crisis

a crisis of thoughts, recurrent waves of panic crashing over me pushing me so far under. grappling with logic to inflate my own lifebuoy. i don't know what i want to do. well secretly i do but i don't think i can, it's too late now mum and dad have spent too much money and i've spent too much time going in another direction. i wish i could go back in time and give my leaving cert self the knowledge i have now and if i could then chances are i wouldn't be sitting here right now. i want to make things with my hands i want to be a painter i want to be a drawer i love sketching people i want to make clothes and costumes i want to draw and sew and knit and put together i want to cook and bake and be happy. but it looks like i'll have to settle for something like writing about other people doing all these things and be grateful that i can still do them on the side as a pastime of sorts.

I met with Deirdre McQuillan yesterday which didn't go as well as I had hoped because i felt as if she was judging me for not knowing enough and thinking i was wasting her time. Well in fairness she was only there because she was obliged to out of decency at the request of a friend. thank you mckeevers. However after a stumbling and occasionally forced conversation i came away a little better off, having seen that a journalist can cover so many areas at one time. well, to an extent within the realms of lifestyle and fashion. She did say one thing that inspired me and gave me renewed energy at facing in this direction - that she things someone who is able to both write and illustrate is hard to come by. Now i haven't much faith in either my writing or illustrating skills but from years of meeting people who went through art college and seeing their artistic output i don't believe the standard is probably as high as i imagine it to be. i just need to find a confidence in my own capabilities and don't worry so much that there's this invisible standard that everyone else is at which is so much higher above where i currently stand. i am honestly my own worst critic. And writing. that's a little trickier. as an artist as long as you have the ideas then you're free to communicate them any which way you want. take cezanne for example; i don't believe he has exceptional technical ability but it's his ideas and the way people interpret his finished pieces that matters, and that they're his pieces which nobody else in the world would or could ever produce. With writing there are so many people all trying to write about the same thing so there's sure to be somebody out there who can do it better than you, it's easier to compare and contrast skills. Althouh Deirdre did say that when she started out she was writing for a women's magazine and she said it could take her two hours to write the first paragraph. Now she says she just sits down and it comes out; largely due to the fact that there's a deadline there and it doesn't matter what you've written as long as it's written on time. But she's got her name and reputation made at this stage. Anyways i suppose what she was trying to say was that it gets easier with practice.

She said she would be very interested in seeing someone who could both write and illustrate so I took that as the niche i could get into. My style of writing isn't very definitive so perhaps that's how i can stand out from the crowd. My hand has since been reacquainting itself with pencils.

And the waves are just waves; there is some calm in between the rushes of fretting. Out running this afternoon i came home along the canal and passed Irish Nationwide. The wall of glass windows was lit up showing the office floors, rows of desks and computers and the image of facts, figures, statistics, numbers, charts, reports, suits, monotonous information, and an altogether restrictive environment. When i complain over trivialities mum tells me to be thankful i have my health, and today when i saw the Irish Nationwide and saw it in light of my daily perturbance i was thankful for living in a world where i'm free to have the choice to worry about what i want and that i'm not a poor soul like Winston Smith.