by Henk ter Heide on Saturday May 7, 2011
Recently I’ve been writing letters to the board of directors of the sheltered workplace I work.
For the last 20 years these people have been thinking that everything was alright because nobody ever complained. So I set the record straight. And now, slowly, the organization is changing.
The point is that I really liked analyzing the problems of the sheltered workplace and writing letters about it. I’m sorry that I’ve reached my goal and have nothing to write letters about anymore.
So I thought it would be a nice idea to start writing articles about stories I’m interested in and publishing them on this weblog.
That seems like a good idea. But I have my doubts.
Not only because I’ve no idea about what I’m going to write, but mainly because I’m scared that I wont follow through with it.
It seems that it’s kind of my life’s story to start with something I’m interested in. And after a while I stop doing it.
Not that I make a conscious decision to stop. It’s more like I run out of steam.
So I’m afraid that this might happen again. And again.
But then if you never start something new. You’ll never start something new.
Thinking some more about it I think that the problem might be with organizing my idea.
I tend to have these kinds of ideas on days that I don’t have to go to work. This is no exception to that rule. I’m writing this on the Friday after the Dutch holiday Freedom day (where we celebrate the end of WWII). A compulsory day off.
I intend to do something about it. But never seem to find the time.
So this time I’m going to try something new.
I’ve put an appointment with myself in my dairy.
Every day from 9.00 PM till 10.00 PM I’m going to either write about something that interests me or find something on the Net that I like and can publish on this blog.
Let’s see how that works out.
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by Henk ter Heide on Friday December 24, 2010
Why would you wash your garbage truck if you can use it to send people your seasons greetings 
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by Henk ter Heide on Sunday April 18, 2010
I started this color hatching sketch. It was meant as a kind of top view of a road through the forest. But as I was drawing it soon became clear that something was very wrong with this drawing.
I just couldn’t figure out why I was doing this. Drawing something of which I know it’s wrong.
But cycling to the fitness center to do my weekly workout it dawned on me.
When I tell people that I have a photographic memory, they often think that means that I never forget any thing. But that’s not the case. Never forgetting any thing is called a Eidetic memory. I do forget things.
I call it a photographic memory because the pictures in my mind have a photographic quality to them.
But as I am finding out. They are not complete.
It’s like I have these photographic plates in my mind that have to be exposed to an object to get a clear memory. But if I don’t look long enough to some detail of that object I don’t have a picture of it in my mind.
It’s like studying for an exam.
While you’re reading the book you feel like you know it by heart.
But on your exam you find that you have forgotten a few details. Usually the details aren’t very important. But sometimes they are the connecting tissue you need to make your argument.
In the same way I have a lot of pictures of tree trunks in my mind. Which isn’t strange. While cycling I get to see a lot of tree trunks.
I have several pictures of leaves and flowers in my mind. But I have hardly any pictures the point of the tree where the branches grow. That’s not the most interesting part of a tree. So I assume that I don’t look at it very much.
You know the feeling of needing a word that you can’t quit remember but you have it on the tip of your tongue? People suggest words but although you still can’t remember the word you need, you know that the suggestion is wrong.
I have something like that while doing a sketch like this.
I know it’s wrong, but I don’t know what I should change to correct it.
color hatching sketch
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by Henk ter Heide on Friday March 5, 2010
No, I know. This isn’t the first writing session. But I thought if I just call it “writing” WordPress should add a number. And I think it will. The next time I call an article “writing”.
But anyway I was planning to do a drawing today.
A few days ago while doing one of my lines drawings I came about an interesting shape I wanted to use in a drawing.
But of course that sketch didn’t work. So I started anew. The second drawing also didn’t work for me. But the third did. Sort of.
So just now I was racing through my drawing.
But that doesn’t work.
With the first two mistake I though “oh hell, whole will notice”. But with the third mistake it was clear that I notice. And I am the most important member of the audience.
If I don’t like the drawing there’s no point in posting it.
Which teaches me that I can’t rush through drawings. I’ll either have to do them the way I want them. Or don’t do them at all.
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by Henk ter Heide on Sunday February 28, 2010
I just saw a video by Seth Godin about shipping.
He mentions something I never realized.
I always thought that being an artist is about making beautiful and interesting drawings. But not according to Seth.
Seth Godin says that any business is about shipping.
And of course he is right.
In the Christmas holiday I started a very complicated drawing that probably will be very beautiful if I ever get it finished.
But like with most complicated drawings that I do. It takes a lot of time to complete and the middle part isn’t very interesting to do.
