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Are you disappearing into nothing?
What happens when we decide to give up? The music in the movie of our lives does not swell. No one comes sweeping out of the darkness to save us. The kind of giving up that happens everyday, quietly, desperately, defeatedly. Is insidious and toxic. We may silently or loudly play things in our heads that sound like You’re not smart enough. You have a learning disability. You’re poor. You’re different You’re not different enough. You’re too different. You’re too skinny, too fat. Give up. Get cozy and hide. Hide in plain sight. Doing something with your life that is fine, good enough. Do something practical and boring. Do something, or worse, just do anything. Pay the bills. That's it. Survive. Survive, long enough to be swept away by time and obligation, and forget all the dreams you had. What happens when you give up is that it doesn’t happen in a moment, it happens over many thousands of decisions. Just like it happens when you decide to succeed and try. Same energy, different outcome. I’m not talking about death. I’m talking about the toxicity of mediocrity. Realizing you waited realizing you hesitated. Over. And. Over. The alternative to this quiet desperation? There are many. One general rule though is to start things, commit to them for either a length of time or another metric of doneness and to assess your progress, then move on and not be caught in sunk costs. Move into something, away from the nothingness of giving up slowly over time. Move towards possible. Move towards people who believe in themselves and therefore probably believe in you. Move towards small, incremental possibilities, opportunities. Build a step stool of possibility. Make daily habits, and know you will miss some days, make small promises and keep them (because later you will be able to keep big promises to yourself and others). Move towards somethingness and away from nothingness.
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I’ve come to the conclusion that regret is largely a waste of time. Despite that fact I was thinking about what advice I’d give to my younger self if I could, because although I can’t change the past, I realized that this advice is likely advice I’d give myself now in the sense that it’s still relevant.
Here’s the advice, and I share it as with all my writing that it may help you. Feel your feelings. Feel your feelings, learn to feel them to their fullest extent. Feel the most extreme version of them. Knowing all the while that you are moving through these feelings by feeling them. If all goes well, we are taught as kids to behave certain ways, and to express our feelings in appropriate ways - don’t have a tantrum in the grocery store, don’t hit people and so on. This way we become functioning members of society. That being said, sometimes things go wrong and we are taught that certain feelings are better and others are worse. This is a “good” feeling, this is a “bad” feeling. Sure, I’d love to spend most of my time feeling joyous, happy, excited, and less time feeling angry, pissed off, and sad. This is very generally a good way to go about life. Things get tricky though when we have patterns of suppressing or not feeling our feelings. You my reader have your own special poison that you may be drinking and it’s probably a pattern. If you’re angry, learn to feel that anger and move through it. Otherwise it will consume you. This can take many forms, but for you (and to myself of days gone), this has resulted in depression. Many years of on and off depression. Depression is toxic, it eats your very soul, it sucks the life out of life, it makes you make bad choices, and the worst and best part, is it doesn’t have to be this way. A tricky thing about depression is it is a forest for the trees situation. When you are depressed, everything seems to filter through that depression first. It’s like wearing goggles with very fogged up dark crap on them with the added fact that you don’t even know you’re wearing the goggles. Put another way, you are living in a dark forest, but you just call it “home.” You walk out everyday, the sky is dark, there are clouds all around, food is bland, everything is pretty shitty, and well, this is your life. You accept it. The ways this can look are as many as the number of humans on the earth--I will still give some insight to how it has looked for me, because I think it will help you. For me depression was nothing to do with a single dramatic and traumatic event, (life is often not like the movies.) Depression meant, compromising a lot. Depression meant playing a role in many situations - put on a happy face, make jokes, diffusing tough conversations instead of handling them head on. Depression meant a permeating, consistent fog, a haze, a filter, ways of thinking, a sense that nothing would improve, or feel good. It meant spending large swaths of time chasing happiness, and a quick laugh. I say chasing because in a chase you are not embodying something you are pursuing it, and in this case I was on a search for something “out there” rather than being able to live in the moment right now right here. You see how toxic this is? Constantly chasing something