It's All performance Art 67

Gentle Reader, I think that as well as being gentler with certain friends, and as well as remembering to bring my own rubber bands when I am at the supermarket buying eggs, to keep the cartons secure, as New Year resolutions, I am going to add a third one.  I am also going to give up trying to write a new blog post every morning before I head off to work.  This has been putting on me a lot of pressure to perform, and I think it is also affecting my sleep.  Anyway, it is morning, and instead of fussing any further over this, I will simply save it to drafts and continue writing later today when I get home from work.

I think it's about being gentle with ourselves.  Right now I have just finished an early lunch and have been copying and pasting art images as part of my research for putting together future art classes, whenever that's going to happen.  This daily blog has been a daily discipline for me since I started writing it six years ago.  Six years!  Wow!  I think I'll still try to write something every day, but not in the mornings.  Or, I could start drafting it out in the mornings, but really I need to spend that time on breakfast and waking up gently.

I also wonder if that has been wrecking my sleep lately.  This pressure that I only put on myself to have to get something new, fresh and interesting and well-written published every single morning before I head out the door.  I seem to have become obsessively self-disciplined in the last several years and there are reasons for this.

After spending five years underemployed and trying to scratch out a living as as working artist and cleaning homes, I realized I would have to get back in the work force.  I could no longer rely on welfare because they had so tightened the rules that the options were limited to either get a job and do everything by their rules or go homeless and starve to death.  The pressure to be globally competitive was already really harsh and in pre-employment training they were really on our backs.  It was literally sink or swim.  So, I have been carrying this mandated anxiety with me ever since.  One simply can no longer relax.  Anywhere.  We are treated like commodities and we have to perform and this is really undermining and destroying our mental health.

In order to make myself marketable I have had to become super self-disciplined, and in order to do this well at work, I also have taken on those characteristics in other parts of my life.  So, writing this blog every morning.  Or doing art every day.  Or walking a minimum of six miles a day.  Or cleaning
 my apartment every morning.  It's all become so obsessive that I really want it all to stop for a while so I can rest a little.  But it isn't about to stop, and this machine of self-hatred is just going to keep chugging along as human lives are fed into it and destroyed.

I'm dancing as fast as I can.