aching with the desire to really be somebody tonight. It comes over me in terrible drowning waves. The heavy turbulent sort, or like a misjudged river, suddenly I’m swept under.
FAME
It is then, a spiritual yearning, must be. The pandemic has given me this pause, I can take a breath and watch myself feel, more clearly than ever before. Not always immediate, but quicker.
I’m watching a show that has me enthralled, and all the music is everything I listened to when I was in my early twenties, that gave me that feeling of being swept away, spellbound. The double hit of nostalgia and wanting so badly it hurts, is overwhelming.
To watch me be overwhelmed is to watch someone lying on the sofa eating jelly babies by the pound. There’s no obvious dramatic outburst, I get completely submerged and voiceless for hours at a time. It used to be months.
But I can tell now, what’s happening, that’s the gift. And once I know I don’t stay long. I bring out the self care and compassion and I can usually make it through one way or another.
My great friend Margaret always says ‘I’m still waiting to be discovered’.
How very true, I think, dipping my hand in for another jelly baby, even though they are making me feel sick, while I think about how I could have been Rita Hayworth if I’d only applied myself better.
Of course, this is the moment when I must remind myself that art is not the final presentation, but the practice.
I had lost my practice and I am currently realising why. The bouts of cruel attack from my own private Hades are excruciating, no wonder I so rarely made it out the other side with any kind of finished piece in my hands. My mind is inordinately mean.
As I watch something that I admire profoundly, that moves me, I am hit with violent regret and desire. I want to be the actor, the writer, the director and the producer, whilst simultaneously despising myself for wasting my life. The old fear of wasting my life, dread regarding my lack of talent, old artistic wounds resurfacing, this is what a deep creative block feels like.
But hey, the reason for writing this piece is because I feel hopeful right now, I have found a healing process, I am moving and making. There is a solution, I have a strategy and a schedule. It goes like this:
I run a weekly session of The Artists Way, which reminds me I’m not going mad, that creativity is the Great Mother’s will for me, and that this fuzzy path is a real way, no matter how vague and dark it seems at times.
I have a group of women I meet with two mornings a week to focus on female power, politics, spirituality and fearlessness. They keep me grounded in my true self, disrupt the old patterns of perfectionism, over achieving and capitalist / materialist ambition.
And I have a friend holding me accountable for my work, I have to check in and confirm I have done my practice today. Every day I get another hour done I deepen my understanding of what my practice might be. The finished piece is not arrived at through theory, it is a practice and I have to live it.
This consistency of structure is holding me together whilst the inner chaos rails and defends against change.
Ultimately this defense is a survival instinct - I have real trauma around making mistakes, so I can’t afford to be a failed artist, I can’t afford to take those kinds of risks. My protective self says absolutely not to this ridiculous idea of making art, what do you know about it? you will not make a fool of yourself by showing people your ridiculous work, and so on. Self preservation run riot.
So, the schedule as per the above, awareness, or mindfulness increases, and I find ways through.
The antidote for self condemnation is praise, and the salve for perfectionism is love. Love of self, cheerleading of self.
As on I trudge.
