One of the disadvantages of my own personal recipe of autism traits is the tendency to stay with the familiar, the safe.
I have a thing called "Pathological Demand Avoidance" (PDA) that means I get extremely stressed by new tasks and situations and I will consciously or unconsciously avoid them for as long as I can - until I absolutely have to deal with them. Over time I will then become familiar with them, rationalise and strategise them and create a safe operating zone for myself around them. At that point, the comfort zone becomes unconscious-invisible and at least temporarily, I wonder what all the fuss was about.
PDA, although heavily researched has never made it into the mythic Diagnostic Service Manual (DSM) as a discreet form of autism in its own right and has now been absorbed into the DSM's autism spectrum model of diagnosis as an "autism trait" anyway. I am ambivalent about whether that is a particularly good or bad thing but there is plenty of information on PDA out there if you think it is important for you or someone else to know more about it. The National Autistic Society is a great starting point for information about all types of autism. That's where I started.
For a long time, my comfort zone on the internet was social media, namely Facebook.
Before that, I had a MySpace account. I moved from there to Facebook on the advice of a trusted geek friend and I guess at the time I was still new enough to social media not to feel any great sense of loss at no longer seeing Tom's happy smiling face waiting for me each time I logged in.
In 2010 I used Facebook to vigorously promote my first exhibition "Hysterical Fabrications" which resulted in increased exhibition footfall and many sales of my work. I increased my reach and made lots of new artistic networking connections, selling work internationally off the back of my activity there.
This is the way forward, I thought. I will always do things this way.
The comfortable zone was established and I have been operating there ever since.
I remember fellow artists at the time telling me I should be using Twitter as that was a more effective way of promoting my work in their opinion and I have had an account dating back to that time. I didn't do much with it however as I could never get along with it, preferring the visual format and sense of connection I felt I was getting from Facebook. Twitter seemed all about the thoughts of celebrities and was really boring to look at.
Fast forward to 2021 and in the middle of a pandemic, I found myself thinking about the way I use online media in my life.
Much has changed in the last eleven years: the comfortable online social space I experienced Facebook as has all but disappeared, replaced by endless memes, conspiracy theories, advertisements, celebrity/corporate-sponsored or "boosted" posts, political arguments and controversies. Where before I felt connected, I've never felt so alienated by it as I do now. It's almost impossible to be heard beyond your immediate circle of connections without paying for the privilege, and the endless dishonesty, cynical manipulation and attempts at coercion leave me exhausted.
I decided to belatedly try Twitter again but that was even worse. Witnessing the endless puerile fighting that goes on there I begin to understand why Guy Debord, author of Society of the Spectacle ended his own life by shooting himself through the heart.
I started using Instagram to promote my visual imagery a few years ago and for a time I felt it was a much safer and pleasant place to operate than Facebook or Twitter. Now I find that every other posting on my Instagram is an advert or a sponsored post and the nastiness pervading other social media platforms is growing like a fungus everywhere I look.
Comfort zones are all very well but what do you do when you have no control over the visitors who pass through?
Austin Kleon, a personal hero of mine - please read all his books as soon as you can - says it is vitally important for any artist to have a space on the web where they are in control of their content and activity.
I read that several years ago but PDA kept me where I was as usual.
Later, another arts mentor, Brainard Carey said that you must have a personal website to engage effectively with possible gallery sponsors and funders. So I dutifully built the website (this one) - and just like when I joined Twitter a decade ago, I promptly did nothing with it.
This is how PDA works (sic), it isn't dramatic or obvious it just stops me getting on with stuff I need to do, acting as a hard-wired defence against any anxiety and fear I might experience. It's like a clinical form of procrastination but exactly because it is clinical it is possible to manage it.
My antidote to it is my conscious awareness that it is there.
The more aware I am of PDA sneakily diverting or distracting me, the more I can interrupt it and get on with the task.
The more I externalise the task by writing lists, researching and forward planning, the quicker I can get engaged with any task and possibly even enjoy it.
So here I am writing my first blog since 2019 and whupping PDA's bum by openly acknowledging it in front of the world.
I guarantee you one thing - because I wrote this it will not take me three years until I write the next one!
n.a. 22.1.21
