This is the hardest part for me. Stopping and sitting and starting. I have a list of subjects to write about and several draft posts, including the jeweler’s bench critique I have been avoiding for over a year. Almost as long as I’ve been unemployed, as it was the first thing I really did during my unemployment, spending what at the time felt like almost a hundred dollars (maybe a little more, though not much) that I didn’t feel safe to spend.

I still seldom feel safe to spend. It feels like the utmost indulgence and frivolity to buy some discount metal or beads to do some jewelry work.

It feels difficult to lament my perceived woes, especially about money. I think that is also a reason I don’t post too much. I am full of stories and I worry that those stories are just too full of woe-is-me and I fear that it’s not vulnerability, rather something else, even if it is my perceived truth.

Once I get started I tend to flow, most of the time. Until I get too self-conscious and dry up. Maybe I’ll just put this one in draft mode until I decide to write more later or to not post it at all.

[Two days later? Three days?]

Putting it on the shelf just means forgetting it, adding it to the mental mountain of things that I tell myself to feel bad about. It’s not that this kind of work makes me happy. I do feel compelled towards it. I tell myself that it is important and I do feel that it is, for myself. The dopamine hit of someone else being interested, inspired, moved, motivated, or just plain giving some little care is real. It’s also not something I can do it for, except as a hope in an indeterminate future.

I do it for myself. I do it because it is doing something, otherwise it is just sitting and staring at the computer screen, staring at YouTube videos I have no connection to and no interest in. Staring internally at the idea that I need, need, to create. The compulsion is there, the belief, the knowing that it is something I am driven to do, even if it struggle with the “Just Do It” part.

I can sit down and force myself to start and maybe the words flow forth, as they are now, and that is part of how I know that it is the right enough thing to do.

I am also doing it to fill space, I am struggling with beginning a new chapter of new information and it is just so big and so late feeling. I don’t have the money to invest in myself again, for the unknownth time to pay for training. I have to do it on my own and that is scary as well. Difficult, hard to begin, especially when the only job I can get right now and not screw up is so draining on my physical being, which becomes a drain on my mental being.

It’s not as many words as it felt like, still, it was action and I can string that action into the next action.