Why am I so intense?

The voice of perfect for me was just always there. I had a need for things to be perfect from as young as I can remember. I'm trying to battle it but these days it's a constant feeling of not being good enough, and wanting to be good enough. I'm going to try putting the boundaries one into place though. I don't know how to switch off properly so I've felt I've always been in a state of working and worrying.

Thank you for this message, it really helps, truly! For context: I studied music at university a few years ago, and started trying to make a career of music for the past 3-4 years following. I've managed to connect with many creatives locally and made a name of sorts, so I feel the pressure to try and prove that I am a competent musician a lot. I was taking an applying for anything and everything to prove myself as a 'complete' musician, and mentally, I feel stretched out, and I don't feel as if I've allowed myself to be authentic to myself. That meant saying yes to everything, and then not realising why I am actually saying yes.

that question of 'what part of the process of writing music is my favourite' I feel is an important one. I am starting to try and figure that out. It's interesting, I even took a very long time to respond to this message as I wanted to have a complete answer to respond to you haha. 

Thanks for sharing me your music. I'll drop you a message directly with my music soon.

I found that learning to meditate calmed the chaos going on in my head and let me work out what things actually brought me happiness and what I was doing either for others benefit or because I thought they were expected of me.

Once I could sieve these issues out I could write it all down on pieces of paper, give them marks out of 10 for how importent they were to my mental health (ie happiness), my life (ie keeping the bills paid / keeping me healthy etc) and my family/social group (ie my human contact).

Once I could see how these all looked it was clear which things I could drop (eg playing football on a wednesday night with the guys from work) as it added little value overall but took a lot of time and energy.

From the stuff you really want to keep it helps you allocate time and effort to them - clearly some stuff you NEED to do so you can pay the bills etc but the little stuff that makes you happy - do more of it.

Who says you need to be perfect anyway? Try to work out where this voice comes from and decide if it needs to be told to go stuff itself.

When you feel yoursef getting intense then go take a break, find that quiet point that meditation lets you find and locate what is driving you to be so stressed / perfection seeking or whatever.

Also get yourself a psychotherapist with experience in working with autists to help you untangle knots of issues you cannot do yourself - they are great at helping you find the root causes and develop ways to defuse them so you can develop healther ways to move on.

Another great approach I found when working as a project manager is to time limit when I work on this stuff. I used to limit it to my commute + working hours and as soon as I was home I was offline until the next day. Those boundaries mean I can relax and enjoy time with my loved ones or persuing my own hobbies / interests.

A therapist can help you do this too - creating and enforcing boundaries is a great approach in my experience.

Also, if you ever need someone to check out your music, let me know. I’m interested in hearing what kind of music you make!

aurelis said:

I feel as if I have not given myself time to create for the sake of creating, rather than to prove to the world something

Oh yeah, that makes tons of sense. A little background on me, I’m a former music composition professor, so I always felt pressured to make immaculate and grand music because others were looking up to me to be great at what I do. Trying to prove myself killed the joy completely.

I can also understand feeling incompatible with working alongside others. I remember working with a lyricist one time and I absolutely freaked out in private because I couldn’t understand how to make our visions of the work come together. It always seems to work out, but it can be a painful process to compensate.

Maybe part of the reason it is a little harder for us Autistics to work creatively with others is because our inner world is so vastly unique and different? I don’t know.

My advice is to step back and think “What part of the process of writing music is my favorite?” Focus on that. For me, it’s hearing the end product of the sheet music writing right before sending it to performers. I realized that getting performers stress me out, so now I just finish products without intending to get them performed. I just write the sheet music, export the audio, and slap it on this Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/disco-at-the-milk-bar. If people listen to it, cool. If not, I will.

What you said about music composition is literally what has killed the joy for me. I also thought solely on making music, and not as much on promoting it and sharing it once done, which also felt like I put in an awful lot of work for a small payoff. For context, I managed to produce and put together multiple albums over the course of time, and without a plan besides working through it in my head, I managed to have them done, and collaborate with people. But now I almost have rejected all the music that I've made due to the high expectations of wanting them to, like you saiid  'change the world' and 'get my name out there'. 

THis year I've been working on a project with other people, and I realised because of my way of independently creating things and having high expectations, I feel very maladjusted to really working side by side with others towards a creative goal, and now realising this, I am afraid of collaborating with others on a project.

The intensity has resulted in some really nice work I think, but I feel as if I have not given myself time to create for the sake of creating, rather than to prove to the world something. If any of that makes sense haha

aurelis said:

Projects that I take on and lead creatively become intense as I can become really obsessive and perfectionist, and have little understanding on how to scale according to the project.

I’m curious what kind of projects you are referring to here. Work projects? Creative ventures? Just generally anything you work on?

I’m asking because I know in the music composition realm being intensely passionate about your projects can actually be a huge boon. It’s so much better to be intense about your projects than to half-a** them. On the other hand, when you feel like:

aurelis said:

There’s this constant feeling that I need to change the world, and do something big.

In the music composition realm, that can be a downfall. “I need to write a whole album” and “I need to make a complete symphony” are two thoughts that really destroyed my love of writing music for a while. Those are HUGE projects that I wanted to do to change the world and get my name out there. It took reframing my mindset towards creating altogether to rekindle a love for the work again. Now I write just for myself, and I can be as intense or not as I like.

I don’t know if that helps at all, because it kind of depends on what kind of projects you are referring to, but I hope it does.