Avoidance is a trauma response

So sometimes I have a hard time making myself do things. Sometimes it’s because there are Too Many Things and I am tired. Sometimes it’s because I am sick. Sometimes it’s because, for example, the task of shoveling email is positively Sysiphean. (And here I am, contributing to that problem for you. Well, I guess you signed up for it!)

But sometimes it’s hard to make myself do things because I am avoiding them. And we avoid things for very good evolutionary reasons: we avoid them because they hurt, or because they have hurt us in the past.

Making art in public is hard because you do have to allow yourself to be vulnerable, to tell the truth, to not look down—and once you have done that and put your work out in public, you know it will be cruelly judged. People are going to hunt you down and tell you how much they hate what you did. (People are also going to hunt you down and tell you how much they love what you did, but as they say in the Army, it takes ten attaboys to cancel out one aw shit. And gentle reader… isn’t.)