Your Job as Artist = Create, not Critique
What if I have nothing to say?
What if there’s nothing inside of me?
What if I’ve already written the best I could write?
What if nobody cares?
What if nobody notices?
What if everything I write is terrible?
What if people I think are really cool think my writing is really dumb?
And, cribbed from Erin Hanson: What if I fall?
Oh, but my darling,
What if you fly?
There are a million voices inside my head, a million weights tethered to my ankles, shouting reasons not to make art. These voices and weights slow me down.
Maybe they’re all true.
But that one tiny voice, in italics above, is the reason I can’t ever seem to quit writing.
A writer friend of mine, also an ultrarunner, tattooed a thought thematically the same as all the competing voices above on his arm.
I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
“I can’t do it! It’s impossible!... I must do it!”
It’s fairly absurd the amount of time we artists (…it’s not just me, right?) spend lolling about in bed bawling over the art we must make, but can’t make for this, that and the other reason (reasons, above). It’s all a bit boring ultimately but it doesn’t make it any less real, this saga. My diaries hold the same non-stop drama for the past multiple decades.
For some reason, I’ve convinced myself that it’s both my job to create the art, and to ensure that everyone likes it, or that it’s good.
It all calls to mind this fantastic article by Carl Richards I’m sure I’ve referenced in the past.
Distilled: Leave the judgement of your work to the professionals. All your job is, is to make your art.
Re: What if people I think are really cool think my writing is really dumb?
I have a fantastic friend who married another fantastic human. As they’re both humans, they are both divinely, fantastically weird. One day, my friend’s mother-in-law said lovingly, “Thank you for loving my son for his special kind of weird.”
How insightful, how beautiful, how applicable to other things.
What I glean from that: It’s not my job to appeal to everyone. Perhaps it’s not my job to appeal to anyone. But there’s a possibility that my weirdness will correspond to others’ weirdness and perhaps we can all feel less alone for it. All that aside, it’s all spilling out of me, it’s the reason I feel I’m here and so I have to let it all fly anyway. I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
If I’m being honest though, I picture certain people picking up my work or landing on my blog, and I cringe. I’m cringing now thinking of one of them. Omg omg omg, I think. No no no, keep walking. I’m a total introvert who hates the Internet except when it suits me and basically wants to spend all day poking barnacles, searching for barred owls and surfing waves. I basically want to be the human embodiment of Tom Petty’s Wildflowers. There isn’t a Type A cell in my body, which means I ain’t everyone’s cup of tea.
Some of these cringey people are people I love dearly. But they just have a different flavor of thinking or living that I know means they may not be into my work. And even though it feels icky, it gongs the primitive bone that says belong or be cast out, it doesn’t mean I’m a failure or I’m a bad person. The shoe just doesn’t fit.
Let’s Be Brave.
My beautiful artist and dear friend Janice spent a year pouring out the evidence of what I’ve always known about her: She is brave. She is singular. She is courageous. Every day, she published a self portrait. Every day, she chose action over inertia. She chose courage over hiding. She chucked all the bullet points above (I’m sure she felt them again and again, because she is an emotional human, and she is engaged in life) and carried on. The project (final result here) was also a practice. It was daily, daily imagining and dedication to her art. It was creativity as a way of being. Daily vulnerability, the putting out there of oneself. I’m sure it felt impossible at times, and she heard the millions of voices in her head and did it anyway. The perfect practice of I can’t go on, I’ll go on.