Good evening once again! It’s a busy time at the moment over here in baguette country. In a sudden twist, teachers have realised I’m capable of slightly more than sitting down with a group of students and asking them what their favourite colour is and why for 10 minutes at a time. This is great, but a bit of a double-edged sword if I’m honest. I barely slept last night finishing a 30-minute presentation on County Wexford and its links to Normandy (wow!), and I’ve got a whole other half hour to prepare on the tradition of Thanksgiving after writing this, which should be particularly fun given I have absolutely no clue how it works. If the movies are anything to go by, it seems like it’s just a day where Americans all gather in their Bigger Family Groups and each Smaller Family brings a casserole dish full of carbohydrates and gravy with them and then the granddad says something racist. Happy holidays to any American readers.
I’ve read Seán’s and Hugh’s blogs already tonight, and both have written of feeling a bit starved of ideas at the moment. Seán also (justifiably) has admitted that sitting down for 1000 words a day is getting a bit tiresome now, and that “it’s hard to relax until it’s written”. I’m with you there. It’s obviously great practice as I’d ideally love to make a living by writing at some point down the line, but to have no respite and be obligated to do this every single day poses problems which I hadn’t even thought about beforehand. There are books that I want to read in the evening. Games of Among Us that I want to play. Tik Tok dances that I want to learn. This blog has robbed me of those crucial life experiences, but that’s obviously the whole point. We wanted to add a challenge to our daily lives, something that would be ultimately rewarding but which also would be a constant bullet point in the to-do list for a whole month — and if our biggest concern is that we’d rather finally start watching The Crown but don’t have the time because we need to shit out 1000 words every evening, I think we can count ourselves pretty lucky.
One nice source of ideas for stuff to write about for the rest of the month, as I realised this evening, is looking back at the stuff from the very start of these 30 days and re-thinking what I’d written — because, naturally, nothing makes you feel better than constantly self-evaluating and calling your opinions into question. In the very first entry I say the following:
“I always seem to be wrapped up in the idea of doing things that I know others will be interested in; there’s always a certain level of performativity to my actions… clearly I’ve unwillingly been sucked into a cycle where I gain personal satisfaction from likes, comments and engagements”
I’m looking at that now, literally just three and a half weeks later, and I don’t really feel that way anymore. Weird. Being able to write a thousand words on whatever you want for a while seems to have subconsciously changed my priorities and sources of satisfaction a wee bit. I’m happier with the 1000 words I wrote about LeBron James or my dissection of the lyrics of Andy Shauf, neither of which anyone cared about, than I am with the one or two entries which have hundreds of reads and which people have sent me messages about. It may end up being the case that this brand new set of priorities only apply to me in the context of writing a blog every single day, but I’m hoping that it’s gonna spill over into the rest of my life and the plethora of other stuff I put on social media. Namely, I hope I stop caring so much about what other people think when I’m Slapping Strings.
I started playing guitar when I was about 11 or 12. My friend Jack had cool swishy hair and got the girls and also played the guitar, so of course the only possible course of action was to copy him. I got a left-handed blue Tanglewood acoustic guitar with a massive acrylic bump at the back of it which used to jut into me and make my stomach hurt. My poor soft pre-teen fingertips used to sting and bleed if I played for more than half an hour and I hated it. I had lessons for about a month with a pretty annoyingly impatient teacher until, as most children who did well in primary school will be able to relate to, I realised I wasn’t immediately good at the thing so I stopped doing the thing.
The guitar stayed in my cupboard, then, for a solid five years. I still really badly wanted to be the cool guitar boy, but I didn’t want to suffer through actually putting in even an iota of practice to get there. When Nirvana was blasting and I had my big headphones on I’d sit and play air guitar in my room and pretend I was at our school talent show. When the talent shows came around, I’d be playing the tin whistle or singing in the choir instead. So much cooler.
One day, for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, I Dusted The Old Axe Off and started just messing about on it. No lessons, just vibes. I picked up the chord shapes from YouTube which, sadly, tends to be a difficult place to find help if you play left-handed. It took a while. For a good two-and-a-half years, my mum and dad were pretty much the only people who listened to how I was getting on, and even that was purely by virtue of them being in the next room. If someone else were to have heard me and thought I was crap then I would’ve immediately stopped and just never practiced again, I’m fairly sure. That quote from the first blog most certainly applies. I was all about performativity and presentation, and therefore if looking cool meant having to — shock horror — practice something cool without telling anyone about it until I was at a decent enough level, then so be it.
Eventually, just over a year ago, I made a little second account on Instagram where I post covers of songs I like. It’s humming along nicely and has 114 followers at the moment, which is quite evidently not a big number but one which I think is a nicely-sized little audience. I know without doubt that the motivations behind making this account in the first place were the likes, comments and engagements, and until recently they honestly have been a huge part of it. The serotonin boost of uploading a song and having 25-odd people like it was actually improving my mood, as lame as it may be to admit that. But doing these 1000 words a day has made me realise that I actually do enjoy things just because I love them, and I have all along. I love music and I love writing, and I’m not doing both all the time at the minute because I want to see my phone ping and tell me that someone did an artificial round of applause for my work — I’m doing both because they’re a lot of fun. I’m finally starting to derive personal satisfaction without the need for others’ gratification, and it’s a real relief to be able to say that.
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cheers
