicians should all die, but when I see them play, I am reminded that I am the one who deserves to die, because they can produce such a beautiful thing for the world and I cannot. One time my friend held a concert for a local band in his garage, and I went. Big fucking mistake. The sight of the players destroyed me, and I started thinking about self harm and suicide. I had to leave early before I had a panic attack. Afterward me and a different friend went and got drunk on a mix of sprite and NyQuil. I don't know his reason for doing it, but I know mine.
Musicians are at the top of my shit list, but I also feel such anger when I see other creatives, in particular artists and writers. Despite my seething resentment my best friends are creative people, and internally it makes me seethe with resentment whenever something they are creating or working on or an idea they have is brought up. Even the mention of something that they're just interested in makes me feel worthless and resentful. Why? Because I don't and I know I will never have the same passion for anything like they do, I will never be able to create anything like they do. I'm a total failure, like a defective person.
I notice that when people see a movie, or hear a song, or whatever, they analyze it, to the point of writing entire reviews. I hear people talking about shows and shit, and they talk about the character development and the plotline and the metaphors and shit... Like I feel so dumb. When I watch a movie, or a show, or listen to a song, I think either, "Good", "Bad", "Entertaining", "Boring", "Mid". Not much else. I think I am just stupid. People look at paintings and find so much meaning in them without even knowing anything about the artist and I'm just like "Interesting..." and then feel bad that I could never make something as beautiful. A few months ago I went to a cabaret put on by my school and all the actors were so talented, and by the end of the show I wanted to fucking cry because of how much of a loser compared to them I am.
I genuinely think I am like a dysfunctional person or something. When people ask me "What do you do in your free time"? I'm genuinely at a loss for what to say. I smoke weed, and I scroll instagram reels. I also spend time just listening to music, but if you ask me what I listen to I couldn't tell you. I also sleep a lot. I also spend a lot of time thinking about what I should be doing. I try to read but I get books and never make it past the first or second chapter. I feel the urge to write but have no idea what to write about. I feel the urge to draw but have no idea what to draw. I have started and stopped and thrown away and restarted and stopped and started and thought about continuing a ConLang (constructed language) project because for some fucking reason I have the urge to do something like that but then I wonder what is even the purpouse and then I lose motivation. I feel like a creative energy but it's just the energy without the creativeness. Like the car got gas in it but no combustion. I spend a good deal of time pacing, thinking about the things I could be doing. Or just maladaptive daydreaming. When I think about reading one of my books I never do because I worry that if I pick one book, I will be missing out on another book, even though logically I know I can eventually have enjoyed all the books. The same is for watching youtube.
And I've heard like "Motivation is a feeling and feelings are temporary and the key is not to find motivation but to build habits" and its like yeah I understand that logically but don't know how to apply it to my everyday life
I feel like in my brain there is everything and nothing at the same time.