in the future, constantly living in another place, or living for a goal? Doing things like living for the weekend? These are so commonplace and accepted that it’s hard to even see them! For me, well I’ve been lucky, I wasn’t always depressed. I had a taste of the life outside the forest, I’ve lived in the forest and outside the forest so I knew that things could be better. I know though, that very sadly, for some people this may not be true. For some of you, you don’t know what it’s like to not be depressed. Luckily the antidote is the same either way. Get a therapist. I really want to make this the end of the post, because the call to action is clear, and to me not debatable, but I know that some need more on this so I will continue. Find someone you trust in your gut, you need not like them (though it helps) but you need to trust them. It may take some shopping, it probably will take some trial and error. It will be worth it. Actually I need to add: Find a good therapist. Someone worth their salt, someone with experience who knows their shit and has done their work. Someone who has done real work on themselves. It’s hard, you won’t be able to ask them “Have you done the hard work on yourself?” You will need to figure that out, feel that out for yourself. Give yourself time to figure it out. Real time. Weeks, months, years. Do not expect miracles in days, expect miracles of perspective and time. Expect to be able to look back over time and see progress. Progress is very much it’s own reward. That, I can tell you without doubt. Having walked out of the dark forest I can tell you that time does not heal all things on it’s own. Time, patience, a good therapist, learning to move through your feelings, these can heal things. I used to think the point of writing was to explain what I thought. To persuade. To come up with an idea and then show it to someone else in it’s fully formed version. This of course is largely a product of the education system where we are being taught to a degree what Paulo Freire would call banking education. Where you as the student are meant to return the information back to the teacher like waves banking on a shore. The steps would be:
Think of your idea, write them down, present to the teacher. Now of course I realize that we write in order to find out what we think-with a cursory google search can be traced to Joan Didion and Stephen King (and I’m sure others.) We write to uncover something, not in order to show something. We write to unearth from within us what our thoughts on a topic are. In this case I am writing about writing about writing which is a meta-mind fuck, but I think we’ll survive. A wasted a lot of time in school trying to fill pages with words, which if you’ve been to school is of course an arduous and annoying way to try and finish a project so you can go play outside. Playing with margins, font sizes, repeating paragraphs-I’m sure the teachers out there grown weary of this. I’ve got no solution for the education part of this situation. I do think though that writing is valuable in that it can give you clarity. Clarity of thought on a topic, on a problem, on a solution. Putting at the top of the page your topic “What do I do about my career?” Then free writing can be extremely helpful-perhaps on some level therapeutic. Looking back This is invaluable. To be able to look back and see “Oh wow, that’s how I thought about writing.” Or “ah yes, I do remember I learned that process, and now I can see it ever more clearly.” I can’t overstate how valuable this is! Publishing What about the scary, vulnerable thought of publishing your thoughts, your babies your feelings on the internet? This could be crazy! Well, to a degree, it is exposing, but at the end of the day, just like anything you decide what to post, you decide what to write, and how detailed to be. Putting together a process of revisions and edits can help, but I’ve decided on certain topics that I have no problem sharing about -creativity among them. Vs. other topics that I’m not interested in sharing about. It’s a little obvious but for some of you it’s worth setting up some rules for this in advance so you can get out of your own way. So why publish? To be seen, and to see and for community. Not necessarily to be understood because the internet is full of trolls who won’t understand, but to be seen by others is an important step and to see others through writing is an important piece as well. So, what do I think about writing? I think it helps with clarity, to untangle our thoughts from within our minds, I think it also helps to know that you may read this and it may help you with something your figuring out--that’s plenty enough reason for me. How many steps to do the damn thing? What a trivial question at first. What an important question in practice. A few years back now, I was in a group of professionals of all walks and industries. One member talked about her schedule: Wake up at 4 work out, grind like a machine and take no prisoners (or something like that). Anyway, although I was disinterested in copying and pasting her exact rubric I did want to learn her secret of working out daily--but insert anything you don’t do that you want to do in place of working out.
