September 26, 2012

Grow Joyfully Through Your Limitations

Ready Set Grow by West Eighty Third

A little over a year ago, I got a digital SLR camera after feeling like one of the last bastions of the point-and-shoot in the blog world. I was instantly smitten with the weighty feel of the Nikon in my hands, the pleasing click of the shutter, and the crisp images.

I wandered around everywhere with the strap around my neck, first taking pictures of all the things you’d traditionally take photos of and then branching out to try to “find” beauty in those things I hadn’t normally noticed with a camera in hand.

And within the files and files of images, I began to find some gems. It seemed that I had something of an eye for photography. At least as an amateur, I was doing quite a good job.

I pondered taking a photography class back then, but I decided against it. I wanted to keep delighting in the process of taking pictures without worrying about whether I was doing things the “right” or “best” way. I didn’t want to know whether I was obeying the rule of thirds. I just wanted to know whether I liked my photo or not.

And that worked out just fine for a while. I even opened an etsy shop with postcards and notecards of my photography and participated in a craft show where I sold framed pieces of my work.

But in the last few months, I’ve begun to bump up against my limitations. I’ve begun to find myself in front of a beautiful scene, unable to capture it with my lens. I don’t know the best setting on the camera for a particular moment or why certain lighting gives me stellar images and other lighting can’t be managed even with a flash.

The tipping point came last week on my honeymoon in Hawaii. I snapped photo after photo of an absolutely stunning sunset, and I couldn’t get the lighting right no matter what random setting I tried. I couldn’t take a picture that showed it like it looked to me in that moment.

And that’s when I decided it was time to grow.

It was time to be thankful for whatever natural talent I have but also time to recognize that without some instruction and education, it can only take me so far.

As someone who battles perfectionist tendencies, I understand why I have been wary to take a photography class. I can get so caught up in rules that I forget my own joyful process. I was afraid that learning the rules of photography would rob me of something that I love. But in Hawaii, I realized that I’ve gotten to a point where my joyful process is being inhibited by my lack of education.

So I stopped by my local photography shop and picked up some brochures on their classes, and I’m signing up for Digital Photography 101. I’m going straight back to the beginning.

I’m trusting that there’s room in my creative process for both knowledge and joy.

Is there a place for growth in your creative process? Where have you reached limitations?

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August 21, 2012

Fearing Our Own Creative Work

Write Write Write by the dreamy giraffe

The other day I sat down to make a writing schedule for myself.  I’d read for the four hundredth time how important it is for aspiring writers to set aside time every day to write and build up that creative discipline.

I weighed different time options in my head.  Morning?  If I wanted to do it before work, I’d have to get up at least by 6:00 am, maybe 5:30 if I wanted a good chunk of time.  And then once my office moves in a few months and I have a longer commute, probably more like 5:00.  That seems awfully early, and I can just see myself turning off the alarm and going back to sleep more often than not.

Okay, how about at night?  9:00 pm?  That’s when Anne Lamott talked about starting disciplined writing, and look at her.  Of course, then I’d have to skip out on evening snuggle and watch television time with my fiancee.  That seems like a bad idea – I like our evening routine, and it’s important for us to unwind after the workday.

Alright then, how about right after work?  5:00 every day?  Eh.  That’ll make it difficult to take care of the kids and their afterschool activities.

This is when I knew there was something else going on.

How? I don’t have kids.  I’m not pregnant.  I’m not even trying to get pregnant.

I was projecting out to some date years into the future on which my writing schedule would fail.

Why do we find every excuse (even ones that don’t exist) to keep ourselves from our creative work?

For a while I thought it was because I wasn’t really meant to be a writer, because I didn’t really want it.  But the more I dig into the resistance, the more I see it for what it is – fear.

Setting aside time for our own creative work is a frightening affair.

It touches on many of our scariest demons – vulnerability, selfishness, perfectionism.  That’s bound to be met with some reticence.  But it doesn’t mean you should jump ship.

No!  Now is the time to practice greeting that fear with strength – maybe just a little at first.  For me, it’s one day of sitting down with the blank paper.  And then it’s the next day.  Maybe for you it’s ten minutes of meditation or finally signing up for that painting class.

Whatever it is, don’t let fear keep you from your special creative work.

We’re stronger than that.

Filed Under: Buy You, For You Tagged With: , , 2 Comments
July 24, 2012

Conversations With My Critic

Girl Reading by Belafonte

When was the last time you told yourself that what you were making, writing, or doing was not good enough?

I was 19 when I began to realize that the chatter in my head was not the truth. In an eating disorder treatment center, the therapists’ goal was to help us all understand that the voices telling us to stop eating, to work out more, to purge, to take diet pills – those voices in our own heads – were not being honest with us. They were our inner critics, and they were speaking entirely from a place of fear and insecurity.

It was an incredible gift for me – at that age – to begin to understand that the negative stories I was telling myself were not actually true. Instead, they were the frightened chatter of the most insecure parts of myself. And I could choose not to listen to them.

So when I heard the cadence of “I’m not enough,” I began to recognize it as thought rather than truth.

Later, in my mid-twenties, I worked with my therapist on discovering why I had developed the “I’m not enough” voice in the first place. We talked a lot about how it had once been a somewhat useful coping mechanism, a way to protect myself from potential external pain. If I told myself that I wasn’t pretty enough, it wouldn’t hurt so badly when I didn’t get asked to the sixth-grade dance. Or if my internal voice said I wasn’t smart enough, then getting a low grade wasn’t a shock.

