Tag Archives: communication

The particular sadness of feeling like a hack

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Hack Mouse Pad via Zazzle

In the creative world, there’s this disturbing phenomenon of reading, viewing, hearing, experiencing art that slaps you in the face with your own insecurities and makes you never want to pick up a pen, brush, camera, tutu ever again because you’ll never be that good, that skilled, that talented. It taunts you with its beauty and ease, sweetly whispering these are heights you can never even aspire to.

It breaks your heart even as it delights you.

For my whole life, this demoralizing bitch-slap has been something that happened to other people. I’d hear friends bemoaning their artistic inadequacies and be completely dumbfounded that they could experience someone’s art and be anything except inspired. Especially if that person is better than you – they’re showing you the next level, giving you a new awesome to shoot for, teaching you technique.

And then it happened to me.

Last week, I started (and eventually finished) reading The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender on a writing buddy’s recommendation. Magical realism + food + teens? Count me in, motherfucker.

But by page 21, I was in tears. Not because the story was so moving, but because it’s so fucking well-written. I was holding a masterwork by the sort of author I want to be. Knowing that plowed ugly furrows in my writer self and demolished the inspiration I’ve always felt when reading excellent fiction. Bender’s fluid style, voice, and characterization crushed my tiny sense of self-satisfaction at starting my second novel. I sobbed at my own shittiness.

I tasted the fear of confronting an artist so good that I felt like I shouldn’t even bother. I can’t unfeel it. That’s part of me now, something I’ll live with every day, just like so many other artists across myriad fields of creativity. I’ve been inducted into that tribe (with a beating, which is apparently normal).

This book is so good it ruined my fucking day.

Naturally, like any good web denizen, I took my feels to the internet.

Tweeting about feels

I was hurt and confused. Knowing so many people face this same demoralization –many who either quit making art or never start because of this fear – I thought surely my tribe would understand.

And they came out of the woodwork to support me. Folks I hadn’t heard from in months and followers who’d been lurking offered comfort, tough love, and pompom shaking in truckloads. A couple dozen comments all reminding me not to compare myself to other people. That my writing is perfect for me, that I’ll only get better, that I should never quit. Outpourings of love from friends, family, and fans all wanting to help me cheer up and regain my feet.

I was so fucking angry that I had to excuse myself from the internet.

I felt supremely unheard and misunderstood. I cried more with every message telling me to ignore what I felt, put on my big girl pants, and move on. After all this time of connecting and being naked on the internet, when I had a moment of internal crisis, I received the opposite of what I needed. I wanted to throw up, trash my manuscripts, and blow up my social media accounts. What was the point?

I realize this makes me sound like an emo douchebag, so let me deconstruct this a bit.

What happened here is that I needed to be witnessed and heard. Not advised or patronized. My world was shaken, and I reached out to my tribe for comfort.

But I didn’t tell them what I needed.

If I’d said, “No advice, please. I just need to be heard,” the situation would’ve been totally different. But since I wasn’t clear that don’ts, shoulds, and rhetorical questions hurt more than they helped, no one knew. Duh, right? Without direct guidance, everyone simply did their best to support me. They wanted to make me feel better because they love me.

Part of what hurt so much, though, is that no one asked me what I needed. A good 60% of folks I connect with online are highly-sensitive persons and/or are super into communication skills. Yet every response I received was an assumption. Everyone leapt to my defense (against myself) without checking to see if that’s what I wanted.

Best intentions, right?

But don’t worry: I got up the next day and wrote. And the next day. And that whole week. Because writing is my Big Work. I can’t not do it, even with the phantom of Aimee Bender haunting my heart.

The point of me telling you all this is that artists – whether you are one or love one – need understanding and support for our creative feels. And we have to ask for it; we have to stop expecting everyone to be a fucking mind-reader. Art doesn’t have to be hard, but it does have nasty pitfalls and potholes. Practicing asking for what you need and asking how you can help is how you navigate them gracefully.

Now go make motherfucking art.

I don’t care what famous master or perfect work is scaring the shit out of you. Your tribe understands. I understand.

Let’s do it anyway.

.

Putting words to the Wordless (or Writer hell is the best hell)

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Its a Wordless Song in the Depth of My Soul by -RejiK via Flickr

I finally picked up Finding Your Way in a Wild New World by Martha Beck. I’ve resisted her work because it’s always talked about in super fluffy-bunny terms so annoying I want to punch someone in the face. But when a dear friend says, “This book is about you,” it’s probably worth reading 50 pages.

And holy shit were they right. I laughed, teared up, had goosebumps, and thought deep thoughts, all in the intro. By the time I finished the first section about Wordlessness, the space where words disappear and we experience seriously awesome shit, I was drawn to write at 7am on Saturday in a pre-coffee haze.

Follow along as I try to put words to the Wordless.

I think part of the reason for my over-hyphenated and verbose writing style is that I’m trying to put words to the Wordless. Trying to relate things I’ve noticed over years of unthinking absorption and Sherlock-Holmes-style observation. Describing the weird smell of my cat or the sudden patience in a bustling pharmacy line or the ugly beauty of a Hamilton sunset or the heart-ripping fear of mortality – all so complex they can only be messages from the universe. Moments outside of time and space, coming through a sort of sixth or seventh sense, desperately trying to be processed into words so I can share.