She said, do every single thing you can for the morning the night before. I sat down and wrote out all the things I needed to do when I woke up in order to get to the gym. It looked like a fairly straightforward list:
When it’s early morning though and your warm in your bed, and your motivation is potentially low, it looks more like:
So, I set about doing as many things the night before that I could: Grind the coffee beans, fill the electric kettle, put out my gym clothes on the floor in front of me. Checking my bike tires etc. This way, in the morning, when Grog the slothful caveman version of myself was in charge of my brain, I could just put the clothes on that were on the floor POOF i’m wearing workout clothes?! What? Walk out to the kitchen and hit a button to start the whole process of making coffee POOF, like magic, I’m drinking coffee. I’ve done this process for years at this point, and I don’t think about the steps any longer, they just sort of happen. This is the thing though. They needed to be written out and processed for me to know that I needed to do them. This is also true of writing blog posts. What are the actual steps? Do you need to go in and find the damn folder on your computer each time you sit down to write a new post? If so, can you cut that step out? Can you make it stupid easy by having as few barriers as possible to your goal of writing a blog post? A question for another day: are you adding and complicating your process?! probably. It’s one reason I’ve stopped adding photos to my blog posts. Sure I’d probably get more hits on these posts if I had photos BUT if a step that is in here is preventing me from doing the writing, then it HAS to go. Beginner's mind: Part of having a beginner’s mind is knowing that you don’t know things, and figuring out to a degree that you need to build that in. I’m going to need to allocate time and energy to certain pain (how the fuck do I create a new blog post on this damn platform?) Yes, easy once you know it, but there is time and energy involved to do it the first few times! This is true of everything. An idea can be lost so quickly. I personally do not have a good system for collecting ideas.
To me the very idea of collecting ideas can be overwhelming. I have many ideas all the time. This part is fine with me, it’s the fact that I’m just not going to go back and review my ideas that bothers me. It’s that feeling I used to get as a kid when I didn’t do my homework. Like a little pit in your stomach kind of feeling-that nags. Yet, I will say that writing down the ideas and never looking at them again, well this is infinitely better than simply not writing anything down. I can’t place it, but there was a description of a writer and she would be constantly laughing and writing down ideas and laughing to herself. This image just cracks me up because it’s like the joke was on everyone else. This obviously wouldn’t bode well interpersonally, but the image is lovely. Keeping even a small notebook and writing things down and never looking at it-the thing about this it does a couple things: 1. The very act of writing has apparently been proven to help you remember something better. 2. It does signal to people that you are taking them seriously especially superiors. HOWEVER. I have found that if you want to be the boss, it sometimes helps to not write things down, because it signals to others that they are the ones who need to be writing. This is of course a little bit of trickery that I don’t love-but it’s true. It also sometimes necessitates that you inquire about whether they plan on writing down any of the things you’ve discussed. The funny thing about this whole train of thought is that I had a thought that I was going to write about and it flitted out of the window in my brain as I was distracted by refilling the ink in my pen. Ahhh yes, it has now come back to me. I will write about dreams and goals in a separate blog post instead. So, I recommend keeping a notebook with a pen and I recommend against all the fancy notebooks in all the world. I also recommend against your smartphone, but all of this is eclipsed by “whatever works.” I have crap tons of notes on my phone in various places which are searchable. So this is important. because when I want to remember what movie I want to watch I can just search my movie list. Instead of the dreaded 30 minutes of “What do you want to watch-let’s ask the algorithm on each god forsaken streaming platform instead?” Write things down, not so you can see them later but so your brain will hold onto them. Also though, write things down because one day in a decade you will be so glad you did. This blog is a great example of this. “ Generally speaking, it’s good to make decisions about art and life when you’re in a good frame of mind and then spend time getting out of your own way.”
