My fucking monkey mind remains in charge. Or at least it's one hand on the wheel at any moment in time. I'm trying to produce some creative output. And yet the ease with which I go from staying focused on that task and bouncing off of it to do some tangentially related work — it's lokey fucking killing me.

Back up a step. My hope... in putting these feelings out into the world is that one of you motherfuckers consume it in some way and give me some feedback that makes the act of being a little less lonely and a little more hopeful.

So this project requires that I not only produce the work, but also teach myself the tools to get that work out in the world and into shape. Or, strike that. Reverse it. And so while I can spend time doing the work (which is frankly the easy part), as soon as I get to teaching myself the tools in order to give the work a shape I'm happy with, I immediately feel out of my depth. And because I'm not making the sort of progress I would like to, I feel like an imposter. At which point it's far more appealing to get sucked into some other task than to make slow and steady progress.

These sorts of experiences are all too common in my life. No matter what I happen to be dealing with, this sensation of being not quite skilled enough to produce the vision that I have in my head. It comes up over and over and over again. And it leaves me with not just an absence of work that I could put out into the world for which to seek feedback. But also this repeating sense that I am not capable — that I am doomed to fail at just about everything I set my mind to. The one exception to this is physical activity.

I have no problem creating a structure wherein, on a regular basis, I put myself in a particular place and I do some form of exercise. Or some form of cooking. Or some form of, you know, longhand writing. But as soon as the work has to exist inside of a universal Von Neumann machine, my ability to stay focused on the project — that ability just falls through the fucking floor. Maybe this is because I'm not as skilled in the digital tools as I would like. as I ought to be. But I also think that it's often a problem of having so many ideas for what I would like to do, or what I think I could do, that would be stimulating to my imagination and interesting to an outside audience.

There's so many potential projects that the moment I'm not making adequate forward progress on Project A, my monkey mind sort of grabs Project B and says: oh, we're not getting what we want with Project A, so let's pick up this different shiny thing, and let's waste some time on that goal.

And this, as I said before, this process just repeats itself over and over and over again. throughout my life, and it's so fucking debilitating and makes me feel like such a piece of shit who will never amount to anything and never produce work for which I could feel accomplishment or acquire the respect.

Nothing that I could then point to and say: I created that, and I believe it's good, and there's at least one other person in the world who also believes it's good, and therefore I can feel good about myself. That loop I have yet to be able to close in having been on this planet for... plenty of fucking time.

So, I don't know what to do about that. What do you think I should do about it?