In Irons

There’s a precarious moment, a moment when I feel I wobble on a quarter’s edge, ready to fall to either exuberance or hopelessness, and I’m struck that while the exuberant rush of feeling I can do anything, the giddy excitement, may be more fun than the gloom of realizing nothing I have done matters and I’ve done it poorly, too, neither extreme is reality, or — because I am clever enough to come up with tremendous evidence in both states supporting the position — it’s that each is only a filtered version of reality.

What I think I fear most is having the exuberance carry me to the fabric store and pick out yards of gaudiness that I can get home and be too inspired to even find a pattern for before I find myself weeping in the scraps of cut-up fabric, each representing the age-old feeling of having a notion of a finished product that I don’t have the skills to quite manage, the picture in my head that my hands cannot fit to paper, the idea I don’t have the words to express, the sense of being mired in patterns of amateur ineptness, the paint turned to mud, the paper wrinkled and distressed and overworked beneath my grubby, sticky hands. What was in my head was so glorious, and what is in my hands so tawdry.

And sometimes it occurs to me that mood is a wind, and that with a little knowledge of my own sails, beating to windward is possible, I can sail close-hauled and advance against the wind, something that seems impossible to my land-lubber’s mind. If the exuberance is a running position for the sailing, almost dangerous in its speed, then to despair is to be in irons, and all I can do is “push push pull pull” easing myself into a position to catch the next wind with a small daily discipline, a walk, some music, another attempt, a fresh piece of paper.