What does it take to make things happen on a consistent basis? some measure of knowing you aren’t going to feel like doing the thing. I’ve got a mental to do list of many things. All of them have varying degrees of importance or even unimportance. Having read David Allen’s book Getting Things Done he talks about having a trusted system. He also outlines that system. There are different schools of thought about this. I like the idea of ‘mind like water’. I do think though that you have to perhaps look at things like anxiety and mental health as well. Those are beyond the scope of his book. It doesn’t really matter if you have a trusted system if you’ve got deeper things going on that seem to stall you over and over. A lot of things end up being symptoms of a deeper cause. Let’s be clear, I’ve got no confession here of some deeper cause, as even if I knew it it wouldn’t really be blog material I don’t think. Anyway, I’ve spent a long time, years thinking that one day would come, where I would wake up daily, inspired, alive, enthused to write, to make money, to make art, to act and so on and so forth. I’d be living the promised dream. Yet, this may or may not exist. I’ll tell you I do know, that no matter what, you’re going to have problems. You’re going to have challenges, you’re going to have things come out of the blue that you’ll need to deal with. Long story long. Doing. Doing the thing. Me typing this post right now is a form of doing. Not necessarily a habit, as I don’t (yet?) do this daily. I do write daily. Whether I feel like it or not. I heard Hugh Jackman compare meditation to showering, you just do it because you do it, everyone showers every day because it’s what you do. He seems to have taken that same frame of mind with meditation. I like this frame of mind as it makes good logical sense and doesn’t seem to involve a lot of harrumphing and flailing about striving to do the damn thing. This can also be true of creative work. I’ve noticed it’s a lot easier to prioritize creativity that is for jobs that fulfill my paycheck. Which makes sense, I have to keep the lights on, the water running, the groceries etc. Yet this doesn’t mean the solution is to then make every creative endeavor urgent, this doesn’t work (at least not for me). Nor does it mean making every endeavor a potentially paid one. I like being paid, and I like finishing projects, but the artist in me just can’t have it be all or nothing, one or the other. There is definitely a balance. It’s hard, it involves sometimes listening and taking in more feedback about a project than you would like. Perhaps compromising more than you’d like -yet at the same time, if you go to the other extreme of the spectrum you’ve got “I’m just making this for it’s own sake.” Which to me, just feels uninspiring and I don’t really care about this! Anyway, doing the things. Generally speaking, it’s good to make decisions about art and life when you’re in a good frame of mind and then spend time getting out of your own way. Not asking when you’re tired in the morning “Do I really want to go for this run?” Not asking when you’re feeling like your bank account is low. “Is this really my career path? Is this what I want to do with my life?” These aren’t Monday morning-do-the-work-time questions. These are questions left for a Saturday, or a random day you’ve blocked off for directional questions, big picture questions. I’m not talking about white knuckling by the way. I’m talking about just starting or just continuing. This blog for me is a continuation, this blog for me is momentum. I love this term momentum. It’s a great way to think about work and life, to gain momentum and keep going. It’s much harder to go from sitting on the couch to running than it is to go from walking to running--you’re already in motion! It was easier for me to keep lifting weights consistently once I was lifting, it’s easier for me to keep writing this blog now that I’m writing it. It will be easier for you to do your painting, your comics, your singing, your videos once you’ve been making a few. It’s not just about habits (which help.) It’s about just beginning, sometimes gently, kindly, small, easily. Easy does it. Begin. Waiting for an answer is the worst. Waiting for someone else to do something is the worst. They probably won’t do it as fast as you or the way you want it. On the other hand, if they do do it, (haha doo doo) and they do it the way you like, well, then you’ve saved hours, maybe weeks of time even and they have achieved a thing. I become “we” and you’re a team of sorts. What is waiting really? When it comes to work or artistic endeavors there is real and productive waiting. For example, when someone let’s say an intern who I’m in charge asks a question over email, many many times I can wait, and I’ll get a response to the effect of “never mind I figured it out.” Why? Why is this? While the answer may vary, I think it is largely due to a culture of relying on others to do our own work. Which is problematic because it becomes a really easy place to make excuses. “I’m waiting for a reply on that…” The unfinished end of that sentence said that people don’t say it “...until then, I’m going to do nothing!” “I’m waiting for so and so to get me that report”, “I’m waiting for a reply from my friend because I’m kinda’ stuck on this project.” Here’s an example from today for me. I’m editing a video for work. It’s pretty good, but not great, the story doesn’t seem to have structure. It’s unclear who it’s for and the premise is kinda loose and undefined. So, I sent a text to two friends in a group saying: can you help me out with this? tell me how to fix it/improve it. The things is...if i walk away for a few minutes, if I take a walk. Maybe reflect and/or write a blog post about waiting (now we’re getting meta) the actual answer I need is likely to come to me from me. No, I don’t mean the muse or magical fairy godmother of creativity I mean the answer is somewhere along the path of bad ideas. Now as I write these I come to see, what I really need. Write down a list of bad ideas and write them until a good idea comes along. A strategy Anyway, back to waiting. Waiting is really a pain. I really like these two terms that are similar: UIHO and UNODIR Unless I hear Otherwise and Unless Otherwise Directed. Two great (similar) strategies both to use on yourself and to use with your team. As a friend of mine described UIHO “It creates a bias for action.” Rather than waiting for instruction (that probably will never come) You say and think, unless other wise directed, I’m going to create this thing, make this video, add these sounds etc. It gives everyone the full empowerment: You to take action (or your team) and the supervisor can say “hang on, let’s do xyz.” While there is no rule that is always true. I have found that in work and creativity, that “waiting” is really code for “I’m stuck” “I’m scared” “I want to postpone.” I've come to one of those realizations that feels painfully obvious. It's painful to think that it's as simple as changing the order of words in a sentence:
I am inspired so I do the work. I do the work so I am inspired. Looking back as far as my teenage years, I can remember thinking these same thoughts over and over as I sat in my room on the third floor of my parents house trying to write a song: "I need a good idea" "I'm not inspired to write this" "it's already been done before." and so on and so forth. These were very true and very real to me. The were certainly not necessarily the capital 'T' Truth though. As that truth, well it doesn't really exist as we know. As always I digress. I've been a little stagnant in my creative work lately, and I think I have a tiny taste of what Dave Chappelle went through when he was offered a big contract for his show and he wanted to run away. I've been given so many resources to create videos, and a budget and yet, the creative in me is suddenly feeling all this pressure! Trust me, I'm not complaining, but it's worth asking yourself the question: "How do I keep doing what I'm doing" The presupposition in this question though is this: That doing what you're doing includes: growing, learning, making mistakes, putting out work that isn't perfect, but is pretty damn great! You do this by knowing that some days you will be inspired and most days YOU WON'T, but that every day you need to get out of your own way just enough do the work. For me the work varies day to day but if we take a simple example: (just insert your own work into the sentence here, naturally). I need to edit a podcast episode. I don't want to, I don't feel like it. I don't really know what the next step is. I'll go make coffee. Oh look instagram. Oh look my friend is calling etc. All things being equal. What happens if you put your phone on silent. What happens if you put it face down nearby (or gasp, in another room!) you open up your editing software and start mucking about. I'm not even talking about things as directed as Step 1. adjust the clip Step 2. move the clip to the timeline. I'm talking about a messy process, where you just start touching things, playing around! You open up the project, you pull some files in and just see what happens. You do this for a little while, suddenly you step back and WHAT? You've got something, is it an episode? maybe yes maybe no, but you've got SOMETHING and something is more than nothing. Something is more than "I just scrolled my instagram feed for 10 minutes and my life sucks." "Suddenly" you've been doing the work, and you're inspired to do more of the work, because you've been doing the work. It builds on itself. Not just that moment, but daily. So, if you're looking for inspiration, you may consider stopping that, and starting to doodle, starting to muck about (is this a British phrase?), starting to sing, starting to_________. Perhaps in the not so distant future there will be no need to edit videos any more.
Having delved deep into Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way, I feel a tension has arisen in me about whether creativity is this magical spiritual journey with a muse and a great creator in the sky or, is it simply a collection of habits and ideas and the ability to do work?
While I don't have the answer, not even for myself let alone for you- I am finding there is a freedom and spaciousness in the idea that making art is not some secret process to be unlocked, but rather as Seth Godin writes "The magic is that there is no magic." Can it be as simple as having a regular (maybe daily) practice of making something? Putting pen to page, recording a video, editing said video and sending it out? Of course a part of the brain screams "WHAT IF IT'S NOT ANY GOOD!" Okay fair. but this is a later question. Being in my mid thirties now, I'm finding that the consequences of doing nothing are often far more detrimental than the consequences of trying something. I've spent a lot of time thinking, and not experimenting, and I've been left with an uneasy feeling that my time was wasted. To bring this back, if the worst thing that comes of publishing you art in some form is that the trolls on the internet don't like it, this is a risk worth taking for the upside of looking back on the body of imperfect work you will have created. So, is it creativity or work? I guess it somewhat doesn't matter, because either one still seems to entail showing up on a regular basis to do something. I like daily action when possible as it builds on itself. I don't think it's necessary though. |
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