Day 259: Dried fruit

If you suffer from self-doubt and crippling perfectionism then this post is for you. Have you ever tried to do a thing and found yourself thinking that there’s no point trying because you won’t be any good at it? Because you won’t be the best?

Maybe you dream of creating portraits of celebrities out of bits of dried fruit. I don’t know. It’s your dream. I’m not judging.

But maybe you lie awake at night beset by worries about all the incredible dried fruit celebrity portrait artists out there, all the groundbreaking work being done in the field of dried fruit celebrity portraiture, and how you will never measure up. You look at your own efforts sitting on easels across the room, the leathery apricot swirls in the wonky shape of James Dean’s coiffured profile, the banana chips overlaid into an approximation of a wounded Kurt Cobain, and you despise it all. It makes you sick. None of it is good enough. None of it works. You might as well just give up and crawl back under that rock out of which you had the sheer temerity to poke your stupid ugly head. Dreams of being a dried fruit celebrity portrait artist indeed! As if you could ever achieve such a hallowed goal. What tosh!

Well, I’m here to tell you that all that is crap. That whole mindset is damaging and painful and illusory. It is but a boundary guardian of your own mind, warning you off from exploring the exciting territory of the unknown, telling you to stay safe in your dull little village.

Stride out, and slay that guardian. Slay it with truth and reason. Bring your fear out into the open and shine the light of awareness upon it.

You don’t have to be the best at what you do. You don’t even have to be good. Many people are not. By definition basically nobody is the best. And there’s plenty of room for people in your chosen pursuit of all skill levels. There’s a whole hierarchy. A whole ecosystem. You’ll find your place.

You could be a professional dried fruit celebrity portrait artist, sure, but you could also live a full and worthwhile life as an amateur dried fruit celebrity portrait artist, earning money a different route. Or you could be a dried fruit celebrity portrait teacher, guiding young hopefuls through their first steps creating dried fruit celebrity portraits of their own. You’d be great at helping your students avoid the common pitfalls, having fallen foul of most of them yourself. Or you could be a dried fruit celebrity portrait reviewer, working for a broadsheet newspaper, or running your own blog, critiquing the dried fruit celebrity portraits of others. What about a dried fruit celebrity portrait TV show presenter? A businesswoman selling dried fruit celebrity portrait supplies? An inventor who designs a new tool that streamlines the whole process of creating dried fruit celebrity portrait art? Or simply someone out on the street selling their dried fruit celebrity portrait art for pennies to passersby?

Would it be worth it, even then? With no money, and no fame, and no esteem, would you still feel compelled to glue dried fruit onto canvases into the shape of Audrey Hepburn smoking a cigarette in Breakfast at Tiffany's?

If not, then you didn’t actually want to do this thing, and the universe has kindly shown you this, and you can go gladly and look for something else to occupy your brief moments on this meaningless rock. Easy.

But if it would still be worth it, then go do it. 

Just go do it.

After years of hard work you might become the best, which could be nice - or being the best could be horrendous and stressful and anxiety-inducing and laced with constant suffering, as most things in life end up being. Or you could be not-the-best, and probably still have a life laced with constant suffering.

But what matters is that you find something that you yourself believe to be a meaningful use of your time, whatever that means to you - something that lights and continuously reignites that candle sitting at the centre of your soul - thrilling you to be a part of it, whether you’re the world’s number one ranked seed or a lost and forgotten nobody.

Find that thing, and do it, and do it, and do it, and you’ll never be a nobody to yourself. 

The world and everyone else in it will be happy to figure out where you slot into the hierarchy. You won’t have time to worry about all that. You’ll be busy.

...... 

Music: Now, Now, by St. Vincent. 

Day 253: Swing and miss

An addendum to yesterday's post, in which I said that inspiration is like a deer in the woods. If you are quiet, and patient, and still, sometimes the deer wanders up, graces you with its presence. But sometimes it does not. And whatever you’re working on you have to just work anyway, regardless, and accept that it will be as it will be. Most times the work isn’t inspired, it’s dull and pedestrian and uninteresting, but you have to accept it anyway, and move on.