I haven’t done much drawing the last few months, so I’m still only about one third the way of completing the drawing.
Thinking about this shipping idea I realized that there is a better way to drawing. It would work much better if I draw a lot of these easy, quick drawings. And when I feel like it I’ll intermix them with working on the more complex drawings.
Lines 6
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by Henk ter Heide on Sunday February 21, 2010
A few months ago I promised you a story a day… and dropped of the face of the earth.
The last few months have been a bit tense.
In August, last year, I wrote a letter to the board of my company in which I accused the head of finance of embezzlement.
The board has taken the letter under advisement but hasn’t as yet taken any action to deal with the problem.
The reason being that we are a government funded business and our board members are local council members and there will be a council election in two weeks.
But for some stupid reason this head of finance apparently doesn’t know this.
He seems to think that if he can get rid of me his embezzlement won’t be investigated.
So the last few months he has tried several tricks to get rid of me.
Accused me of abusing a colleague, tried to discredit me.
Tomorrow he is going to offer me a job. Apparently a job where I’m going to get a pay rise of € 100. I know this because I received my bank statement last Friday and my salary is already € 100 up, while I haven’t yet accepted the job.
Does he really think I would be this stupid?
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by Henk ter Heide on Sunday October 18, 2009
I came across a post by Steve Pavlina about this guy who has a site about deprogramming limiting beliefs in about 20 minutes.
Normally I wouldn’t have given much stock to somebody with such a claim. But coming from Steve Pavlina there must be something to it. So I went to have a look.
In his first video he talks about his defining trait. Perseverance. His ability to overcome all sorts of obstacles.
He found that the problem with perseverance was that he needed obstacles to show his perseverance. So he was always looking for them.
That made me think about my defining trait.
I’m very intelligent. I can solve every problem that you through at me. And people through a lot of problems to me. Actually I spend my life solving problems.
Only thing is that when I looked a little closer it turns out that a lot of the problems I think about aren’t really my problems.
Looking even closer I found that I don’t actually solve anything. I only explain problems. Then a fantasize about telling people about my solution and then I move on to the next problem.
That’s why this website is much more about what I want to do and what I’m thinking about then about what I’m actually doing.
In the next video Morty Lefkoe examines the history of your beliefs and has you thinking back about what it was that people actually said that gave you this belief and whether your interpretation of what they said was correct.
So what did people say?
My parents, teachers and counselor at my boardinghouse all gave me the impression that there must be something special about me that was the cause of the fact that I couldn’t do certain things. The only thing was that they didn’t belief me. They made me feel that if I could only explain the difference they would belief me.
At least that was my interpretation back then.
But thinking about it a bit more I remember a teacher who told me that I could do things my own way but he wouldn´t not help me because he didn´t understand what I was doing.
I´ve always been very strong willed and prone to do things my own way. Partly out of necessity. Being autistic and gay there are some things I can´t do the way you do them. But also out of fun. What is the fun in doing things the same way everybody else does them?
So of course I’ve been criticized a lot. But not by ill willed people trying the spite me but by helpful people who just didn’t understand what I was doing.
I think it’s only in the last ten years or so that I learned to belief that explaining a problem is the same as solving it.
I’m not yet quite sure how I got this belief but I’m glad I disproved it. Because it frees up a lot of energy I can use to do a lot of things I’ve been planning for ages but never got around to.
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by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday October 14, 2009
Sometimes it helps to look at something from a different perspective.
For the last 30 odd years I’ve been trying to get rid of my (at times) very annoying habit of talking to myself.
Not only by will power but also by trying to figure out why I did it and what the purpose might be.
At times I succeeded to not talk to my self for a few hours. But it always came back.
A few weeks ago my manager called me stubborn behind my back. Very loudly behind my back.
I didn’t mined that much because being called stubborn is only one mans judgment.
Being strong willed and being stubborn is actually the same thing. Both means that you have the power to overcome obstacles you find on your way. In the case of stubborn the person setting those obstacles will call you stubborn. (Usually because he doesn’t agree with the way you live your life.)
But thinking about it a little longer I realized that there is a difference in being strong willed and being stubborn. But the difference isn’t in your actions but in the way you present yourself.
A strong willed person will be very calm and composed. Where as a stubborn person is loud and argumentative.
I act stubborn. And I do that because I always are afraid because of all those people criticizing me.
That is.
When I thought about it I realized that there is actually nobody criticizing me. Except in my mind.