Perhaps the curse of the self-aware writer is the nature of Wordlessness itself.

You feel and know things that you can’t share in words because that’s just not how it works. Perhaps the painter or sculptor or dancer has it easier. They work within the Wordless and the translation for its sharing is that much easier.

Ecstatic dance is dear to me for that reason. It takes me out of a hyper-verbal mind and puts me where those words have no meaning. For someone who despises exercise, the siren call to act stupid in my living room jamming to Tori Amos is powerful. It’s not the dance itself – though there are holy moments there – but the final collapse, body exhausted, that follows where Wordlessness takes over and I commune with the universe.

What ruins the practice is when I try to force that calm into the moment itself.

It automatically applies words to the wanting and makes it damn near impossible to touch. Perhaps that’s what Buddhist masters are talking about when they say desire is the root of suffering; by wanting more of the Wordless state, I lose it. Doing without expectation, just for the practice and having a time apart for it, that’s what’s important. Deep practice reveals those sacred moments as they unfold, not because I want them.

Wordlessness is a handle for something I’ve practiced all my life without realizing it.

I find little trouble (at least in recent years) in holding paradoxical or contradictory thoughts about the world or myself in tandem. As Whitman so beautifully put it, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” And I’m not great at expressions of love, not because I don’t feel it – I do, deeply – but because I find putting words to it clunky. Speaking such powerful expressions somehow diminishes their authenticity; writing them is only slightly better.

I’ve often wondered why my perception of a single moment, in the moment, can be so strong and yet I have trouble remembering it later, especially when I want to write about it. I’ve always hated the feeling of futility – why exist if there is no memory to revel in or learn from? But perhaps the simple explanation is that I drop into Wordlessness during those times, supremely present and folding the essence of the moment into my Self so that I don’t need to draw up explicit memories later. The implicit is woven into my cells.

The paradox of being a writer and trying to explain the Wordless is one I definitely haven’t mastered.

I’ve always struggled with the deeply emotional or complex, trying in vain to give them description so someone else can hear the ring of the familiar.  The desire to share throws up roadblocks and turns me into a furious ball of hair, teeth, and computer parts lashing out against myself for not being up to the task. Perhaps that’s why I let go of “self-improvement” writing; it throws me out of Wordlessness and into struggle. (I’m, of course, having trouble with writing this last idea. Oh, universe, you’re so hilarious.)

I wonder if my choice to downshift, pull within, and refocus my life with curiosity is a drawing back to Wordlessness on a grand scale.

A massive overhaul born out of necessity; I was perilously close to having a breakdown that would’ve left me paralyzed inside. I also wonder, out of purely ambitious self-servingness, if diving deeper into Wordlessness is what I need to find not only my path but the legacy I’ve been so afraid of not having.

This is where I start to get all bent out of shape and feel that sick grout in my stomach – the frustration of not being able to put words to the Wordless. Just like in the dance, when I start to question the nature of those ephemeral moments, they disappear. I get so wound around longing to understand that I boil over with self-hate for my stupidness, slowness, and spiritlessness.

But I’m not a Zen master.

I’m not a master of the Wordless and the Everywhen. I’m not even a master of meditative thought or “elementary” observation.  I’m just a wayfinder working out the kinks in her own system, trying (without trying to try) to die before dying.

The Perils of Sugar-Coating Your Story

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I know a lot of writers.  Many of them (including me) share personal stories as their way to help others and to change the world.  Some of them even submit those stories to magazines, literary collections, publishers, and blogs to get their message out to more people who need to hear it.

And as a writer of personal stories, sometimes you come up against someone who wants to edit your work.  Not just in the sense of fixing your grammar; they’re cutting out vital voice, deleting essential details, and nixing important narrative.  They want to remove the not-so-pretty bits, to “clean it up” so that it’s more palatable and accessible to a broader range of people.

This cannot stand.  Not just in writing –  it’s unacceptable all the time, ever.

Your story – the tale of your life on this earth – is important.  Telling it in all its flawed splendor helps you connect with others who share elements of your life; it helps other people to find solace, closure, joy, and support in their own stories.  The dark, ugly patches are just as valuable and meaningful than the bright spots. Perhaps more so.

When our stories – our lives – are edited for the lowest tier of understanding or parts of it are muted to make the message more digestible, everyone loses because the authentic truth is censored.  Don’t allow anyone to deface your story and its power by leaving out the parts that are less than perfect.

And don’t let yourself do it, either.  It’s one of the worst kinds of self-hatred to delete the parts of your Self that don’t measure up to someone else’s stick.  Stay with your Self; remember every chapter and honour them.

Sugar-coating the sour, bitter parts of our lives serves no one.  At best, it’s a pretty story with no meaning; at worst, it’s misleading propaganda that makes others form the wrong conclusions about their own stories.  The hard, nasty, unairbrushed chapters of your story are where you learned and grew the most.  They’re the crucible in which you were gloriously forged, the dark night of the soul that helped you embrace the light, the lick of chance that pushed you in the right direction.  Covering up the unpretty bits does everyone a disservice because it paints an unrealistic picture; it’s a lie of omission.

Tell the unvarnished truth of your dark story, and let no one tell you it’s unworthy of sharing.