GYSO Drawing Part 26 - Positivity
Published: 2020-02-16
Introduction
Thor:
I don’t know what to put here. As in, this blog post. I’m the literary spark for this episode of GYSO drawing. Today, I am overwhelmed. In fact, I’ve felt constantly overwhelmed for quite a few weeks now. Or actually, it comes and goes in waves through the years.
Tim:
You know that famous “chicken and the egg” problem? I’m sure you do. Its the one where someone pretending to be smart ask you if the chicken or the egg came first. Its the egg, of course, since the first “chicken” that could genetically be considered a chicken by our standards would have had to hatch from an egg layed by something not a “chicken” by our standards.
I digress.
The question I ask is this: Was GYSO the catalyst for our lives going down these paths, or is it the symptom of the path our lives were already going down?
This is going to be one of those “therapy” post, except this time with less self loathing and more character development. Enjoy. Or not. I ain’t your daddy issues.
What went right?
Thor:
Today I’m finding it really hard to focus on all the positive that’s been happening in my life. For the past few months I’ve been in the most fruitful emotional roller coaster of my life. A lot of it has shown through GYSO posts like Krampus and Trust. Today is no different. Let’s go on a quest to find some positive extracts from my life as it is now.
So one tangible development I’ve noticed is that I shut down when other people start talking emotions and letting their guards down, while I have gained the ability to more sincerely open up to others. The thing that troubles me with that is the possibility of me being perceived as someone who takes more emotional effort than I help others take off. The foundational problem there is that how my social perception anxiety manifests into something that is self-derogatory. While it’s totally reasonable to go “hey this thing I’m doing might be emotionally imbalanced”, it’s not a thing that should be socially debilitating or cause self-marginalization.
I actually feel as though I have a circle of friends. A group of people I can trust, that I can talk freely to. It’s not that these are new people that have entered my life, but it is rather my perspective onto them, and the way that I treat them. Now that I have started working on an emotional vulnerability and availability, I can sense more fears and more causes of stress that I was not able to before. Sometimes this backfires, and I retreat behind walls and shells again. But many times, I find myself relieved just to have seen the truth; jealousy, performance anxiety, comparisons, general self-marginalizing statements, fear of being left alone, fear of being wrong, fear of being ridiculed, and so on.
So the theme here is general awareness, of both myself and of others. I’ve never been one to read people’s “energy” or “vibe”, but I’m crazy enough to intuitively understand people’s behaviors, like how or why people say the things they do or act the way they do. In this recent period of time, I’ve regained some of my intuitive analytical ability to read people. I’ve also gained the confidence in this ability to use it, act on it, and create a more intuitive and cohesive social environment. Which is an abstract way of saying “I leave people alone faster when they act like they want to be left the fuck alone”.
Tim:
Like a warm electric blanket the comfort of GYSO wraps itself around my cold dead heart.
It’s strange. I’ve “taken the lead (not the metal)” on the past… Fuck I don’t know. I think it’s been the last 4 or 5 post at this point. Usually its been me coming up with the ideas. This time, contrary to tradition, I’m the second guy to appear in each section. What a weird feeling.
This give me a pretty fresh opportunity to comment on the rambling of my good friend Thor, and extrapolate those ramblings out to whatever manic absurdity my mind concocts.
I won’t actually comment much on the content of what Thor is saying. It speaks for itself. I’m wondering where the hell it all came from.
GYSO is freedom in blog form. “There’s no rules, unless what you say will get me arrested,” is what I always tell Thor when he ask me about what to write. For the longest time I thought I was the person getting the most out of the “no rules” thing; always coming up with funny absurdist thing or poorly espouting ideas about artificial intelligence and the singularity. I think I was wrong in this assumption.
Just… Look at this. Look at how sincere Thor’s writing is here. I can tell you outright that one year ago Thor wouldn’t have been able to write something like this. And yet we’re here, and it exist.
And its not like my own writing hasn’t evolved over time either. I’m far more confident in my abilities, and I’m less afraid to write what it is that I want to write.
Where has all this change come from? Is GYSO itself causing us to become more like how we want to be, or are we naturally maturing and its being reflected in GYSO? Is it the chicken or the egg?
What went wrong?
Thor:
So what’s my problem? Like just about every person in existence, I am worried absolutely sick by things which I cannot control. Jobs, other people, performance.
