What is known and what is unknown about your creative work?
What's your willingness to take a risk for a purpose?
When you create anything, you are exposing a vulnerable part of yourself to the world. Being human is complicated, but we can snatch flickers of time that remind us that goodness, beauty, and truth still exist somewhere in the world —and that both you and I can not only participate in these, but create them.
The creeping insertion of doubt
Ben slowly approached me in the kitchen, likely sensing my agitation. The four oldest were at school on a dismal (read: chilly, wet, and gray) October morning, and Auggie was content in the family room watching Trash Truck on Netflix.
“What’s going on?” Ben asked tentatively, and I hesitated before answering. I usually hesitate, because I’m never sure how to directly — and simply — answer a loaded question. There are so many factors playing into how I feel, why my emotional state resembles a tornado. “A lot of things, I guess,” I mumbled, opening the fridge door and slapping four pieces of sandwich bread on the counter.
I didn’t make eye contact with him. I just mentioned a few things that had jostled my heart before 8:30 AM: a comment Ben had made upon awakening, a case study I’d read about a celebrity-turned-author, and the cliffhanger of whether our babysitter would secure a ride home from our house that night so that we could uphold our dinner reservations with close friends.
The big one, though, was the celebrity-turned-author. “Are you jealous?” Ben asked pointedly. “Because you seem jealous of their success.”
I sighed and shifted my weight. Daisy (our dog) stood at my feet with pleading eyes while I spread peanut butter on the bread. “I’m not jealous of them. I don’t want to live like a celebrity. I am just disenchanted with what it seems to take in order to succeed as an author in this country. It seems like the opportunities are mostly for the privileged. And I am not among them.”
I thought about how I was making lunches for my boys (all three of them, Ben included) before 9 AM on a Friday and how odd that must seem to most people. But I had to leave for a doctor’s appointment that would require a thirty minute drive, plus arrival time at least fifteen minutes before my appointment time. That meant, for a 9:45 AM appointment, I had to leave my house by 9. And knowing it would take me another thirty minutes to drive home after who-knows-how-long for the appointment, I couldn’t guarantee that I’d be home in time for the boys’ 11 AM lunch — or rather, their expectation of it.
“Well, a case study of a celebrity makes sense from a logistical standpoint,” I continued. “I mean, I get that the point wasn’t about the celebrity status of the author but how the author invested in the marketing of their book. But all I can see is that the reason they are able to get on Jimmy Fallon’s show and have a well-known musician play music to the rhyme of their book is because they have access to whoever they want. Everyone knows this celebrity, so everyone will bend over backwards to gush over their creative work, whatever it may be.”
This is not a tangential rant. The evening before, Ben had sent me this video of the actor Michael Sheen discussing “The Magic of a Creative Career” on TED. In the first nine minutes, Sheen shares about the idiosyncrasy of coming from a working-class steel town in Wales (Port Talbot), which has produced incredible actors like Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins (and Sheen himself). He wonders, how did this happen? Could it happen in today’s world?
Here’s where his words struck a nerve in me, something that caused me to leap from the couch, pump my fists in the air and shout, “Yes!” as I listened to him put language to an experience that was only beginning to stir in my life:
If someone like myself, with all the advantages I had, wouldn’t be able to do [this artistic career pathway], what about the kids who are out there who don’t have those advantages, who don’t have maybe a family who can take them to youth theater rehearsals…?
The conversations that we have as a country, as a nation, as a community, what is that conversation like if we’re only hearing from the people who are able to afford to get through to the point where they get to speak, get to have a voice? It makes that conversation incredibly one-sided.
Sheen goes on to quote statistics about how many British writers came from “privileged starting points” versus working-class backgrounds (47% and 10%, respectively). His point continues, though, about how to hear from creative people who have something to offer the world, who can speak into the culture - or against it - that is otherwise being hindered by their inability to access the powerful people who can hand them the megaphones and mouthpieces.
Ben countered, “But that doesn’t mean you can’t look for opportunities. You might not have access to the same resources, but you can still use your energy to create connections with other writers.”
He’s not wrong. I know this. But still…
“Ben, when you repeatedly hear about successful writers, and most of them share certain specifics in common — zero to two kids (usually later in life), some sort of MFA or if not that, growing up in New York City, landing a writers fellowship through a prestigious university, graduating with connections in the publishing industry —what am I supposed to think?” I said this as my voice rose well above a calm decibel.
He didn’t say anything, so I continued, tossing Daisy a tidbit of bread. “Why can’t I hear about a middle-aged author who has more than three kids, at least one of whom has a medically complex diagnosis, and they are living on one income? If I can’t hear a success story about a person like me, how am I supposed to believe that someone like me —that I —can achieve the same things?”
Ben had no response, but he leaned over and gave me a hug. “I’m sorry you’re struggling with this right now.”
“Thank you,” I sighed, blinking away tears. Tears? Really? With massacres and political divides crescendoing everywhere, worldwide? What right do I have to sulk in self-pity about my writing in times like these?
