The thing about being a relatively busy adult with a load of responsibilities whilst dealing with neurodiversity issues is that it’s really easy to lose sight of the fun and creative hobbies you want to do. This then leads to the skills behind these hobbies atrophying, creating the dreaded skill gap - the distance between what you can do, and what you want to do.

I feel this most with my guitar playing. I’ve been playing on and off for nearly 20 years, but I would say my skills are trapped in that state of high beginner. Theoretically, I can hang at an intermediate level. Modes, positions, fingerboard awareness, extended chords and how to use them. All in my brain ready to use. I just can’t back it up.

I can definitely play, and play rhythm fairly fast and accurate; I can follow along at around 160bpm, and I can sort of solo. Improvisation is an area I often fail in outside of a pure flow state, usually because all I can hear in my head when I’m trying to solo over a backing track is the original solo (or a live recorded version).

Then there’s the fiddly bits. My bends aren’t 100% accurate and I struggle to put vibrato on them. I can hammer on/pull off pretty cleanly up to about 100bpm in quarter notes, but not much further or faster, and not for more than say 4 to 6 bars. Slides often get a bit blurry if I try to apply speed so the target note gets lost. Then there’s the speed picking issue, plus the fact that I struggle above the 15th fret in any position really.

Combine that with the tendency to play unplugged and I’m left with the inability to turn the sounds in my head into reality.

There are other hobbies I’ve let atrophy, or ones that I want to start picking up, that are similarly easy enough to assess the skills gap. The one I struggle with though is writing. How do you assess something essentially subjective? There’s no real 16th note alternate picking or speed legato playing equivalent in the art of writing, outside of perhaps grammar, and even then, there’s ways around it. Hello, Claude.

Experience has told me that unless it’s universally disliked, writing is difficult to qualify. Low effort, badly written books can still pick up a fan base, whilst highly rated best sellers still have their detractors. For example, I’ve personally tried and failed to read One Hundred Years of Solitude 3 times; I just can’t get on board with it. See also: Rivals by Jilly Cooper, a book that seemed more interested in introducing the 6 page glossary of characters than writing about any of the things said characters actually do on the daily, other than cheat on their partners.

ChatGPT (whose grammar opinions I trust less than Claude, for reasons, although I find it better for general purpose use) tells me to try and assess things like storytelling and structure, narrative pacing, scene construction, but again, being a relative novice at this how would I know? Then there’s the directions I want to push into more - poetry, story writing, etc.

Of course, the answer is simple: I find out by doing the thing. Start writing poetry. Start writing more fiction. Make it more of a daily habit. Then assess it. Pick up things I struggle with, just like I notice the struggle adding vibrato to a string bend.

More importantly, stop using the unknown or unknowable as a reason to not do the thing, or even learn more about doing the thing.

My pencils are sharp enough.