But this is difficult. It really is, and especially at first, when you lack experience. It’s tough to be someone who has the acumen to discern quality in a particular field - which you presumably do, if you’re enthusiastic enough to try your hand in that field, be it cupcake baking, dollhouse cabinet building, poetry writing - you presumably love cupcakes, let’s say, and know a good cupcake when you taste it - and it is tough, at first, to sense that the cupcakes you yourself are baking are objectively not good cupcakes.

Allow me to jump analogies, from deer to sports. Because you can lie there, in bed, after a hard day baking, covered in flour and frosting and sloshed egg white, and think about the tray of bland, unrisen muffins cooling on the side downstairs, and you can feel really bad about yourself. 

You can imagine yourself as a sportsperson, a batter, maybe, trying out for a team; these cupcakes you've been baking are your big opportunity to prove yourself, and you imagine the coach watching from the sidelines, clipboard in hand, and here you are on the field striking out.

Even if sometimes you swing and connect. Even if you’ve hit the occasional home run. Mostly you’re missing. Your hitting average must be depressingly low. No team would hire you. Maybe you just don’t have what it takes.

But this the wrong way to think about it.

You’re not at try-outs here. You’re not in the game winning final minute.

This is just one of many practice sessions on a dreary Tuesday afternoon in the rain. You have to do it, and a million more like it, before you’ll even know how good you are. Romanticised assumptions tell you that people with hidden beautiful gifts get noticed, and have to only display those innate gifts, and they win fame, attention, call-ups to world cup teams, positions on next year’s Bake Off.

But the truth is that it’s all a lot of work. For everyone, regardless of talent. And most of the work involves failing, and learning, and adjusting, and failing again, over and over and over. Batters spend all day every day swinging at balls. Not to prove their talent. Just to practise. To dedicate themselves. Have you got any idea how many footballs Beckham would bend in from outside the box in ceaseless training sessions, ingraining the muscle memory, honing the movements? How many of those do you think went in? Not all of them. Not nearly.

How many free kicks did Beckham score, in actual matches, out of the total number he took? Some of them.

And what’s more, art is not sport. The primary drive is not competition. There aren’t rigid rules within which precise skills may be tested. Art is more exploratory, imprecise, curative, playful. You are not aiming to best others, but to share with them. Whether you share through words, fabrics, musical scales, or cupcakes, you’re dedicating yourself to an act of communion.

So when you’re next lying in bed, sugar and dough beneath your fingernails, feeling the day has been for naught, remember that this is the job. Your cupcakes will sag. You’ll strike out. Why not give yourself a decade or two, and then see if that’s still the case. And if it is, but you still enjoy what you do, then who the hell cares?

We’re all only going to die.

So get down to the oven, to the pitch, to the page, and do your work, whether you hit or miss or fall. There is nothing more for it.

...... 

Music: This Is the Day, by the The. An upbeat new wave classic, imbued with optimism, but with a hint of melancholy twisting through the core. Gently profound. Lovely.

Day 252: Deer

Here's something about creativity that I should know, and yet am continuously learning: it cannot be forced. Creativity is a deer in the woods, picking gingerly through the thicket, and yelling at it will only scare it away. Telling it when to turn up is an exercise in futility. Anger and frustration only drive it deeper into the bush.

The best you can do is create a large and tranquil space within yourself, put out food, ensure there is running water, and then wait. Maybe the deer will be along. Maybe it won't.

If the deer does arrive then you can only be relaxed, let it do its thing, and accept that it is going to leave whenever it wants. Maybe you need it to stay for a full day, but it wanders off after half an hour, and does not return.

This is the nature of the deer.

