That is always what happens with commissioned work. It turns into something painfully obvious, something I end up hating before anyone else does. I only paint well—and love what I paint—when I have made no decision beforehand about what it is going to become. Usually, I don’t even know myself, until the very end, exactly what shape it will take.
I can say with certainty that this has been the guiding principle of my entire life for years. My long-term goals have never gone much further than relatively precise notes and plans. My planners and computer files are full of unfinished projects. I have read thousands of pages of books and magazines about personal management, planning methods, and all the rest of that sort of thing. Everything those books and step-by-step formulas for success promise to teach you works on me like an empty spell. Planning actually makes me sick.
Damn all of them. Their only real function seems to be making me lose faith in my abilities. How can some people follow a plan for a year, or even longer, to prepare for a competition? Don’t they have hormones? How do their moods never change? How can they stay determined all the time?
Today I don’t know whether this is finally my lucky day or not. I am sitting behind the door of my apartment with a considerable amount of money in my bag, in the form of a check, while—as usual—I have left my key in the lock on the other side of the door.
The building manager’s wife is not home either. When I call her to borrow the pliers and screwdriver I always use to get the door open, she says before even saying hello, “I know what you want. But I have somewhere to be for at least another two hours. Either wait or call a locksmith.” Of course, she knows perfectly well that I am not going to call a locksmith.
I take out my earphones, put them in, and decide to go for a walk until she gets back. The music playing in my ears cuts me off from the rest of the world. I see nothing and hear nothing except the music. I start walking at an ordinary pace, but little by little the music and the endorphins speed me up, and, lost in my thoughts, I walk as if I were half-flying.
These days, I am seriously at war with myself. I am struggling with a difficult choice. Whether unfortunately or fortunately, I have to admit that the older I get, the more cautious I become. After making so many decisions, each flawed in one way or another and eventually abandoned halfway through, I have lost confidence in myself.
There is a question I ask myself every day: Why can’t I settle down like everyone else and have an ordinary life? It feels as though my very soul is straining against its container. It seems like only yesterday that I lost my job because of one of these very decisions.
I had been an employee at a government office, with adequate pay and benefits and a measure of job security. After seven years there, I had become so fed up with the routine and the life of an office employee that on some days I wanted to deliberately do something that would get me fired. Sitting in that chair behind that desk made me feel sick.
My friend used to say that everyone hated office jobs. I doubted it. At the very least, not everyone felt as miserable about it as I did. No one understood how impossible it was for me to endure those endlessly dragging, mind-numbing hours—receiving and sending letters with repetitive, perfunctory memos, letters that appeared to contain terribly important information, but God knows, even if the entire department had never existed, nothing would have changed.