Make Stuff in the Mess (I'm on the Well Tended Life podcast!)
Friends! I hope this newsletter finds you healthy and hanging in there as we near the weekend - and a holiday weekend at that.
I am almost always tempted to open a Friday newsletter with, “I hope your week is wrapping up well!” but I usually catch myself before typing this phrase because as someone with three day jobs, I often work on weekend days, and the assumption that everyone is moving steadily towards a work-free weekend can feel slightly irritating at best, downright depressing at worst. So! Wherever in your week you may find yourself, in whatever kind of chaos you are currently steeped in, welcome. I’m glad you’re here, and I hope this bit of mail helps to fortify you for whatever lay ahead for you in the coming days.
First order of business: Deep breath. Another one. One more for good. measure. Good. Let those shoulders drop. Let your jaw go. See if you can relax the muscles in your face. The way you are tensing your stomach? It’s safe to let it go and let it be. You are here in this moment; no where else to be, nothing else to do. Right.
I am so delighted to be popping into your inbox to let you know that you can now listen to the newest episode of The Well-Tended Life podcast, hosted by the wonderful Keri Wilt, with yours truly as this week’s special guest! You can hear a little audio preview below (photo of me featured in the audio clip was taken by my dear partner, Dave Bergstrom, in Tweedale Court, Edinburgh, Scotland in July 2023).
Keri is a writer, speaker, and self-described “heart cultivator”, and an all-around lovely human. She also is the great-great granddaughter of Frances Hodgson Burnett, who penned The Secret Garden (one of the childhood stories that has impacted me in a deep way), among many, many other works. In all, Frances wrote more than 40 novels, a dozen plays, and nearly 100 short stories, articles, and poems.
I am deeply grateful to have had the chance to sit down with Keri last month and chat about my own creativity practices, why I believe in making things in the middle of the mess, how my experience of anxiety and OCD serve as invitations to use my active imagination for good (asking “What if…?” can be empowering as well as worrisome), and why I am embracing identifying myself as multi-passionate these days. Keri and I nerd out over our favorite Secret Garden quotes and themes, and I also share my story of visiting the real life Secret Garden in Kent, England last July. After two hours, we said goodbye, but we joked about needing to set up another call to continue the conversation soon. It was WONDERFUL.
It also feels meaningful to say that during the podcast conversation, I name parts of my mental health experience aloud that I'm still getting used to sharing with others, and that sharing feels both terrifying and freeing. I am experiencing a slight vulnerability hangover since the podcast aired, realizing that anyone I know (or don’t know) now has knowledge of pieces of me that are not visible from the outside. While this slight shedding of layers of what it feels like to be me feels a bit akin to emotional skydiving, I am allowing myself to sit with both the discomfort and relief that this willful revealing brings. When others who have gone before me have generously shared their own experiences, it has been such a gift. If any such benefits might be found in my words, I gladly offer them. I am committing to lean in to owning my own stories without piling on unnecessary helpings of shame.
I’ve been reveling in the meaningful conversation Keri and I shared earlier this summer, and I can’t wait for everyone else to get to listen, too. At some point in the coming weeks, I’ll be writing a full post on my visit to the real life inspiration for The Secret Garden, so look out for that soon!
Where to listen to the podcast episode? If you have an iPhone, you can listen here, and this is a link that should work for other devices.
Why should you listen to the episode? This podcast might be for you if you are currently setting unrealistic expectations for yourself around your creativity that aren’t making you more “disciplined” but rather stifling the joy that’s waiting for you, tucked inside this moment of making.
This podcast might be for you if you have been programmed to believe that you need to choose one thing and one thing only (drawing, dancing, baking, crocheting) and not stray from that one thing, but rather “stay in your lane”.
This podcast might be for you if somewhere along the way, you were taught that the only measure of success in life was to perfect one skill and be THE BEST at it. Nope. Not true or necessary at all.
As always, I’d love to hear if anything feels particularly resonant for you, and encourage you to pass the episode and post along to someone in your life that may need a permission slip to try as many different kinds of creative experiments as they like (in the middle of the mess) and to do them all imperfectly. I’ll look forward to sending you some more mail next week! In the meantime, take good care of yourselves and each other.
Read on for this week’s reflection, inspired by my conversation with Keri on The Well Tended Life podcast…
On “doing it all”
At one point in the podcast interview, Keri asks me, “You have this nest of a bunch of different things that you are doing, and weaving into your nest…how do you do it all?” Ha! Yuck. The comical notion of “doing it ALL!” hits me at about the same time as the disgust at the idea does. I should be clear: Keri simply asked me how I engage with many different forms of creative expression at the same time - she wasn’t piling the expectations at all. The “Ha!” and “Yuck.” that I sensed within me come from what society teaches us about the loaded phrase “doing it all.” For me, the notion of “doing it all” conjures up the image of a SuperRobotHuman who does all the things, on time, without complaining, perfectly. Every time. For the rest of time. Doesn’t that sound tedious? Doesn’t it fill you with rage, this idea of needing to confirm to some inhumane standard that is not possible, for anyone, ever? Just me?
“…how do you do it all?” My short answer: I don’t do it all. At all.
