I'm Afraid I Like Clay Too Much

We're having a lot of conversations right now about infrastructure. Where fences are going to go, where the chickens are going to move to, what gets planted where in the gardens. As part of those conversations, it's been brought up a few times by the family that it would be nice to make a space for Linke to do pottery.

Because I love pottery, sort of.

I love doing things with my hands and then seeing a result, and pottery is a good, flexible way of doing that, and when you can get the firing to go well, it's wonderfully permanent, if delicate. But pottery also is a commitment. It's expensive. It's time-consuming. You get muddy while you're doing it, so you have to clean up afterwards. And I love that whole process.

This conversation though, it is giving me some interesting echoes to when I was a lot younger, because in a way this was also my parents' solution to me having a panic about what to do with myself late in college, when my brain was utterly overloaded from classes. They got me the supplies and I built the shed and for a couple years I did a lot of pottery in the warm seasons.

When I moved out, it became the pool shed.

I have a wheel and a kiln that I've been lugging around with me for 20 years, installing in whatever space I could manage. My dad helped me wire up my garage for the kiln a couple years before my whole life imploded around the COVID days.

Now I'm trying to pick apart why I haven't been able to touch clay for almost a year and a half.

I can blame it on simple things like the garage is a mess. We've had the combined collections of multiple houses crammed together into the garage and basement in the last year and while we're making good headway on sorting it all, it's a lot of objects, many of which I can't really make decisions on. I can move them to a new place and I can try to not think about them, but they're not mine to throw away.

It's easy to say, "No, I'm not doing a lot of pottery because my space is occupied by boxes."

Boxes which I could move.

Sometimes I put it on the cost, because clay is not cheap. I mean, compared to high-end oil paint and hand-stretched canvas, it's not a terribly expensive hobby. Especially compared the continual search for new camera gear, which is another hobby I have been avoiding.

For me it's that I want to sink deep into the things I love, but I have trouble expressing how. And I have trouble justifying it to myself, perhaps.

I'm probably happiest when I put on an audiobook and spend all day trying to perfect the throw on a bowl or a vase, even though the inevitable result is always going to be somewhat mediocre.

Taking the time to sit down at the wheel and center the clay and find that delicate balance where the clay is not so dry that it is tearing in my hands, but not so wet that the clay melts in my hands and spins off the wheel. It's a nice physical manifestation of pulling my intentions and actions into a single moment.

This is just a working theory, nowhere near complete yet, but I think a lot of it comes down to that I really love diving into a thing head-first and being in it and doing it, and I get lost in it.

Part of the struggle I've had with Narrative Eversion, or with video game journalism and critique in general, is picking what to play when, because I don't want to be in the constant relentless grind of whatever the news cycle is. I want to be analyzing and enjoying and writing that thing. But I do that slowly.

I struggle keeping up with the pace of online gaming.

And when I think about going out to a shed that I have set up to do all of my clay work, it gives me a lot of good feelings. But it also requires me to say, "Okay, I'm going to go outside, and I'm going to go into this place and do this thing."

And when life often feels like you can't even take an hour to play a video game or take a couple of hours to read a book, the idea of taking multiple hours to do pottery... and then not just doing it in parallel with other people, like playing a video game in the same room where other people are watching TV or something, but doing it alone?

That's not something I'm afraid of.

I'm afraid I like it too much.

I am a rather solitary person. I like having my special people, and I don't especially love going out and meeting new people. It's really difficult for me. Because as much as I enjoy getting to know somebody, just like doing a craft or playing a game or reading a book or starting a TV series, there feels like there's a commitment, a weight, an expectation set of deploying my social tools to have conversations when I meet new people.

I generally prefer not to, for many reasons.

This isn't the answer, but I believe that a large part of the challenge for me in thinking about scheduling time to record my podcast, scheduling time to go do pottery, scheduling a date... is finding that way of expressing to other people and to myself how much I really, really, really want to do a thing.

How does one say to a partner, "I would like to go and stare at damaged sidewalks in a bad part of town and take pictures of the cracks in concrete for three hours... want to come along?"

I often feel like I'm running at somewhere around 97%.

When I'm at work I'm running at about 160%.

So having the ability to back off, look at what I'm trying to accomplish, and figure out how to maybe pull my effort level back to 80% is a large part of not just my relationship with pottery, but what I'm working on overall. Figuring out where my actual limits are, where the limits that are healthy for myself are, so that if something happens I have that little bit of buffer space.

I need to find that buffer space because inevitably other people or life or circumstances ask a little bit more than I said I could give. It sounds manipulative to type or say around, but if I've already committed everything I have and someone asks for more, I'm faced with either saying NO repeatedly to what are probably good ideas or ramping up into 130%... 170%... overwhelm.

So we're talking about fences and garden sheds and possibly sheds where pottery can happen. I think I've successfully nudged folks that we'll do the pottery shed somewhere between fall and next year. In the interim, I'm going to try to clean up my space in the garage so that I can do some pottery when it's finally warm, and maybe that will answer the question for me. That will help me find if it's something that I love in the abstract or something I still love doing in the present.

I don't feel like I can dive 100% into pottery right now, in large part because it's taking so much of my brain to write lesson plans and edit videos and... well, be a functional person and parent.

Choosing what to do when you have choices is a challenge, especially when you don't have a firm sense of what you're going to do next week, next month, next year. When you're not quite sure how those choices are going to feed back into the overall life that you're trying to make. And it's a good thing to be having these sorts of deep, struggling thoughts about something as inconsequential as pottery, rather than what my next meal will be or how to pay a bill.

For that, I am thankful.