A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
I’m agitated, disappointed in myself; I thought I’d be further along by now. I need to send my final illustrations to the client by this evening, but I’m still working on the first round of sketches. The day is mapped out between daycare pick-ups and drop-offs, graduate school classes, my job, and house chores. I have an exact amount of time slotted for each task; this is how I ensure everything gets done.
My expectations crowd me. They squeeze the life out of everything I do, making it impossible for me to be present. I focus on expectations (“Creating paintings that others will adore!” “I will be happy if I stick to my rigid schedule during these unprecedented times!”) that I have little control over. Expectations are unforgiving; they reduce our feelings of ease or imagination—two ingredients necessary for thriving creativity. It’s difficult to draw well with my brain in a vice, jammed between an increasingly long to-do list and a timer waiting to go off.
I decide to replace my expectations with intentions. I can’t control what happens, but I can choose how I want to feel, and quite frankly, I’m tired of feeling disappointment each day. I say it aloud: I intend to create work that meets others where they are. I intend to try my best with the time and limits I have. I intend to be kinder to myself.
I try this for a week and notice small shifts within. I’m able to recognize my progress and feel good about it, rather than obsessing over all I haven’t achieved. I feel calmer and in control. I’m less reliant on external circumstances for satisfaction or fulfillment, knowing that although I can’t always control what happens, I can control my intentions–what I choose to see, feel, and give—and that is enough.
—from How it Feels to Find Yourself: Navigating Life’s Changes with Clarity, Purpose, and Heart, my book of illustrated essays
TUESDAY
It’s summer. I’m working, or trying to work, on two books currently—a new journal and a picture book. I care deeply about both. I’m knee deep in revisions for one and up to my nose in sketches for the other, and struggling to make progress on 12 hours of childcare a week. Some mornings I wake up empty—physically empty, like the engine in me has fallen out, and I know that emptiness will always find a place inside a body that is overtired.
My work is solitary, which I love, but in this particular phase of life feels dangerously isolating. Isolation breeds self-doubt and discouragement—both are part of the territory, I know, of being an artist, but this year feels particularly prickly. It’s alarming just how negative the negative self-talk can get. How ugly can one’s self critic be? Pretty ugly.
I’m lucky enough to recognize it, mostly, when it happens, and this week I deliberately pulled myself out from inside myself and showed up for
online pep rally, a virtual meeting of creatives, and I’m just so happy I did. Spending an hour with him and his supportive community reminded me that I’m a person, not simply a pair of hands, and I left the call feeling more human, which is what I really needed.
Right now, it’s an evening in late June. The house is quiet. I hear the crickets and wasps outside my studio window. I watch the sun fade, leisurely, to make way for moonlight. I think of myself decades from now, and wonder what future me will think of the life I live: with work that challenges and fulfills me, and a family who does the same; with a home that feels like home inside a city that doesn’t, but could, someday; with an overtired body that insists on keeping on; with a life that promises the same it does for everyone else—some constant, some change.
I wonder if future me will miss the exhaustion and the noise: the constant running behind tiny feet, the incessant stream of questions, the tugging behind my knees when I’m cooking or working or attempting to form a thought. I wonder if future me will miss being this tired—not because it’s glamorous, but because it’s still beautiful— because it’s from giving my all, each day, to building a life that is richly, unbearably full.
WEDNESDAY
A few things that are giving me inspiration right now:
The work of Bernadette Watts, which feels very classic.
I am tired of Earth. These people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives.
Sophie Blackall talks with Roger.
THURSDAY
“The most important thing is the doing—integrating your life and your work and everything together.”
—Ruth Asawa
FRIDAY
As I turned over the last page, after many nights, a wave of sorrow enveloped me. Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real? To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively, I lit a cigarette. In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor. But who would see this light, this small dot among the infinite stars? I stood a while in the dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small, each breath patiently destroying me. How small it was, how brief. Brief, brief, but inside me now, which the stars could never be.
—A Work of Fiction by Louise Glück
xx,
M
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