weeds in the garden
When I find myself shying away from writing again, I try to go back to my first few posts and remind myself of my reasons for starting.
When I first began, I felt incredible: so creative! so excited! & so in touch with a piece of me that I thought had shriveled up and died. Still, life gets in the way and I am - unfortunately - highly susceptible to changes in momentum. It only takes a small stone underfoot to trip me up and send me tumbling back down the mountain of self-assurance, right into the pit of doubt.
So, I've been thinking a lot about where the flinch comes in. I could write a hundred thousand posts about the long line of hurdles I place in front of myself in an effort to circumvent disappointment, but in the end it would just be another small way to stall: psychoanalyzing myself into oblivion; looking at her through a frame and saying, Oh, Eve, yeah. Well, she does this and that and this because of X and Y and Z, you know? without ever really getting to ...but what does she do about it? I know I'm avoidant. I know I'm self-flagellating. What to do, though? Where to go?
In my mind's eye, it goes like this: the curtain pulls up and I'm not on stage. In fact, I'm not even in the theatre. I freaked out three hours before and decided to stay home, in case I fucked everything up and made a fool of myself. So there's the flinch, right? It's early on in the game. If I can keep myself in longer, get myself out of the house and in the room, I'm that much closer to my goals and it's that much harder to make a run for it once I'm in the building and everyone's waiting for me. (Not that I'm saying anyone's waiting on me. This is something else.)
I come back, again and again, to what I've said before:
All this to say: I think this thing, this feeling that I am some insubstantial wisp of a person is a key component in what is holding me stagnant in my life right now. I feel substanceless, I therefore act substanceless - lose passion for my hobbies, talk to friends less, hide from new experiences...
A lot has changed - in the past six months, let alone the last two years - and I've chipped away at this feeling in many places, but in others it grows and clings and suffocates. It doesn't help that I'm a slow writer in the first place. Even if I have the spark of an idea, a lot of the time I need to let it sit and percolate. That natural lull in my writing process is just enough of a crack for my flinch to creep in and start sprouting little mean-spirited weeds all over my creativity garden, and I'm really not much of a gardener in the first place.
I'm desperately curious to know what other people do if and when this feeling appears. Bulldoze through it? Wind around it? Sink beneath it? How do you get out?
I texted Shrimp (my soon-to-be sister-in-law, who is an accomplished artist) the other day to ask her for her advice, because I knew she would be real with me:
[sort-of transcript, with edits for brevity]
Me: how do you put art out into the world without feeling so miserably embarrassed? when I post writing online, I feel kinda mortified afterwards!
Shrimp: It took time, but when I got to be proud of my work it was easier to post about it. Grow your ego a little bit.
Me: okay, I will try to grow my ego a bit!!!! I randomly get struck by the “nobody cares what you have to say & ur dumb to think they do” laser beam and freeze up, which I recognize is a fear-based overreaction
Shrimp: This is totally a canon event that every creative goes through. It also helped me to show the work to people I know care about me. What are you scared of sharing right now?
Me: I just post my thoughts or poems or whatever, so it’s not like I’m writing anything that I think is life-changing for anyone reading, but sometimes when I put something out there, I have to log out for like 48 hours so I can’t think too hard about people reading and perceiving me
Shrimp: “You have to lower your give-a-shit factor." I say those words out loud to myself often! You have to really really actually believe your work has value, which is the hard part imo. Especially because your art should NOT be for everybody. there will be people who don’t care for it! If everyone cared for it, it’s likely too easily digestible!
Grow my ego, grow my little self-esteem garden, and take the time to weed out those little, nagging thoughts that grow into the thorny flowers of my flinch.
I want it to be easy, though I fear that the line between weed and wildflower is non-existent here. How can it be easy, when I care too much about what I make, what I write, what I love? Caring brings doubts, I think. Regardless of the fact that I’m just on here blogging for the hell of it, I feel a sense of responsibility and a sense of vulnerability when I write. A poem, a diary entry, a list of things I've seen - these are all little pieces of me, curated and carefully displayed. Even if only one person1 sees them, I want that connection to feel important. That desire makes it impossible to ever really stop all of the doubts from creeping in. To flinch might better be written as to care. If I care too little, the garden is barren. If I care too much, it’s overgrown.
Still, I want a garden and I want to see it lush and vibrant and full of color. There are fears I have to overcome in order to have these things, much like Shrimp said, and there is more than one skill to build on within those fears. I have to make myself tough, hardy, and difficult to pierce, for there are weeds with sticking thorns to carefully pluck out. I must learn to keep a warm, discerning eye, for there are dandelions that I should let thrive.
You tend to these things a little at a time, I suppose — learn what to keep and what to let go of: chickweed or yarrow; clover or crabgrass.
Good luck out there,
Eve
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And when I say "even one person," I don't mean that everyone who comes through the door of my blog has to leave feeling something, okay? It's more like in Ratatouille (2007), right? Like, "anyone can cook," & that means that anyone can cook, but not necessarily that anyone can cook.↩