One of the most valuable skills I’ve been developing, mostly without realizing I was developing it, is an understanding of what my limitations are and of accepting those limitations. This is not an understanding I readily relinquished myself to: My naive desire was to be unlimited, to be able to do anything anyone else did as well or better than they could do it. I won’t say that I don’t desire that any more; but it has now been tempered by an understanding that doing things is difficult and I have a limited amount of time and energy to put towards each work I decide to undertake. When the limited resources of time and energy enter the equation, it becomes apparent that one has to sometimes work with ones limitations rather than ceaselessly push against them in hope of eroding them.
It becomes easier to accept my weaknesses as I come to recognize that they tend to be rooted in the same place as my strengths. For instance: I have a tendency to get overwhelmed by problems that have a large number of factors – which sounds like something that would be true of anybody, but the key difference is which things come to be considered a problem like that. A few things that I find profoundly stressful because of this: Being in a crowded place; solo play in a battle royale game; drawing a full scene in perspective; creating animations for a game; creating code for a system with more than a few components; planning for my future in any way. Each of these raises questions that can only be satisfactorily answered by answering other questions, each of which can only be answered by other questions – and so on, expanding out, becoming exponentially complex, until I get frantic trying to hold onto the threads, maintain a complete picture. Most of this processing is at a sub-verbal level – I can’t even explain all of the things I’m trying to figure out and why all of a sudden I’m incredibly tense and irritable. After all, if I could put it into words that would mean it was something simple enough to be held by words: Such a problem probably wouldn’t be enough to frustrate me in the first place. However, as acutely stressful as these situations can be, the tendency they feed off of, my tendency to try to see how each question connects to other questions and creates an overall structure of mutually affecting factors, is also one of my greatest creative and technical strengths.
Even understanding this, it can be a tough cookie to chew. Some of these tasks still simply need to be done – and, in many cases, once I can navigate past the stressful and indecisive beginnings, they can be enjoyable tasks I feel quite competent at. Attempting to push against my limitations, to get this work done even against my natural resistance, results in days where I end up tired and frustrated while getting very little actual quantifiable work done – not because the things I’m actually doing are necessarily very difficult, but because approaching the state of understanding and wherewithal to actually do those things is long and arduous. It’s hard not to feel like I’m lazy or incompetent when I struggle with these things – but it’s possible to understand what’s going wrong and to plan for it, and that capability will only be available to me if I admit that I have these limitations.
The core of this strategy, for me, usually boils down to writing things down – which is most likely one reason I’ve kept this little writing corner going for so long. Describing one part of a problem, noting it down, making it so it won’t fly away if I get distracted, lets me stop thinking about it for a while so I can move on to the next one; then, describing the second one, nailing it down, describing the connection between problems A and B, lets me see them side-by-side, trace the threads, see if the structure makes sense. This is something that can be very difficult to do all in one’s head, particularly as problems C, D, and E make their entrance and each need to be connected. Writing it all down is the only way to navigate it, a trail of thread through the labyrinth – if it’s not pinned down it will tangle, and all that’s left in my mind will be a messy ball of string.
The challenge, all too often, rests in understanding that if I don’t put in this work when it seems unnecessary, if I don’t start charting out the connections when I understand them well, then it will only be once I’m already stretched thin, when I’m struggling to hold my perspective together, that I realize I need them. At the very worst, I will have spent a little time noting down my thoughts, which will allow me to understand later what I was thinking and why I thought it.