(Click ‘play’ to hear me read this post)
The truth is I don’t know how to be a recovering artist in this world. I don’t understand how to bridge the seemingly humongous gap between the intimate, sweet, sacred, honest, beautiful experience of creating my art and the soul-crushing available platforms on which to share it. It is deeply troubling to me in the same way it became deeply troubling for me to really look at my drinking, what it had done to me, and how the culture in which I was surrounded added exponentially to my self-harm and demise.
No drinker drinks, no addict is addicted, no person in recovery is recovering, no artist is creating, no creator is sharing, outside of her surroundings. To live in and have to operate in this world is a treacherous thing for anyone willing to be truly themselves, truly vulnerable, open, and daringly forthcoming about her flaws and dreams. And no one is more vulnerable or more bravely honest and badass than a person in recovery, a person willing to share herself humbly and courageously with herself, her God, and her world.
I felt so much anxiety around opening up social media that I shut all of mine down; truthfully, I feel it here, too. “Substack” is hailed as some utopia for writers. No, it isn’t. Everything we share anywhere is at least a little bit stripped down and ultimately always nailed to the cross of stats, figures, numbers, competition, and manipulation. It’s all designed to degrade, disillusion, and cause self-doubt, self-criticism, and a host of other silliness that none of us needs. It is my belief that all platforms are toxic by their very design, because they are designed to make as much money for the platform as possible, and the people in this culture have been so shaped and warped by immersion in all of this constant sharing, commenting, and ranking, that it is exceedingly rare to encounter anything close to deep connection.
People are subscribing to each other’s newsletters as well as hundreds of others. No one is reading that many publications. I am content to read maybe 2 other substacks. I mostly read books from the library and spend my days creating cool stuff. I don’t need or want DMs and all the intrusive stuff these platforms allow us to force upon one another. I don’t like the platforms. I don’t like how the platforms are making us behave. I don’t like that we behave in ways that clearly indicate we are being manipulated and we are manipulating each other.
I’ll keep it to my own experience: I’m in love wholeheartedly with the life I have created for myself. I know I am exactly who and where I am meant to be inside myself. Interesting that someone so confident and self-assured, would feel so sick in mind heart and soul around social media. It’s interesting how when I open up about my feelings around this, so many people respond by accusing me of not using the platforms correctly. That it is somehow my fault it’s a toxic experience. Sounds exactly like drinking. If I can’t drink correctly, it’s my fault. We blame, of course, we always do, the whistleblower, the canary in the coal mine, the victim, the survivor. We tell them: you brought this on yourself.
Most people, I bet, who read or view or interact with my work stay quiet and to-themselves about it. The experience of art, how it affects you to create it or interact with it, is a private affair. Why do we keep wanting to make what is beautifully quiet and serene into something loud and crowded and overwhelmed?
As artists, can we ask ourselves: where does our privacy live? How do we decide what we will share, where, when, and with whom? Why do we automatically think “getting our stuff out in the world” is the “right” thing?
I get that there is value in creating and sharing. Fuck, I’ve been doing it generously and consistently for over 20 years. Even when I was a mom and had a corporate job. I have always been a person with an innate desire to create and to share. To me it is my essence, my divinity, my soul expression. But sharing has become a problem, a concern, for me. It is not my first instinct anymore. Flinging my creations out onto the internet with the belief that the rest will take care of itself? I’m not so sure. It matters how I feel when I’m doing it. And lately, it has felt awful.
I’m not looking to put blame anywhere. Mostly I’m just saying it ultimately doesn’t matter who is to blame. What matters is that I know I am the most calm, cool, collected, and spiritually connected person I know, and if I feel something isn’t good for me, I will not do it. That’s what sobriety means. You start with your insides first and trust your heart, your instinct, your intuition. You don’t ask everyone else if you should do what you know you must do. If I think a situation or a person is going to put me in emotional or physical danger, in any position that threatens my ability to stay grounded inside myself—I owe it to myself to protect my well being first and foremost.
I am reading Julia Cameron’s book Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance. In it she shares a quote by Rilke:
“Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterwards summer may not come.”
My painting explorations continue. I adore the process and the sweet surprises along the way. I reject all suggestions that I mass produce, monetize, or in any other way attempt to commodify my acts of creation. I’m not in that space. I may be one day, I may never be. All I know is where I am. All I know is to honor that. And to call into serious question anything outside of me that threatens what I cherish, enjoy, and love inside.
Our worth is never, ever, ever in the hands of anything outside of us. It never was, it never is, and it never will be. To learn the depths of the powerful truth of that is to understand the true meaning of recovery. It’s to understand that only we hold the keys to setting ourselves free. And we are offered, again and again by our inner knowing, the chance to choose to do it. To choose to dig into ourselves and establish the inner foundations of our self-worth. To be the first and last confirmation of our own belonging inside ourselves. To be our own homes. To be our own safest places to be.
I wonder, if more of us did this, recovered ourselves, what would our art be like? What would our relationship with our own inner creator be like? If there were no numbers, no measurements. If we simply made art today because it called to us to come play. And we allowed ourselves to be privately affected by our crafts. Our wild inspirations, making “sense” of them (let alone businesses out of them) be damned. What if we let go of proving anything, including that we have to turn our private joys into public “inspirations” for them to be real, for them to have an impact, for them to “matter.”
What if we let go of producing. What if we surrendered to a much more beautiful mysterious encounter with a higher form of creativity than just using our sacred artistic impulses to feed a machine (call that machine what you will).
Thanks so much for sharing your heart.
I wish peace and honest beauty for you…and nothing else if that’s not what you want.