The problem is that the inner critic, just like anyone, gets better with practice. And it’s a game stopper. Eventually it becomes stronger than any potential outside critiques, and you stop creating, writing, doing – before you even start. What’s the point? You’ve convinced yourself you’re not good enough.

The thing about the critic, though, is that it’s not mean – it’s not trying to hurt you. It’s scared. Like a little 11 year-old who is afraid of not getting asked to the dance. Instead of fighting against my inner critic or trying to ignore it, my therapist encouraged me to treat it like the frightened 11 year-old it is, to engage it in a little mini-conversation that goes something like this:

Critic: No one is going to connect with this blog post you’re writing. You’re embarrassing yourself.

Me: Oh Critic, thank you for being there when I needed you to protect me. But I’m actually okay now. And I’m really excited to share this.

Critic: It’s going to suck.

Me: I know you’re scared about that, but you can relax. I’ve got this.

Perhaps reading this little dialogue, you think I’m crazy. Maybe I am, but having these little mini-conversations has helped me push through those days when I have trouble trusting my own abilities. And as someone attempting to grow a creative business, there are an unfortunate number of those. If I didn’t give my inner critic a little vacation – let it know that its services are no longer needed – I’d never get anywhere.

Almost 13 years after being formally introduced to my inner critic, I’ve accepted that it’s not going away.

And when I’m making real creative progress is when it’s most likely to pop up and derail things because those times of progress are the most vulnerable – right before I hit the publish button on a new blog post or tell someone about my creative ideas or upload an item to my etsy shop.

And when it shows up in those moments, I know just what to say.

Thanks.

I got this.

Filed Under: Plot Notes Tagged With: , , 20 Comments
July 11, 2012

Are you **it-ing** me?

Inspirational Cat Print by Stephanie Lin Roth of SWLstudio -- click for more info

But, more importantly, are you “it-ing” yourself?

Nearly 90 years ago, Martin Buber published I-Thou and introduced a new way of thinking about how we relate to others. In “I-It” relationships, we see others as objects. In “I-Thou” relationship we recognize one another’s whole divine-spark-filled humanness.

Recently, I began thinking about our own tendencies to “It” ourselves — that is, to see ourselves as objects, to see ourselves from the outside in instead of experiencing life from the inside out.

I see this most clearly in my voice students. We “It” ourselves when we guide our singing based on an imaginary sense of what we sound like to other people (as if, from inside our own heads we could even know what we sound like to outside ears). As a voicefinder, it is then my job to hold up the mirror of I-Thou love and help them experience the sensations of letting voice move through them.

Sure, outside perspectives are important.

But using this “It” view of our work, our voice, our bodies from the outset only leads us to be cut off from the Source.

Yes, God willing, your voice, your art will go winging out into the world and have a life of its own. But in its making, in its birthing, it does no good to feel it as anything but internal to you, rooted in the core of your being.

What helps you stop it-ing yourself?

Filed Under: Finding Your Voice, Plot Notes Tagged With: , , , , , 3 Comments
June 13, 2012

A parfumier I shall never be

Spider Mums by vicci

Spider Mums by vicci -- click image for more information

In my mind’s eye, I can still see it: a glass jar filled with water speckled with bits of dirt and spices. Various flowers and grasses float in the water and stick out of the top of the jar. It smells ever-so-vaguely floral but mostly like dirty water. In reality, it is nothing at all like the magically pungent potion I had imagined making from all the ingredients I lovingly collected and thoughtfully mixed.

And that was that. A child’s experiment failed and a life’s work in perfumery easily abandoned.

Thankfully I did not give up on songwriting quite so easily even though the songs produced by my earliest attempts bear a strong resemblance to that jar of dirty flower water. Each overly long song resembled a jumble of too many undigested and indigestible ingredients swimming in a watery soup, never releasing their truest scents.

Here the ingredients were images and story snippets that each meant something very complex and important to me as an adolescent. I knew how to collect them, like so many bright dandelions, but I had to put in my now-proverbial 10,000 hours in order to learn how to cook them to get them to yield their essence.

The best perfume travels lightly on the breeze, touching our senses without overwhelming.

Most importantly it communicates between people: floating with the heat off one person’s skin until it reaches the next person’s nose. My early songs didn’t quite communicate. Perhaps I was afraid of stripping my precious stories and images of their original forms. But this kind of processing is an important part of turning such ingredients into song. I wasn’t willing to play with the ingredients and then play with them again.

As I continue to grow as a songwriter, I want to honor both parts of this process: the child-like instinct to collect a song’s ingredients and the hard, if playful, work of mixing and processing those raw ingredients. The dreaming and collecting part of the work is where the wonder comes from.

The girl who collected the flowers and the grasses was fully aligned with her own “What if?”

Process song ideas too soon and I end up with the musical equivalent of processed cheese: a song that sounds cheap and disconnected from its deeper source. But leave those collected words and melody snippets overprotected and under-processed and the song is a dud – it can’t quite float from my heart to another’s.

What lessons do you learn from early – if failed – attempts at your art? And what helps you keep both these parts of your creative self alive and well?

Filed Under: Finding Your Voice, Plot Notes Tagged With: , , , , , , , 1 Comment