unico_love | Really Stressed Out

I am really stressed out. My life is pretty simple. I have to keep it as simple as possible and limit my range of activities both because I tend to be very intense and focused on particular things and because I get confused and overwhelmed very easily. I really don't see how I could limit my range of activities more in a way that would actually be helpful for me, I just have to somehow find ways to be more organized. I try to focus on doing one thing at a time, but usually in my mind I am still thinking of a whole list of activities in the distance, and I have to stop doing that because that makes me really overwhelmed and I end up messing up what I am supposed to be focusing on. I can be pretty ambitious and have all sorts of goals, and while I almost always complete what I start and I do struggle through my various projects, I can expect too much of myself too quickly. Where maybe certain things would be possible if I had huge amounts of time and support which I do not have. If I mentally think of things in much smaller steps, I will end up completing more without this huge amount of stress. Also a lot of my goals and projects depend to some extent on other people, who can be really random and have different preferences and priorities to me. So I have to set my more concrete goals more to what I can control, with maybe more flexible goals in the distance relating to things on which I'm dependent on the choices of other people.

I get very confused by instructions due to both taking words very literally and not being able to figure out instructions without some kind of visual aid. If there are a bunch of instructions at once, even if they are written and well-organized, I tend to get very confused and make stupid mistakes that are difficult sometimes to undo. My mother is in the process of trying to undo one of my mistakes (relating to art, if anyone was wondering). I know what I want to do, I know very concretely what I have to do to improve at the things I need to improve upon. I just have to accept that things have to come slowly, and mentally block out all the extraneous stuff.

I'm painting over an old portrait of

sand_piper because my painting skills have improved since I first painted it. It will still look basically the same, just (hopefully) better and more professional. I'm also going to start doing a bit more black and white drawings, since I used to like that. I'm going to plan them out for a change, though, and see how well I can make them. I also plan very soon to start making attempts to move to a more realistic painting style. More expressionist/impressionist styles with bright colors will still be my favorite, I just feel that in order to really have flexibility and to feel I am becoming a good artist, I have to at least know how to paint very realistically. Drawing very realistically with pencil, etc. is easy, so I'm not concerned about that. Painting requires a lot of different skills than drawing.