You're not hunting it. You're not capturing it. You simply want it to come and sit with you. The energy and beauty that the deer bestows upon you only works when the deer is free. Creativity cannot be made to happen.

But of course this doesn't mean you have to wait to be productive. Oh no. The deer might well come and go as it pleases, an animal spirit beholden to no mortal laws, but you, if you are serious about creativity, have to make commitments.

Whether you're painting, writing, sewing baby jumpers, or baking meringues, you have to be able to work whether or not the deer of creativity, of inspiration, deigns to grace you with its presence.

How do you go about this?

There are many tricks. Bum on seat, that's always vital. Get to where you need to work, and put yourself in position. You have to be in that woodland glade, ready, or there's zero chance of meeting the deer.

Schedule your time. Turn off your phone, disable Wi-Fi on your laptop, create a block of time that is for this activity only. Don't leave until the time is over. If two hours feels impossible, do twenty minutes. Do ten minutes. Do sixty seconds. Building a routine of sixty-second blocks, a number of times a day, for a number of months - and sticking to it - you might be shocked by what happens. And you may well find after forcing yourself down to the glade that you've become lost in the sunlight and birdsong, you've met a few deer, and your alarm has long since sounded and fallen silent. Ingraining the habit of getting going is a powerful thing indeed.

Picture where you want to be in the future, say, winning the local meringue baking contest, and try to spend every day moving closer rather than further away from that goal. Go to bed closer than you were when you woke up. Even if only by an inch.

Go for a walk every day. Eat a satsuma. Get enough sleep. Try the Morning Pages. Three sides of free-writing every day, no excuses. They work.

There are many tricks. For me, though, the hardest one to learn has been this:

Get over yourself.

Just get the hell over yourself. Because the truth is that most of what you create, when you sit at your desk, stand at your easel, lean over your stove, will be rubbish. It will be not good. Most of the time the deer will not turn up, there will be drizzle falling, and you'll come home cold and damp.

This is the nature of the deer. This is the nature of the work. This is the nature of life.

Fight it all you want, but it won't change. So best get the hell over yourself, and get on with making things anyway.

You simply cannot put energy into getting that damned deer to do a damned thing. So forget about it, and put your energy into all the rest. There is much to do.

......

Music: Sister Cities, by Hop Along.

Day 212: Wonky art

Wotcha. I’m just home from work. I’ve not got much to say tonight, I did a load of writing this afternoon, but it was more the first delicately reaching fingers of a hand palpating a subject, feeling for the size, the shape, whether there’s anything there to necessitate further action. Maybe the words I wrote will coalesce into something later down the line. Maybe not.

But I can come here and just write this, and see what happens. I know eventually something will come out, because I’ve got my mojo back.

I had a confrontation with the negative voices in my head the other night, shined the light of awareness directly on them after a long time of them bubbling away in the dark, and they hissed and fled, and suddenly I was alone, myself, free to laugh and think and write again.

And, Christ, does it make a difference, believing in yourself! Who cares if this all is pathetic? It’s aflame for me right now. I’m where I want to be. Who cares if no one reads it? Write for the stars and the moon - and if the stars and the moon whisper that you’re a loser, give them the finger and write what you wanted anyway.

… Uhh, not that I’m bragging, by the way. About having my mojo back.

Why would that be bragging? Why would I be ashamed about having my mojo back? It isn’t shameful to feel good.

So why do I feel ashamed?

Because those negative voices haven’t truly fled. They’re just on the periphery of the light, looking for a way back in.

But not today, you pesky buggers.

I’ve got a lifetime of experience squishing myself up really tight, and trying really hard, and using stress and self-loathing and perfectionism to try to sort of trick people into thinking I have talent. Like if I obsess over a piece of writing for months then, provided it doesn’t implode under the weight, I can make it read pretty well.

