I am a being of pure light and joy

I’ve been working on and off for a few years now on a project that’s about discovering your self-worth while living in, and attempting to survive, late-stage capitalism. It’s still this amorphous blob of ideas, notes and conversations, which I keep collecting and storing and shaping, and then I get overwhelmed, and I put it all away again. As a (mostly) recovering overachiever, I’m trying to not putting pressure on myself to produce. I’m trying to let it come to me, to listen to what it’s telling me, to follow the heat when it shows up, as Jennifer has taught me.

And ughhhhhhhhh, do I hate it sometimes. So dumb! Why can’t I just have a great idea and then bloop it out of me and into the world! I don’t mind the “hard” “work” that goes with it, I just want it to be straightforward and laid out for me and then done!

And THEN I want it to magically reach everyone that it should reach on its own without me having to do anything! I should publish it or post it or whatever and voila, all the people with whom it might resonate or intrigue or irritate or otherwise cause an emotional experience will see it. I don’t think this is too much to ask.

Ohhhhh, you say, ohhhhhh, but this is part of the “process,” the push-and-pull of creating, blah blah blah. Oh yeah? OH YEAH? Well, I would like to speak to a manager.

whatever, you jerks

I often try to have conversations with other creative people in my life about how they work and see what I can learn from them. I prefer to learn directly from my friends’ demons and educations, versus like, taking a “class” or reading a “book” or listening to “podcasts” about this stuff, because my friends know everything and no one else knows anything. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.

Recently, Alice and I were talking about how much the idea of hustling a new thing you’ve made can absolutely kill the initial thrill you feel for the idea, before you’ve even done an ounce of work on the thing. It’s so disheartening! I’ve thought about this self-worth project as a book for a while, for example, and as soon as I remember how much hawking a book sucked the living essence of anything reasonably lovely inside of me right out, I crawl back over to my extremely comfortable sofa and start crocheting sweaters for my dogs again. (Literally a captive audience for creativity, those two.)

So then I start thinking, well, I should have more innocent, pure intentions with my work! I should be able to create something, put it out there, and not care if anyone sees it ever! I have spent the past few years discovering the tools of self-worth and trying to liberate myself from the need for external validation wherever I can (no really, I have, I swear, I’m working on it), so I should not need for my work to connect with other people. I am a being of pure light and joy, after all, I should not need from this mortal coil! I should just make what I make, and not worry at all! Right?

Saying out loud “I shouldn’t care about what I make after I make it” is helpful in pointing out how preposterous it is, and how this version of my inner critic is really a sneaky purity demon. It’s basically that person in your life that says, “Oh, your new sweater is wool? I only wear bioidentically-generated woolsynth myself, but that’s just me.” Cool, cool. I most recently said this aloud to my producer friend Kat, with whom I went for a walk the other day.

When I said that I wanted to not worry about hustling A New Project, that I wanted to be able to create and not care what happens to something, Kat laughed and said, “Is there anyone that actually does that?!” She shared her experience working on Octavia’s Parables, a gorgeous podcast that talks about bringing Octavia Butler’s ideas to life. That work is not about achieving a certain number of downloads, and it hopes to find the audience that will connect with it. (It does!) But it’s also a record for what they were thinking, feeling, experiencing in this moment. It’s contribution to the the expansive body of work documenting what it was like to be alive and thinking about this stuff in this period of time.

Whoa. I hadn’t thought about my own work like that before.

She went on to share that she feels like wanting creative work to connect with people is not the same as seeking external validation. Thus, I’ve found a rift in my developing worldview: these are not the same thing? For most of my life, seeking attention, wanting to be seen, looking for validation and finding connection were all the same! One big ol’ bin of emotional aliveness. Disentangling these all from each other could be quite an adventure, but I think I can already feel how different they feel in my body when I think about them.

I’m still stuck on one piece of this, and that is the amount of my identity that becomes wrapped up emotionally in a new project. Because of capitalism, and grind culture, and all the other toxic contributions to this vein, I always feel like I become what I make publicly, and that absolutely does not feel good. When I was working in social justice and technology, it felt like that’s all people wanted from me, and it made me only want to produce things that fit that identity so that I could get validated (and paid). When I quit that work, other projects in art and crafting threatened to do the same. Now that my public identity is more in tune with who I feel like I am, and I have a lot more friends who are not associated with any of my work in any way, I’m extremely loathe to submit myself to the grind of becoming the next project I produce. It’s just too exhausting and toxic.

For those of you who are creating and producing and otherwise who identify with their work in some way, how do you balance this? How do you keep yourself intact, work to make sure your work connects, and stay grounded to your intentions when you create?

Comments are open to all on this post, just in case a more public discussion is useful. You can also reply to me directly via email, if you don’t want to be part of that.

love
dz