[Originally featured as a contribution to Connecting Creatives' Blog Project]
Letters have been cropping up a lot for me lately. A letter to your future self, a letter to your past self. A letter to a loved one, a letter to someone who hurt you. A letter to a dear friend, a letter to someone you’ve never met. A letter to someone since departed, a letter to someone who never existed. A letter to a person you’ve made up from another you’ve created. Indeed a journal entry or reflection could be considered a letter to oneself. The idea that struck me most when I heard it, was a letter to fear. ‘Fear?’ I thought, ‘how curious.’ We all experience fear in myriad ways for countless reasons, but how well do we know fear? Strangely, it may be something we are very familiar with, but we hardly welcome the feeling. Fear seems to be something we are fearful of experiencing, so how might we seek or even desire to become acquainted with it?
Despite my intrigue, I have not yet written to fear. I sense it is something that will come in time, when I’m ready to communicate directly with it. For the moment, it’s bubbling away on the back burner, which for me always means that I’ve become preoccupied with it somewhat. There’s always some creative idea or philosophical dilemma that is sitting with me, but I’m happy to have it on board, awaiting moments of inspiration that invariably arise and develop it a little further. As an artist, this is part of my process, which is something I’ve found a little less disrupted this week, having found much of my motivation waylaid over the past few months. I’ve been undertaking low-pressure, manageable creative tasks, with a mixture of collaborative and solo engagements, and I’ve realised that being creative doesn’t necessitate being recognised as artistic.
Some of my most creative moments have been the simplest ones; tending to the garden, cooking dinner, discussing a topic of interest, setting the scene for a bath, singing a made-up tune, walking in nature and wandering off the beaten track. These are all very nourishing activities that haven’t a thing to do with my ‘profession’, yet I’ve found them to be a great antidote to self-doubt. Not that I’m suddenly rid of the crippling, gnawing beast that it is, which is perhaps attested to by my use of inverted commas in the previous sentence, and indeed my hesitancy in even referring to myself as an artist or creative.
I experience a huge amount of pressure with these titles, because it is unclear at what stage of one’s ‘career’ (there they are again) that one may be referred to as such with any validity. Is it when you’re paid? That certainly wasn’t an immediate gateway of permission for me. Is it when your work is acknowledged? Is it when someone else refers to you in this way? The trouble then, I’ve found, is that once you’ve been outed as a creative, there seems to be some perception that you must now always be in the process of creating, lest you may lose your badge of recognition. This is, undoubtedly, the voice of self-doubt, within which resounds the echo of fear. I feel there exists a fear of greatness, since one is then bound to remain so, else risk the fall from grace.
I was introduced to someone recently by someone else, very generously, as an ‘arts practitioner’ – I thought, ‘Am I?’ I felt a little bit fraudulent; I’d never introduced myself in that way, but from our fruitful conversation about our passions and practice, it must have seemed obvious to her to use that term. It highlighted to me how differently we’re seen by others as compared with how we see ourselves. I’ve tended to presume that others must think I’m not worthy of a mention yet, when really it’s me that thinks that. The prospect of others holding me in some regard as an artist has mostly been a far-out idea, and the prospect of concurring with them even further out. It’s rather like someone paying you a compliment that you don’t believe yourself, but I’ve come to realise that my acquiescence is not necessary, only my gratitude.
And here we arrive at the crux of the matter. Gratitude. I’ve always felt like a very thankful person when I’ve been gifted something or been shown kindness, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve integrated gratitude in my everyday life. I’m coming to see that self-doubt may just be a manifestation of an overall lack of gratitude; it bemoans a lack of abundance within myself – creatively, spiritually, personally. A song lyric I wrote recently asks, ‘Am I too much, or not enough?’ By ‘too much’ I mean ‘overbearing’, which I suppose suggests a lack of temperance. Either way, both options render me lacking, so perhaps the answer is neither; perhaps, I’m simply enough.
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