Written by Miriam Schröer
I remember I liked drawing a lot as a teenager. However, I gave up on drawing sometime during my last years of school. I didn’t notice the practice of drawing vanishing from my life. Yet, if reflecting back on it now, I think at that time I was much too focused on delivering only the best of me. I’ve always been a person who likes control (or the illusionist feeling of being in control of things). I only would have continued drawing if I had expected to become an excellent artist. Drawing would have demanded a lot of time and energy, and I would have needed to invest a lot of discipline and practice. But my life plans didn’t paint me as a painter.
Today, I feel confused about the extent to which I fell victim to a notion of optimizing my life, and accordingly my activities. When I moved to Amsterdam and got into the habit of smoking weed occasionally, I noticed how my mind could liberate itself from this notion of perfection.
I have stuck to keeping a diary pretty much all my life. When I smoked joints, I started making little sketches in my diary again. It came naturally. I let go of my perfectionist expectations. To just draw and see where it went felt like a rediscovery of knowledge I had when I was younger, but that got lost somewhere along the way.
It was an unexpected reconnection to the act of enjoying just doing stuff without expecting a specific outcome. I could find great sense in the act of drawing in my diary and wasn’t bothered by the fact that I didn’t find the drawings particularly meaningful – or even beautiful – when looking at them again the next day.
This picture is a visualization of what the joint does to my mind. I tend to feel free from my linear self-critical thinking and societal expectations about what to do with my life and how to behave. The joint gives me ideas that feel closer to my most genuine conscience.
I don’t think smoking joints every day would be a good idea for me, but adding ideas that I have when stoned to my sober ideas has been an enriching practice for me. When a joint makes me feel at ease making sketches in my diary, my sober self can tolerate doing fun stuff like that more easily.
So thank you, weed, for letting me embrace the pleasure of taking it easy.
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