here goes somethin'

My first attempt at The Artist's Way began today.

My friend picked me up from the airport the other day, at the tail end of the liminal space that is Christmas-to-New-Year’s-and-the-partial-week-after. I didn’t expect to sink into reluctant tears when she asked me how I was. That’s the mark of a safe relationship, though, I suppose.

I have so many expectations for myself and I just want to feel better and I’m really afraid I’m going to get back to my apartment, alone, and decide to numb out to HBO Max instead of doing the things I know I want to do for myself, I cried… something along those lines, anyway.

I feel like I’ve been losing my way in slow motion for years. Solidly on “the other side” of a pandemic that never ended, watching an entire nation feel the benefits of democratic socialism and promptly run in the direction of fascism… I’ve felt my own creative practices and personal ventures slipping from my grasp, slowly fading into a recent past life. Shifted into the timeline just next door, sometimes I can still see it through the glassy veil.

They stitched girl-bossdom and entrepreneurial spirit into our little Millennial hearts, and failed to mention the thread was an alloy of lead and late stage capitalism. Sutures weighing heavier with each step, beating muscle no match for the pull of gravity on dense metal. I imagine you feel it too.

The shredded and pink in me recognizes the shredded and pink in you.

Some of you may know, I have dabbled. I designed and hand-made a small jewelry line, and was a familiar face in the Seattle art market scene for a minute. I taught yoga for over a decade, and even co-founded a retreat business. Always led by the intrigue of a place, be it a city or a country or someone else’s small creative business—I wouldn’t call my career a career—it’s felt more like cutting a path toward freedom with whatever tools I had available or could learn, buying up as much of my own time as possible. But running things on your own is exhausting, and marketing yourself eats away at a soul. They fed us apps and algorithms instead of financial security and ownership. Enshittification slowly bringing into focus a perfect reflection of the American “dream,” now in 3 new Silicon-Valley colorways!

Toss in the unmasking of social media as surveillance and data mining (at best), AI bots sucking up all our work without asking permission, and a new subscription for every single thing that brings us an ounce of joy or distraction that somehow still doesn’t pay the people who created said joy or distraction… and yeah, you could call me disillusioned. I lost any motivation to make a living from my own pursuits and inspirations, mainly because I was having trouble finding any inspiration at all. I couldn’t find the point anymore. And still to this day, on bad days, I blame myself for feeling this way, for being lazy, for not being able to make this work in the way I once imagined it might.

I will say though, that I have recently managed to find a good amount of the freedom and fulfillment I’ve been building toward. All my dabbling and traveling has amounted to some special connections and quite a few skillsets that I put to use in supporting other entrepreneurs in their creative pursuits and dreams. My clients build communities, empower through movement, teach Jungian psychology and myth, and help people find healing in new beginnings. I believe deeply in their visions, and it is a real honor to play a part in lifting them up. I think it has also been healthy for me to have a break from trying to make something all on my own, especially within the confines of surviving in a capitalist world. It feels good to lend my skills, to help, to celebrate the successes of others—and it feels strange to not have anything of my own cooking on the back burner. I’ve had a couple years to reset, and I want to tap back in, make things with my hands, dare to put my words further out there—and I don’t want to worry about how any of it will make money. And I think I’m actually in particularly good spot for it.

But the motivation. The inspiration seeking. I’m out of practice and to be honest, I’ve often needed the pressure of a deadline or paying rent to get me going. Call it a Millennial curse, sure. Tell me I’m not actually a real artist then, and I don’t know, some days I’ll believe you and some days I won’t. But whether or not I know what I want to do next, it does feel like time to do it.

As luck would have it, I stumbled on what’s next a couple months ago, on one of those godforsaken apps. A 12 week Artist’s Way creative cohort that meets (in person!) once a week above one of my favorite bars—and it didn’t even cost a million dollars to participate. I signed up almost immediately, and went to the first meeting this past Sunday. I wrote my first official morning pages this morning. I started the stream of consciousness by writing down what I remembered about my dream…

I was walking with a man I felt like I knew and maybe even loved, his arm playfully around my neck. I remember telling him, Oh, hope, that’s what I don’t have anymore. If you told me right now you wanted to be with me, I wouldn’t believe you.

I wrote on, through observation and feeling and a lot I already can’t recall. (We’re not supposed to go back and read the pages.) But by the time I arrived near the bottom of my last page, I laughed at myself. I’d been writing sentence after sentence for about half the page about what I hope to get out of this process. I just had to move through the vulnerability of having the hope, the fear that comes from caring very deeply about how this life goes.

So it turns out, I never stopped hoping at all.

---

Day 1 done, friends! I’ll check back in with you soon. Are you interested in hearing more about the experience? I’d love to hear from you, too! Have you ever started The Artist’s Way? Have you ever finished it? I have a feeling I’d struggle to complete it without the group accountability.

Anyway, here goes somethin’.
love you. miss you. 🩵

---