But the secret to creating things is to just do them naturally, and badly, and not worry that they’re bad, but love that they’re natural, and encourage that natural element, the organic, artistic element - foster it, nourish it, and let it slowly develop and grow. And only when this instinctive joyful chaotic process inside you has parity with that squished-tight, try-hard process, that voice that criticises and frets - only when the two are equally powerful can you have a fruitful creative life.

The try-hard process hones and shapes. But it is the chaotic process that spews the clay initially that may then be honed and shaped. Be overly critical and the clay well will dry up (that’s a weird metaphor, but screw it!), and you’ll be left criticising an empty hole, and then, eventually, yourself.

So no more of that. No no. I’ve done that for so long. But I’ve also got 212 days practice just chucking out whatever clay I can find. The clay well got clogged (I’m not letting this metaphor drop) recently, but all it took was hauling out the clay blockage and slapping it into some sort of shape and saying, Hey, I made this wonky clay thing, and it might not be a Grecian urn, but it came from me, and that’s good enough - all it took was that, making a concerted effort to accept myself, and the clay was flowing once again, the beautifully flowing clay well… or maybe fountain... maybe this metaphor works better with the clay coming from a fountain, because wells don’t flow, do they? They just sit and wait for you to dip your bucket in them.

Do wells flow? Fountains flow. Or spray. Can wells be fountains? It’s too late at night and concepts have stopped making sense to me.

I don’t know. But I do know you should go away and make something, and love whatever it is you make, and when those negative voices come out to tell you that the thing you made is wonky and disgusting, well, tell them it does not matter.

Your wonky art is wonky because it’s true. And I believe Keats had a little something to say about what is true, whether Grecian urn or no.

So get to it.

Day 71: Commitment

The night is hot. The city sleeps below me. I stand at my window half-dressed and look out on the many gleaming lights in the distance, each one a life, a world, a story, and I think how much I want to quit.

Today has been a day when my commitment to writing has been tested. I've felt low and empty, drained out, tired, worn thin. I'm exhausted from my day job -- I slogged up the hill a few hours ago, made it to the shop with enough energy left to pick up an own-brand oven pizza -- the self-service checkout was in need of rebooting and took an aeon to register every move -- and I stumbled home with the light fading and made my pizza in the gloom, ate in my room alone, tried to write but couldn't keep my eyes open, my brain was stretched taut, my feet throbbing, and I had to crumple into bed and nap for an hour and then drag myself back up just now despite every cell in my body screaming out for rest. I feel like that checkout, everything sluggish, needing a hard reset.

The only other writing I did today was before work, still groggy from not enough sleep after last night's bar shift and then blog, and this is my life, and this is all I have. And the writing was dumb and painful and prosaic, and I felt like I have nothing of worth to transmit, no ability to create. I fight this mental health that every day is crushing me and it feels like the only rewards for doing so are more days in which to be crushed again.

But this is the commitment I've made. To write no matter what. To write when it's good, when I'm flying, when I allow creativity to express itself in unique ways through me, and creativity in turn lifts me up and takes me outside of myself, and we soar together, to lands strange and wonderful and new.

But also to write when nothing comes, when every word is difficult and painful and frustrating. When we're lost in the wilderness just taking one clumsy step at a time and after five hours we find we've gone in a circle and we're back where we began, having discovered nothing.

This is the relationship. This is the reality.

And, boy, do I choose it.

Everything, I think, has these moments. Every pursuit, activity, calling, has these days. What you need to do is find the activity where, during these godawful times, you still look at yourself and think this is where I belong. Where when the going gets tough you put your head down and you find some way, do whatever it takes, to get through it, because you'd rather anything than lose this glorious tender thing that you sometimes have; whatever it is, whatever it means.

So that's me tonight. Stumbling on, uncertain, wounded, battered, but knowing I'm right where I need to be.

And now that's written and there's somewhere else I need to be. Specifically: bed.

Good night.

Day 69: Hammers

Well-hell-hello!

Is that a cool introduction? I think it's pretty neat. I'm going to say that at the beginning of every post from now on. It's going to be my thing.

