Autistics don’t doodle.
I’m not sure why. But now I’m thinking about it. It’s probably something to do with the subconscious.
As I understand it doodling is when your hand moves subconsciously about the paper while your mind is otherwise occupied.
Autistics don’t have a subconscious. Or so I’m told. So no subconsciously drawing while listening to people at some meeting.
But subconscious or not I find doodling a very interesting process. Mostly because you don’t know what you’re going to draw before you start.
For the last year or so I have the feeling that it’s something I should try me hand at.
In a way because it’s the next logical step.
I’ve tried drawing from my photographic memory. But that became boring long before I got skilled enough to really show what I wanted to draw.
Then I tried my hand at a kind of projects where I thought of a picture before I started. Without it being something from RL.
But still it gets stale long before I get around to drawing the picture.
So the next logical step would be to start drawing without knowing what I’m going to draw. But that’s scary.
That I’ve been putting it off for more then a year proves how scary it is.
Or does it?
Thinking about it the other day I realized that it actually only proves one thing: I’m prone to procrastination.
And of course procrastination creates it’s own feelings. The longer you put something off the more frightening it gets.
But that doesn’t mean that doodling is scary.
From reaching that point it was only a small step to realize that my actual problem is a kind of writers block.
I’m afraid of that blanc sheet of paper staring at me. Waiting to be filled.
But there’s actually a very good method of getting through writers block called “Free writing”.
Just start writing.
Doesn’t matter what you write about.
Maybe a note to the milkman. Maybe only repeating words. Really doesn’t matter. Just start and go on for 30 minutes a day. Daily. For a few weeks. And at some point your writings will become meaningful. (To you.)
Free drawing would be doodling.
So that’s what I’m going to do for the next few weeks. And I must say I have high expectation as to what kind of drawings I will be doing in a few weeks.
After doing the first two I find that I’m not really doodling. I’m putting far too much thought in to the process. They’re more like a kind of quick sketches.
Even so. I think I’m going to learn a lot from doing a few of these a day for the next couple of weeks.
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