My longer answer: for me, “doing it all” means that I give myself permission to take a modern dance class one week and knit arm warmers the next. It means allowing myself to start an embroidery project today and then set it down (without guilt) for a couple weeks if I find myself writing a stand-up comedy routine that desires my full attention (true story). It means following my creative curiosities, in whatever form they might take.
For me, “doing it all” does not mean:
Setting unrealistic expectations: “I’m going to a modern dance class every day after work!” Unrealistic expectations = surefire way to fall short of said expectations, followed by feelings of failure and shame, culminating in likely not engaging with said dance class at all.
Giving in to the pressure to be the best: “I’m going to become the best poet in the world!” No, you probably aren’t. And that’s ok! It’s not about mastery, it’s about zest and pleasure. Redefine your goals as necessary and savor the ecstasy that flows from doing something you love and putting it out into the world, awards not required. It’s actually enough.
Needing to be the most organized about your chosen creative project. “I need all the “right” supplies to start this project, my workspace needs to be perfectly outfitted, designed, tidy, etc.” Nope. When you fall into this trap, you pass two hours time not sketching, but having scrubbed and swept your living space and shopped for the “right” decor on Etsy (once again, see last week’s post).
I have fallen into these three traps more times than it’s possible to count. So what’s a curious, creative soul to do?
Redefine and reclaim the phrase “do it all” to be less about perfection, expectations, and organization, and more about giving yourself the exquisite gift of making whatever the hell it is you want to make, however you can in this moment, whenever it is that you can and want to make it.
Once you have stumbled your way through a few sewing projects and decide you want to do a deeper dive and hone your supplies, skills, and expectations? Go wild with the patterns, the new equipment, and the specialized work space. But until you get to that point of knowing you want to devote more time to this particular endeavor, it’s more important to dive in with what you have in this moment and just try it out. Feel the pleasure from experimenting, be open to receiving new information about this specific form of creative expression, and let any pleasure you feel lead you to the next steps.
On doing it “badly”
There’s another piece to reclaiming “do it all”, and that’s the sense that you must do all the things well.
“…how do you do it all?” I can hear Keri’s question again. Honestly? All I really do is make and do a bunch of things that make me feel alive, and I want to do them so badly that I’m willing to do them “badly”.
Most of the time, we are trained to believe that if something is worth doing, it needs to be done “well”. At this point, I will once again quote the writer and creative mind Elizabeth Gilbert, as I am wont to do. In her book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, she writes:
“There is a famous question that shows up, it seems, in every single self-help book ever written: What would you do if you knew you could not fail? But I’ve always seen it differently. I think the fiercest question of all is this one: What would you do if you knew you might very well fail? What do you love doing so much that the words success and failure essentially become irrelevant? What do you love even more than. you love your own ego? How fierce is your trust in that love?”
As much as I can get in my head about many things in my life, I consider myself to have a sort of superpower when it comes to making stuff, and it’s not talent. My superpower when it comes to creativity is that the pressure to do something “well” has rarely been a barrier to entry keeping me from trying something new in the creative realm.
Being willing to do something “badly” or frankly, in a mediocre manner, has allowed me to try so many things that have made me feel alive and connected to every other creative soul throughout time and space. And once I’ve felt these experiences as the thrilling, satisfying, life giving experiences that they are, I only become more and more convinced of how useless it is to let fear of not doing something “well” stop me from trying.
Do you feel afraid? Worry what people think? If you are like me, you feel these things much of the time.
Do you let that fear and worry stop you from making the thing “badly”? Please, don’t. Yes, not doing the thing out of fear of being bad or average or boring will save you some feelings of fear and embarrassment up front. But when you insist on missing out on these, you also consent to miss out on the feeling of being a flesh and blood human, whose lungs are breathing and heart is beating this very second as you read this, and who has something to say with every cell in your body. Someone who has the ever present opportunity to express yourself in the world (or at your local coffee shop open mic night), for whom wonder and elation and awe and delight are waiting for you to swim in.
The best news: no one is watching you, waiting to enforce these arbitrary rules of creative and human expression. Nothing is stopping you from following that urge to paint a portrait, write a song, sew a dress, and do all of those things “badly.” No one will come to your door after you sew one leg of your trousers too short, to take you away and ban you from any future creative projects. In case no one told you, you are allowed to express your creativity in as many ways as you like, and you don’t have to be “good” at any of them. You can intellectually know these things in your brain, and then you have to go and do them. You must experience this knowledge in the body and build your creativity courage trust bank. No better time to invest than today.
If you have felt the pull to make something that’s been on your mind and heart and it brings you joy, make haste and DO IT NOW. Close this post on your laptop or phone and go do it. Even without all the “right” supplies. Even if you don’t feel certain how it will turn out. Even in the middle of the mess (see last week’s post).
Feeling like there is a curiosity to make something brewing inside of you? Try asking yourself these three questions to get started:
What am I feeling?
What do I want to make?
What form will this take (a poem, a play, a pie)?
Then, get going. We are human, which means we are mortal. We don’t have much time here on this Earth. If you want to make a dress and write a screenplay and develop a gluten free puffed pastry recipe, the time is NOW.