Disability & Disorientation

There have been plenty of times when I've said that I generally lack ambition.   In art school my professors talked about a drive to create, an insatiable need to keep working.  They even used it as a cautionary note about choosing a partner who would understand and give us the necessary intangible room for art-making.  I always thought that that was something that applied to other people, not me.  After all, I had never created anything great. But times like this, more than anything else, show me what that need to create really means.  


Most of my friends keep telling me I'm lucky.  I'm lucky to have so much time to sit and watch movies, reruns of Weeds, to read a book or just not to do anything.  And isn't that really enviable?  Don't we all want extra leeway at work, plenty of down time, guilt-free television watching, an excuse not to accomplish anything for a while?

And maybe we do, generally speaking.  Maybe I do.  But when it comes down to it, I just can't enjoy it. I can't.  


Do we call that an unfortunate excess of ambition that I'm suffering from? Maybe.  All I know is when I wake up in the morning and realize I have all of these songs, all these words running through
my head and I'm not able to get them out in the way I'm used to, it's hard to get up and get going. I feel extra needy of support from my friends.  When I'm by myself, I start feeling like life means less,
somehow. This is really unusual for me. Usually, alone time is full of creative energy.    


This is all to say that being prohibited -- physically or otherwise -- from creating in the way we are used to can be very traumatizing for an artist.  It removes part of our sense of belonging in the world. I'm not sure how to get around this.  I guess the only choice is to find ways of creating anyway, ways of doing what I do anyway, despite physical limitations. 


So far I've a few things that work.  Among them:

• Voice memos.  Unable to write as quickly with my left hand, I've spent more and more time hiding in far corners of the house whispering voice journals, secrets, letters I'll never send.  This amounts to my daily writing exercises, and even though speaking is hard to acclimate to, it's something.
• Talking about my work.  Some of these Evernote voice notes are about my manuscript, and I'm seriously hoping for a chance to talk some things over with a writing buddy sometime soon.  At least then I'll be able to create a list of work to do when I can really type again.
• Karajan!  I may not be able to practice my usual stack of songs on the piano, but plunking out things by ear should be fine, right?  Playing by ear has always been my weakest point, so I shelled out 15 bucks for this iPhone/iPod Touch app and wow, was it worth it.  I've spent the past few days drilling on intervals and recognizing augmented, diminished, and suspended chords.  This is what it's going to take for me to realize this is just another skill, and not a terribly hard one for me to learn.  I want to write out a piano version of "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod" by the end of the week.

Other than that, I'm just left to wait it out, watch those movies, and hope my best friends are able to make a little special time for me while I wander around like a lost lamb.