Yeah, so, hey. I went to a coffee shop today and I tried doing some writing prompts, but nothing was coming out. My brain was all goopy and sluggish. But that's OK. That's all good in the pud. (I'm going to start saying that as well. Man, I'm like a Youtube content provider right now.)

Remember what I wrote about saying yes to reality and not being so hard on myself? About self-hatred being a Chinese finger trap? I mean it was the day before yesterday, I hope you remember. If not then you need to get your memory checked out! Do some brain training, my friend.

Well anyway, I'm going to do that. Uhh, be kind to myself. Not the brain training. It's you who needs the brain training. I bet you've even forgotten what we're talking about. It's worse than we thought! And where are your trousers? Wait, you don't even wear trousers. Your legs were amputated after that crash last year. It was a really traumatic experience. I can't believe you don't remember!

Boy, you can tell I'm tired, can't you? I waffle when I'm tired.

So, then, I'll waffle. But what I won't do is hate myself. That's important. I'm letting the fact I wasn't creative today be OK. I'm sitting down here on my tush and I'm doing a blog post anyway. And I'm feeling proud of that.

It's been a cycle of mine for so long to have a day or two of productivity, and then the first day it doesn't flow I throw my hands in the air and curse the heaves and yell that, see, I knew I wasn't cut out for this, I knew I couldn't sustain any creative endeavour.

And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because then the anger and frustration chases the creativity away further, which of course makes me more angry and frustrated, which makes it even harder to do anything the next day, and I get myself in such a tizz I have to walk away from it all and go and get drunk for a month.

It's like finding a beautiful deer has wandered into my clearing for me to photograph. But as soon as I start trying to get it to pose I spook it and it runs. Then I shout at it to come back, which makes it run even further.

And then I go and get drunk.

But not anymore. 69 days, by the way. That's huge. Shout-out to the number 69. Every thirteen-year-old school kid's favourite number. I reckon it's time you stopped tittering about it though. You're a grown-up. You don't have any legs. Be serious for once in your life!

But yes. I have managed to blog every day for this challenge. But the thing with the creativity has remained the same. I've stumbled into doing a Lovecraftian horror parody or a dumb film script or some writing prompts, stuff I've really enjoyed, stuff I desperately want to be doing -- but as soon as I realise what I'm doing I get self-conscious, that old negative voice starts going, "Ooh, look at him, trying to write, thinking he can write. Doing a little film script, are you? A little short story, huh?" And suddenly nothing will come. And I have to just write placeholder posts (like this), until my shadow-self eventually gets bored and wanders off, and creativity sprouts again.

It's like fighting Dark Link in the Water Temple in Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Halfway through the dungeon you come across an evil mirror version of yourself that attacks when you attack, blocks when you block, gets angry at Navi's constant hint intrusions when you get angry at Navi's constant hint intrusions (little Ocarina of Time joke for you there. I know Ocarina is your favourite ever game. Though I bet you'd forgotten.).

The trick, with Dark Link, is to un-equip your sword and whack him over the head with a big hammer. Which, now I think about it, seems a somewhat confused message...

Maybe the point is that you can't defeat your own shadow with a frontal assault. Maybe you win through doing something unexpected, you win through yielding.

Maybe you don't force that deer of creativity back to your woods. You just create a lovely glade and plant the flowers and hope that the deer wanders back of its own accord.

And then you whack it over the head with a big hammer.

I don't know, I feel like hammers should be in there somewhere, otherwise I'm kinda reaching with that analogy.

But anyway, I'm going to go get a good night's sleep, give that timid deer the space and time and love it needs, and see what tomorrow brings. I just hope I'm not still in the Water Temple. That place really sucks.

I've been ya boy, Robbie P., and this is me signing off. If you've enjoyed what you've read, please remember to like, comment and subscribe, and I'll see you next time, Internets. Kablamo!

That's how I sign off now. I'm going to do it every post. You'll see.