The bigger question is this: Why? Why now do I feel this urgency in me to break through the mayhem? I don’t know, exactly, but I do know that sometimes the words I write can be a balm to others. I don’t know who you are, and I’m not sure if what is inside my heart can be given to you in the way I want it to —so that it lands softly upon your pain, so that it soothes what emotionally ails you.
What I do know is that I must try to reach the unknown person with the only thing I know to give, and that is myself, my time, my concern, my heart.
The idea of risk and purpose
Because I rotate between reading a book, then another immediately upon completing the previous one, I collect a melange of powerful quotes that I tend to record in a spiral notebook, so that I can revisit them when I am ready to reflect more about what they might mean for my own life, but also in a universal sense.
Here’s one from Julie Ross’s How to Hug a Porcupine (not a new book), on her definition of self-esteem:
What’s your willingness to take a known risk for a known purpose?1
What struck me about this question is that it’s not just about self-esteem; it’s also about creative work, maybe even in a broader sense, about our psyches and the way we move and live in the world. If we ask ourselves about risk and purpose, I think several things come to mind:
We know the risk but not the purpose: If I eat that slice of mud pie at 8:30 tonight, I will definitely get stomach cramps, but what’s the point in doing that?
We know the purpose but not the risk: I am meant to become a school counselor and help the at-risk kids by building a healthy rapport with them. (But I don’t realize that the red tape of education will prevent me from actually building many meaningful connections, due to the sheer amount of paperwork I’m required to do —unknown risk.)
We know both the risk and the purpose: My friend who confided in me that she has thought of killing herself will probably be angry with me if I tell an adult, but at least she will get the help she needs. (This actually happened to my seventh grade daughter.)
We know neither the risk nor the purpose: Why am I writing again?
Life is more often than not lived in the abstract rather than the concrete. We already know this, yet when we approach the most honest parts of ourselves, we discover that operating in the unknown requires a massive dose of faith. That is where I am right now, both in my personal growth and professional development: I don’t know where I’m going, and, more importantly, I don’t know if where I’m going will even matter once I arrive.
Maybe it’s because I’m clutching this idea that some definite destination exists for me in this life, with my creative work. And the reality may be that it doesn’t. That maybe I will never know the impact of my life while I am still here in the midst of living it. There are days when I can accept that, make peace with it. But when I combine the unknown purpose with the unknown risks that lead to this elusive terminus, that’s when I begin to panic.
When you create anything, you are exposing a vulnerable part of yourself to the world. The risk is that the world may not like your work —may, in fact, loathe it— and you interpret this to mean that they don’t like you as a person (which may also be true). For those of us with highly sensitive inferiority complexes, the stakes of being rejected are too high.
To believe in one’s creative endeavors means to believe in oneself —without evidence that tells us that we are worthy. By evidence, I mean the number of followers you have on social media or the number of times your video on YouTube has been watched. Numbers sort people into categories —the influencers and the nobodys. Numbers after your headshot on Facebook tell you how many “friends” you have, or rather, your peripheral connections mingled with a few IRL friends.
But numbers can’t determine value. They don’t reflect an honest assessment of who we are, of what we are worth. But because of our inherent, festering wounds (usually from childhood), we internalize this to mean I am not good enough. Nobody likes me. See? I’m trying to figure out what it means to share my work, and all I notice is that I’m invisible, ignored, overlooked.
If it sounds petulant, it’s because it is. It’s the unhealed inner child trying to make its voice prominent. Your younger self is telling you something vital: that you don’t yet believe that your unique combination of personality, life experiences, education, and worldview cannot be replicated and at the same time are needed in this society.
I can tell myself that there is something only I can do, and sometimes I will believe it. I will do, as the psychologist William James wrote, act as if I already am doing it. But then a bad day just hits me, like it did the morning I was making lunch at 8:30 in the morning, and I’ll vacillate. I question whether what I do adds anything to the pool of meaning in the world.
This relates to the difference between what is possible and what is probable.2 I get these confused all the time. I’ll say I believe anything is possible, but I don’t really mean it, because I am fixated on the fact that it’s not likely to happen. Possible means it can be done but with an uncertain likelihood; probable means it’s likely to happen. Possible relies on abstract, probable on statistics.
Art needs a little bit of both. So do humans. You don’t have to consider yourself an artistic person in order to recognize that the very essence of the word faith means you are without proof, yet you act as if what is possible becomes what is probable. And then the question of known or unknown risk snakes into the equation, and you might convince yourself that it’s all folly, and you should just give up.
The thing is, we don’t need proof in order to have confidence in who we are and what we are meant to contribute to this fleeting world. Sometimes, we don’t even need confidence. But we do need a modicum of hope, that is, a radical trust that whatever becomes of us and whatever becomes of what we do with our lives cannot be controlled or contained. Yet it still can become the Something Greater for which we strive.
We just keep showing up every day. Let the mess be what it will be. And let the art be born from that interior wresting. Being human is complicated, but we can snatch flickers of time that remind us that goodness, beauty, and truth still exist somewhere in the world —and that both you and I can not only participate in these, but create them.
p. 140
From Ross’s book, How to Hug a Porcupine, p. 135.