[Tag: Loose fit.]

One of my goals has been to improve my ability to hear music, and I’ve been working on it on-and-off for about a year now.

Yesterday I sat down at the piano and tried a new exercise: I play a note on the piano, hear it in my mind, and I wait for another note to come to mind.

I played a C. I heard it in my mind, a little foggily, as the real sound died away, and I waited for my brain to come up with another note. After several seconds, it gave me a C# an octave higher. And that was it. I was at the piano for about 5 minutes, and my brain, which has been playing guitar and flute and voice and clarinet and violin and piano sporadically over my entire life, provided exactly one note.

When I was younger, an English teacher told me I had a sense of style, a unique way of writing. That was the first time anyone saw anything interesting in me, so I decided I was going to be a writer. Every time I sat down to write, it was like that exercise at the piano: nothing would come.

Oh, sure, I could write words down–I was a furious transcriber of my thoughts; but if I asked my mind to give me a story, or a character, or an image, it was quiet.

When I would do therapy, it felt like chatter that never went anywhere. I remember trying Internal Family Systems and earlier Inner Child work (edit: and jeez, even before that, Gestalt), where you imagine parts of yourself as people and have conversations with them. I’d struggle to placate my therapist by describing a part, but they were almost all mute.

Some people say journalling, especially over their childhood, is extremely helpful. When I try to do that, I am met with more silence; probably more related to neglect than abuse. I’ve heard it said you can’t remember all the times you mother didn’t comfort you, or all the times your dad did’t see you.

One of the deepest silences come when I ask my brain questions, especially, “What do we want to do today?” If I have a day off, or a week off, a month off, I drift around the house keeping myself occupied until it is time for bed.

Is there a link between this silence in my mind and my lack of intrinsic motivation?

I notice when it comes to motivating myself, I’m largely unable to do it. I have to imagine some kind of reward at the end of it, and it has to be a BIG reward. I meditated for over 3 years, chasing Enlightenment (also see: spiritual bypass). I went hard into music this year, thinking I’d win friends by being a musician, but that was a fool’s errand, though I have no regrets about what I’ve accomplished. I mastered Spanish because I thought it would set me on the path to being employable.

I do sometimes come up with these fucked up compromises, where I say I’ll learn a language, so I start memorizing conjugations and going through vocabulary, but that excitement of speaking with others or absorbing media is not there to organize and motivate me, so I spend most of time reviewing flash cards. It’s just another dumb way to pass the time.

Yo estaba. J’etais. Eu estava.

If I ask myself, “What would I want to do today, for it’s own sake, with no promise of future reward or development?” I never have an answer. So I end up here, on lemmy, posting, commenting, replying, refreshing: subscribed, local, all.

Is there anyone that has struggled with this and found a way out or a way in or a way through?