A few days ago I realized that I am constantly imagining people who are criticizing me. And I’m constantly defending myself from those imaginable people.
All those imaginable people who are criticizing me frighten me a lot. So why would I do that?
This morning I finally figured it out.
Because of my visual thinking process I can imagine myself somewhere else then I’m right now. That other place feels very real. Actually far more real then the place where I am right now.
So for instance, at the moment bicycling is fairly frightening because of the fact that I fell and broke my hip last year. At the moment I’m again learning how to keep balance.
When I cycling to work I feel very scared. So I imagine that I’m in the office of my manager being chewed out for something I did wrong.
That feels so real that I don’t feel the fear from cycling anymore.
But of course I have to imagine something my manager could be angry about and get frightened of that imaginary problem.
In the end that gets me more frightened that just concentrating on cycling.
So you might ask why did I ever learn a trick that made me more frightened then I would have been just going about my way.
And the answer is that I didn’t.
Originally I would imagine someplace nice I could visit if I wanted to flee reality. That worked perfectly for years. It only had one big drawback namely that it was very distracting.
I remember days passing without me. At 10 AM I would flee reality and next it would be 11 PM and apparently I just sat there for hours on end.
So about 20 years ago I tried to loose that habit but because I didn’t understand why I did it I only replaced it by an other habit that wasn’t as distracting but far more annoying.
So now I know.
This morning I realized that I should concentrate on reality. On living in the here and the now.
Today, for the first time in my life, I had a day without talking to myself and without fleeing reality.
It felt both very nice and as though I was doing some very heavy lifting.
Clearly this isn’t something that will just go on it’s own. I’ll have to fight for it.
But since it’s also clear that fleeing reality causes more fear then it curbs. And not fleeing reality actually helps against the anxiety attics I’m optimistic.
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by Henk ter Heide on Monday August 17, 2009
I feel trapped.
My job is boring and pointless.
My favorite bar is about to go belly up (although the owner still doesn’t know it).
I have hardly any friends.
I hardly ever talk to the kind of people I like to talk with.
I’ve got to get out of here.
Being autistic I’m told that I lack the skills that are necessary to find a new job.
Maybe so. But you never really know until you’ve tried, do you.
So I decided that even if I don’t find a job I should try. If only because you always learn something from trying.
On Monsterboard I found the question “Where do you want to be in five years?”
Thinking about that I realized that’s one of my problems.
I’m only 47 yrs and I live in the past. (We all do at the sheltered workplace.)
I’m always thinking about what went wrong. What aspects of my autism lead me to the place I’ve ended up.
But that’s a dead end.
Knowing how I got here will never help me to get on.
Not with my life.
And not with my art.
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by Henk ter Heide on Thursday August 6, 2009
This morning I realized that by there very nature artists must be very self centered people.
I was thinking about this drawing I was going to do that wouldn’t be very nice. Actually I was quite curtain that I wouldn’t like the drawing. And that you would have a hard time finding someone who did.
So why do the drawing?
Mostly because it is something I’ve got to get out of the way. It’s the drawing I’ve been working towards for the last year or so.
I did one that look a bit like it a few months ago. But then I didn’t dare to do it the right way. I rushed through it and didn’t like the result.
This time the result is almost what I wanted it to be.
I started slow and deliberate. And then increased my speed. By the last quarter I thought I knew what the result would be and changed technique. Which didn’t turn out so good.
But overall it’s more or less the picture I had in mind.
Finish and start
While I was drawing it I realized something else about the term “artist”.
I’ve finally earned the right to call myself an artist.
When I started this blog 2.5 years ago I thought that an artist was somebody who produced beautiful pictures. And since that was what I was trying to do I thought I could use that title.
(And besides “artist learning to draw” sound a lot better then “Dutch guy learning to draw”. Doesn’t it.)
But you don’t have to be an artist to produce nice pictures. Anybody can produce nice picture. Give a monkey a camera and he can produce nice picture.
Even worse: Give an elephant a paint brush and he can produce nice pictures.
And it isn’t even about producing nice pictures.
I don’t like a lot of contemporary art.
Even a lot of famous art works are an acquired taste. Like these paintings by Mondrain.
Being an artist is about development of your medium.
While doing this drawing I realized that I want to spend the next few weeks, maybe months, exploring the interaction between (color) pencils and paper.
Different colors feel different while they scratch or glide over the paper. Different kinds of paper feel different.
And of course using different techniques causes various feelings.
I don’t know if this is going to lead to interesting drawings. But it should lead to interesting experiences.
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