image by Vladimir Kush, “sunrise by the ocean”
I had a massive freak out last week. I'm nearing the culmination of some very big, high stakes projects, (some spanning a decade).
It was a level up freak out. I’m growing, and my life is asking more of me. I’ve moved through the stages of not only have an idea for something, I’ve created it. I’ve collaborated. I am co-founder of a company, I am the author of a novel, I am a writer. I wish I could tell you that I looked myself in the mirror and proudly declared "you've got this!" bitchboss style. But I didn't. I cried. I freaked out. All my fears about not being good enough, about being visible, about the work itself being good came up. I called Jessica. I let it cycle through. I journaled. It turned it into this blog post.
For the record, (and since you don’t know me and have to take my word for it), I’m really good at detaching. At getting through the slog of writing to a finished piece, or, at suspending my awareness of a deadline and being in creative flow. But no matter how seasoned a creative you are, your fears are always going to be there. They get more subtle. You just get better at dealing with them.
Let yourself change. Stay in that vulnerable soft space, take a moment, breathe. Let yourself be uncomfortable. Stop resisting what you need to let go of. When we want more for ourselves, when we've outgrown the itchy casing of our chrysalis, we have to identify what we need to do to embrace the change, so we can let go of what is in our way.
It can be frightening, threatening to our ego and our ideas of who we are. If I am not that, what am I? But it's also exciting, it's growth, it's the opposite of stagnation.
Writing, creating, communicating, making something are all ways we seek to belong. I’ve often felt like I don’t belong, that I was vastly different from my peers and my family. For the most part, I learned to be okay with that. But I also had a bit of lone wolf syndrome. What a snowflake!
So what was I freaking out about?
Belonging is a question of being cared for. In writing or creating something, we are asserting that we not only have the right to be here, but to be seen, to be cared for. In “The Artist’s Way” Julia Cameron writes -
For the artist who endured childhood shaming—over any form of neediness, any type of exploration, any expectation—shame may kick in even without the aid of a shame-provoking review.
If a child has ever been made to feel foolish for believing himself or herself talented, the act of actually finishing a piece of art will be fraught with internal shaming. Many artists begin a piece of work, get well along in it, and then find, as they near completion, that the work seems mysteriously drained of merit. It’s no longer worth the trouble. To therapists, this surge of sudden disinterest (“It doesn’t matter”) is a routine coping device employed to deny pain and ward off vulnerability. Adults who grew up in dysfunctional homes learn to use this coping device very well. They call it detachment, but it is actually a numbing out. “He forgot my birthday. Oh, well, no big deal.” A lifetime of this kind of experience, in which needs for recognition are routinely dishonored, teaches a young child that putting anything out for attention is a dangerous act. “Dragging home the invisible bone” is how one recovering artist characterized her vain search for an achievement big enough to gain approval in her family of origin: “No matter how big a deal it was, they never seemed to take much notice. They always found something wrong with it. All A’s and one B and that B got the attention.” It is only natural that a young artist try to flag parental attention by way of accomplishments—positive or negative. Faced with indifference or rage, such youngsters soon learn that no bone would really meet with parental approval.”
Some developmental part of ourselves, is still always seeking that connection, that belonging. Belonging is when we are asking to be cared for. And how tender, and vulnerable, how brave, how raw, how powerful, how frightening when we are making a piece of our soul tangible and asking to be seen, loved, cared for.
Basically, the only way out of this emotional knot, is through. Just do it anyway. Let go of it needing to be good, hoping someone will like it, that people will respond, do it anyway. You’re always going to want those things, and guess what? Not everyone is going to care, or like it, do it anyway, someone, somewhere will.
As I talked my freak out through with Jessica, long buried memories surfaced. Age fifteen, of feeling the freedom to sing loudly (in a mass of people, at church with my aunt) only to see my aunt (a singer and musician) flinch and give me the side eye. Age ten, standing in front of my community and peers to orate a poem (probably a very weird and too grown up one) only to be met with dead silence, I sat down, my cheeks flushed, fighting back tears. Twelve years old, (belting out Disney songs in the shower) to come out to see my parents choking back laughter.