Recently, I’ve noticed that I get anxious basically any moment I am away from my instrument. I am anxious over my next rehearsal, my next practice. I am waiting nervously for the next day to come around while also utterly dreading it. Right now I’m sitting with a few core projects I’m invested in, writing a GYSO post being one of them, and I am overcome with decision anxiety. As though a feeling of complete overwhelmingness is overwhelming me. Which is surprising that it is surprising, because I’ve known I get overwhelmed easily for years. Getting to meet it again face to face is always a terrible time. It’s like meeting an absolutely unwanted old enemy again, and they’re the one hugging you to death. I’ve already achieved good things today, and I have set things in motion for good things to happen tomorrow.
But hey, I’m writing this! This is positivity overload; in the act of writing about my current vice, I’m also acting in an effort to show it what it feels like to face it. It feels really empowering. It also gives me a warm feeling of acceptance when I am looking back at the proof that this feeling of overwhelmedness is overstated, unnecessary, and unwelcome. Indeed, I feel more content with everything else I’ve done today by doing this thing. Which, actually, might be something that performance anxiety and workaholism might do to you, but I’m not sure. Yet look at that, I’m being generally self-aware and non-aggressively critical of my own behavior, that’s nice.
The core question seems to be “why do I suffer from decision anxiety?” Which is a very hard question to answer, especially trying to get it to make sense to anyone but myself. Ironically, I’m less inclined to spill my guts through GYSO today than I was a few months ago, even though my emotional state is more stable and open. Because now I’ve got more trust. In other people, and myself. Trust enough to actually vocalize my problems to something else than a blank white page, read by literally no one except bots. All my friends say it takes too much effort to read this stuff, and I fully understand and accept that feeling. GYSO really has been a rock bottom for emotional outlet for a long time, now, making the content completely unreadable to anyone that isn’t as deeply involved in each other’s lives as me and Tim are with each other. You are welcome here if you like, whenever you are ready, and I hope you can find an ounce solace with us.
That wasn’t much of a “What went wrong?”-section. How nice.
Tim:
This is why you keep a daily jornal [sic], everyone.
Looking back at my diary, I notice that I didn’t seriously consider my desire to write until months after we started GYSO. If I could pinpoint the moment it was probably the whole “goopy droopy” thing (from Drawing Part 9). I know now that I get more satisfaction from writing than I do any other hobby I’ve ever tried.
Did this come from GYSO, or was GYSO a natural occurrence of my (then suppressed) desire to write absurdist nonsense?
Its hard to say. If I knew the answer I probably wouldn’t be asking it here. Its just as confusing as the “did GYSO help Thor come out of his shell, or was Thor coming out of his shell and the process just happened to be logged into GYSO?” The answer is that I don’t know.
It certainly feels like this blog has had a significant impact on me. I wouldn’t have made my personal writing website without GYSO’s insanely slow two week upload schedule. There’s other things in the works that I can’t talk about, but those wouldn’t exist without the influence of this blog. These things are huge, defining parts of my life, and it feels like it all extends from GYSO. Or was this the path my life was going down, and GYSO just happened to be there at the time?
GYSO was legitimately intended to be a blog about drawing. There was no “plan” to burn the whole concept to the ground for the sake of comedy, it just happened that way. This seems to point to GYSO being a symptom of my intense desire to write, instead of the cause. Or is it the other way around?
Or maybe life is more complicated than that. Maybe its some huge web of causality that just so happened to lead to me making a drawing blog with some Swedish guy that just so happened to like playing along with the burning firework’s factory that is getyourskillson.com.
Either way, I’m glad I’ve been along for the ride.
What happens next?
Thor:
I could make a concentrated and focused list of things that are tangible to achieving a feeling of less overwhelmingness. That would help, I know it would, because I’ve done it and it generally works.
I could talk to my friends about it, they could without a doubt shed a fresh perspective on things.
Doing those things would probably help. With certainty I can say that writing this post has helped. Thanks for reading. Writing this was a pivotal moment in turning my day into a more positive direction. With all my heart, that I occasionally feel beating again, I hope the world gets to look back on these two fools saying
I’m glad they got better with time
But right now, I know nothing of how I will be perceived in the future.
Tim:
The true irony is that GYSO is becoming a legit blog. There’s some silly nonsense in there, but the writing’s on the wall. This whole post has been a totally serious life update. There was a few jokes, some strange comments, some “genuine GYSO”, but for the most part we just wrote a seriously normal blog post about our lives.
This has been coming around for a while now, and its now reaching fruition. Welcome to season 2 of GYSO: The part where they realize that they just want to talk about their feelings.