The trouble with the drive to improve

I like that Aerial mixes the creativity of a performance art with the gains of a bodyweight workout. You can showcase truly impressive feats of physical strength and flexibility as well as perform your movement - your character.

There have been times when I felt tired, unable to do the skill I set out to train. These sessions usually ended up with me just playing around with the apparatus, sometimes finding ideas for character moments that would end up in an act. I have also experienced days of complete creative blocks, so I would use the apparatus for a workout, focussing exclusively on physical skills. This versatility is what has kept me sticking with Aerial for a long time and I still love every moment I spend upside down.

Aerial is of course an incredibly physical skill. The confidence of moving fluidly in the air, to express one's creativity, comes from strength, stamina and experience - through a lot of training.

Something I have noticed in myself and through conversations with other aerialists is this hyper focus on skills. Striving to always be better. Taken by itself, there’s nothing wrong with that. The drive to learn new skills or further build on what one has already mastered can be motivating and is a great driving force. 

It gets tricky when I stop appreciating my achievements. After all, if I constantly move my goal posts, how can I ever reach them? 

I have often found myself wanting a move, training for it as much as I could, but by the time I have finally achieved it - it does not feel special anymore. 

Maybe the reason is that I was there for the entire journey: I had to learn the move, dissect it, go through stages of progression to slowly build up towards its full expression. By the time I have gone through all of this, time has passed and it is harder to think back to the version of Me that was unable to even contemplate performing the move. There may of course have been moments of achievement along the way but these get quickly forgotten when I am able to do the move well enough that I can start to think about all the small details that I am still not getting right. And even when the move finally feels comfortable has entered into my very own catalogue of movement when I reminisce about the time that I could not do it or when I look at old videos of myself training - there is my mind:

Here I will venture into uncomfortably honest territory, so I can really only speak from my own experience. My mind will question the validity of achievement because if I can do the move, how could it be special? The special moves chiefly reside within Instagram or other aerialists that I admire. Something that I am capable of is by default not special.

While this is admittedly not a very healthy view of myself, it would also be self-deception to deny its existence.

This might of course be my very own idiosyncratic problem living exclusively in the confines of my weird little brain but I have been wondering how many other aerialists, subconsciously or not, might share this way of thinking.

Unfortunately I can’t offer a solution to the problem. I wish there was a universal, one-size-fits-all, works-every-time cure, but like with so many issues that touch upon mental health - it’s not always easy.

There is one thing that I have found for myself though: I recently decided to be part of a teacher scratch night, which meant I had to create an act. As soon as I started, nothing worked. Nothing was good enough, nothing was special and every move I tried made me wonder why I was even trying.

Then I somehow managed to step outside of Me and ask myself: “stop doing what you think you have to do, and tell me what you want to do.” And I discovered that all I wanted was to make something that looked pretty and weird and interesting. And so I did. I tied a huge red paper lantern to my rope and during my act it got slowly lifted into the air like a big balloon. There was no aerial skill involved at all but it was thoroughly satisfying nonetheless. I think it was because I did the thing I wanted, not the thing I thought was expected of me.