Me, as an artist

Okay so the best friend sent me to this today. I've read the Ira Glass quote before, but I tend to forget it. Mostly because I choose to live my life in fear of judgement and failure. Rather than to push myself to  work towards something greater, because pushing myself like that hurts. There is this quote by the Marines, "Pain is only weakness leaving the body." I am unwilling to push through that pain of judgement and fear and to fight for who I could be. It is much easier to wrap myself up in the cloak of imagination, procrastination, maybes, and excuses.

In short, I am lazy and I don't want to work to be good at something. I want to wave a wand and be magically perfect at everything I try.

Today, my thought process magically stumbled onto why I am so lazy. I am not afraid of physical work, I can sit and knit, sew, draw, what have you for hours on end. Unless I am being pressured. Pressure makes me turn into a blubbering lump of a human being. Because pressure to me equals harassment and bullying. I have trained my mind to use fear as a motivator, negative reenforcement as a teacher, and pain as a reward.

So when someone says to me, "Hey Lilly are you going to be finished with those by 10, because we need them by then." I hear this, "Oh my god Lilly you are SO slow! If you don't get those done by 10 my personal feelings about you will be forever ruined and I will make sure everyone else hates you too!"

And then I go on to freak out about how terrible I am at this and how I'm never going to have it done by then, wasting valuable time wallowing rather than working. I am so afraid of making a mistake that I shut down and stop functioning. When I really need to do my best work and accept that it isn't going to be perfect. Sometimes people are going to be unhappy with you. All that matters is that you had an experience and you learned from it.