I’m approaching the tail end of my first painting. I started painting out of interest and continue painting because I like the work I’ve produced. Most importantly, I continue painting because I enjoy becoming a better painter.
So far, my painting is perfect! I wouldn’t change a single brush stroke, colour choice or shading. But, my excitement has recently turned to anxiety. Although I’ve been painting perfectly and I’m a better painter now than when I started, I have this overwhelming fear that I’ll screw it all up. I not only see myself making a minor mistake, I see myself tripping over a paint can and accidentally knocking the entire canvass on the ground. It’s almost like now that I’m close to getting what I want (i.e., a near perfect painting) the downside of failure shot right up. Irrational fears consume me. Why?
What happened was that while I was painting, I noticed I was doing well. I began envisioning my painting in famous art shows and me as the revered artist. I began thinking of the price I could sell my painting for. I began thinking of all the other perfect paintings I would produce after this painting was completed to perfection. In other words, my interest in painting quickly shifted from one where I painted for the sake of it to one where I was driven by demanding incentives. Having never experienced these demands before and seeing them rise abruptly out of nowhere, I panicked.
I’m not sure if this is better than the opposite. I could have become arrogant and while I was painting, believed that every subsequent action I took would unquestionably produce beauty. In this mode, I would believe that the painting would stay perfect forever and that I, an amateur painter, was deserving of accolades before I finished a single perfect painting. Doing so would undeniably leave my final painting flawed, my hubris would make it so.
Sitting in the anxious camp doesn’t give me a dangerous sense of confidence but it does make me irrationally pessimistic. On either extreme, I’m drunk. The irrational pessimism form of drunkenness while painting may lead to the sort of mistake where I think, “ugh, I knew how to do that but I still managed to screw it up.” My mind building a wall over what it already knows.
Therefore, to fix this I must think, “why am I anxious?” Is it because things are going well and to spice it up I’ve decided to create a problem out of nothing? Is it because I’ve stopped measuring my progress by my development as a painter but rather by materialistic gains, which by definition are determined by other people (i.e., I let others determine my progress)? Is it because I secretly don’t believe I deserve to have produced such beautiful art?
Whatever the reason, it’s best that I return to the time when my motivation was to become a better painter and to create beautiful art – the state I was in before I started manufacturing expectations. Assuming the painting is still under my control, there isn’t anything to fear as long as I don’t create things to fear.
Here’s how this is playing out in my life.
I recently began studying computer science. I’m currently taking my second computer science class and having completed everything up until the final exam, I’m getting 100%. I was excited and hopeful of the future until, like the painting story, I became anxious. I’m worried about screwing it all up largely because I began looking at my mark in this class as an extension of my worth as a programmer, I want to become a TA for this class, and getting 100% overall would look cool if I decide to apply to grad school. However, I’ve done well in the class not because of those demands but because I’m interested in learning about linked lists, binary trees, recursion, etc.
Considering that demands drive much of our world, they can enable us to be very productive. But, we usually produce our best work when we let our more fundamental interests guide us.