Do it anyway, but pay attention, what comes up? Work through it - the brash bravado and fuck you I don’t care what you think thing works for a while. And we still need an element of that.
Julia Cameron writes in week 3 of the Artist’s Way
“Growth is an erratic forward movement: two steps forward, one step back. Remember that and be very gentle with yourself. A creative recovery is a healing process. You are capable of great things on Tuesday, but on Wednesday you may slide backward. This is normal. Growth occurs in spurts. You will lie dormant sometimes. Do not be discouraged. Think of it as resting. Very often, a week of insights will be followed by a week of sluggishness. The morning pages will seem pointless. They are not. What you are learning to do, writing them even when you are tired and they seem dull, is to rest on the page. This is very important. Marathon runners suggest you log ten slow miles for every fast one. The same holds true for creativity. In this sense, Easy does it is actually a modus operandi. It means, “Easy accomplishes it.” If you will hew to a practice of writing three pages every morning and doing one kind thing for yourself every day, you will begin to notice a slight lightness of heart.”
Let it be easy. To just sit with the self, and listen to your inner voice, and not just that but to let it flow, without judging what’s coming out? Oh yeah, sure, easy. I can feel your eyes roll.
We so often fall into the trap of having to produce, be productive, but are you doing it for someone else? Or for you?
It’s not to fail and start over from go. Life doesn’t work like that. You get to keep going when you feel like you can, with everything you’ve learned, grown through, and past. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.
You also get to keep growing, you get to change your mind, you get to make the best choices for you.
Just make sure it is in fact for you. Not for validation, attention, righteousness, or any kind of hook. This is your fucking life, this is it, this one. Right now. AND if that means you need to go take a nap, take a fucking goddamn nap and take care of yourself so you can show up for others. We are trained to show up for others, despite our own needs, our own tiredness, our own need for stillness, in order to prove we care, in order to matter, in order to be seen. It’s a treadmill that speeds up to the point of being dangerous to leap off.
When we create or write, when we take the time to be intimate with ourselves, to explore, to play, to let you surprise yourself, you give yourself a safe space, grace, to try something new.
Julia writes,
“Practice being kind to yourself in small, concrete ways. Look at your refrigerator. Are you feeding yourself nicely? Do you have socks? An extra set of sheets? What about a new house plant? A thermos for the long drive to work? Allow yourself to pitch out some of your old ragged clothes. You don’t have to keep everything.”
It sounds so simple right? Too simple. Maybe clean your desk off. Walk through your house and clean or throw away nine things. It’s the attention to self, subconsciously you are telling yourself that you are worthy of attention, that you’re here, that you matter. She also says,
“Many blocked people are actually very powerful and creative personalities who have been made to feel guilty about their own strengths and gifts. Without being acknowledged, they are often used as batteries by their families and friends, who feel free to both use their creative energies and disparage them. When these blocked artists strive to break free of their dysfunctional systems, they are often urged to be sensible when such advice is not appropriate for them. Made to feel guilty for their talents, they often hide their own light under a bushel for fear of hurting others. Instead, they hurt themselves. A little sleuth work is in order to restore the persons we have abandoned— ourselves.”
Yours will look a little different, but this time my comfortably numb ego story, deep down, was still about being a screw-up, never being able to do it perfectly, perfectly ugh, who do I think I am anyway? Sit down and be quiet, no one wants to hear what you have to say. If you do stand up, you’re going to be excluded, shunned, scapegoated. It’s not safe to be seen.
Carol Shields, who created the Medicine Woman Tarot, has given us the pierced shield exercise. You take the wound or the hurt, totally accept that it’s there. Then you take responsibility for healing it. Not responsibility for what happened, but responsibility for healing it. It happened, but you are here, now. You turn the wounded belief that you’ve identified, It’s not safe to be seen, into one that strengthens your shield, and it becomes, it is safe to be seen. That’s a very basic example, but it works. When we ignore or push away the beliefs or hurts, we just have them playing on repeat in the background, and that is a stagnation that ends in decay. So let yourself show up new, let yourself change, let yourself be tender and vulnerable, let yourself grow.
