Today I get to hang out with some friends and go for a walk along the canal and eat some nice (probably) food.
Last night I laid down sketches for two new pieces. After a day of combined editing and tidying of worksheets. And cooked and ate a vegan pasta primavera, giving it a protein boost by adding some silken tofu, which worked quite well and gave it a bit of an eggy, carbonara feel.
And this morning, while filling a lot of space with black and drawing some delicate tea cups and mugs, I listened to The Gendered Brain – only two chapters left – and pondered on whether the plasticity of my brain would allow me to train myself to be more socially confident, and then whether I would actually want to.
It’s a similar pondering, I suppose, to my thinking about trying weight loss medication. Food is a very important part of my life and my (as I see it) identity. Not in a binging kind of way – at least I don’t think so – but more in an enjoying cooking and thinking about nutrition and taste and liking feeding people (the latter something I am trying to distance myself from, as I don’t that often get to feed people imaginatively or creatively) way. My worry is that I would no longer be me if the medication takes away that urge and that joy. Is there not a medication that would instead make me want to exercise lots? Can I take that one instead?
And so, if I could train my brain to be better at, and to enjoy, socialising with new people and networking (I full-on loathe that word, incidentally), would that not take away a very significant and long-standing part of ‘me’? I think ‘shy’, ‘quiet’, ‘thoughtful’, ‘a loner’ and ‘introverted’ are words that have been used to describe me for a very long time and, after a fair while of feeling bad about those words and trying to escape them, I have leaned into them and embraced them and accepted them. I am quiet. I do need to be on my own a lot. I definitely think a lot. And I am rarely loud at celebrating my accomplishments.
Lovely.