Missing the Point
The thing with good advice is that it’s often tricky to follow.
You have to change how you operate in ways that feel unnatural or challenging. You need to understand the advice deeply enough to embody it.
On this occasion, the wonderful piece of advice I fumbled comes from fantasy author, comic, and miscellaneous creative, Neil Gaiman. So his words of wisdom go:
“When things get tough, this is what you should do:
Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art.”
I never understood why Neil settled for making “good” art.
Maybe he meant ‘true’ or ‘honest’ or ‘done is better than perfect.’ But still, he’s a writer. He should know that the words you choose matter.
Besides, why not make art that’s undeniable? Why not aim to scorch the earth and make the planets tremble? If I ever get the chance to speak with him, I’ll ask.
Make Great Art, I Say
One of the hardest things in life isn’t staying true to who you are, but understanding who you are in the first place.
Staying true to who you think you are is easy. You don’t have to think. You just do. A steady stream of subconscious-driven actions, programmed subtly over the years by the breadth and depth of your life experiences. Letting that programming tend itself and be influenced by external input is easy, but can override the truth of who you are.
For me, this was a terrible experience.
On the tin, plumbing the depths of your subconscious for buried truths and forgotten selves is as appealing as eating a stack of arsenic pancakes. Bitter. Twisted. Definitely poisonous. Lemme nooope that silly idea right outta here. Get in the bin.
But in my case, eventually I had no choice other than to dig into the arsenic pancakes. My body was in too much pain. I had no hope for a better future.
I looked forward to nothing. I was dying.
So I braced for my ruin. I gulped back bile.
I chewed on what I thought would end me.
And the darndest thing happened.
Those bloody pancakes weren’t made with arsenic.
They were made with sunshine, bubbles, and that lovely feeling of your stomach falling through your heels when you drop over the crest of a hill in a car that’s probably speeding. I went back for seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths… You get the idea. My appetite for these unexpectedly fucking incredible pancakes was bottomless.
I began turning over stones, revealing and discovering pieces of me that had been there all along, but were repressed, buried, locked up, hidden, stashed, disguised, masked, spirited away into my deepest depths and shunned from society.
So I broke the locks, released the shackles, tore off the disguises, and welcomed everyone home. Some lingered. Some vanished. Some had no form, only feeling.
When the smoke cleared, what was left was me—more me than I’ve ever been.
And I realized:
To make great art is to remember who you are, then make what only you can carve.
Your art can be anything. Writing. Painting. Gardening. Cooking. Cycling. Hiking. Running. Whatever. Your art is the thing you love doing most in this world.
But You Need to Be You
“The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.”
I believed I was doing this by building a business that fed the lifestyle I wanted.
I wasn’t anywhere close to the mark. Sure, I was writing, making art. But not mine, aside from brief interludes here and there. Mostly, I was writing in the voice of others, from their mind, using their stories, their vision. I wasn’t writing and drawing and building and making and dancing and living as only I can. Are you?
I suffered deeply. I say that not for pity, but as an honest accounting of my experience. Due to wiring, I have little tolerance for living and being anything other than 100% me. My body begins breaking down if I ignore the warning signs.
And for a long, long time, ignore the signs I did. I didn’t listen. I didn’t know how. I’d lost touch with myself. I was scared of what I might find. So I say this with love:
Don’t be scared.
Finding and using your voice is hard. You’ll feel exposed, raw, naked. As Neil also says:
“The moment that you feel that just possibly you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself—that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.”
That’s the real goal. That’s what I overlooked all these years. That’s what took nearly a decade not to “get” conceptually, but to embody.
What if Fear is just Mislabeled Excitement?
I’ll leave you with one last idea. Something I learned this year that has helped me immensely when confronted with what I’d have once perceived as fear.
Fear and excitement are emotional opposites, a pair. As with all emotional pairings, you cannot feel one without feeling the other. This connection also allows you to—with effort and focus and patience—rewire how you interpret one or the other.
So you can train your brain to process fear as excitement.
I’ve been doing this when hitting ‘publish’ feels scary. Before, my stomach would clench, my breath would catch, my doubt would kick in.
But now they’re signs I’m alive, that I’m making great art.
The rewiring process is simple:
Recognize and acknowledge your fear.
Then start asking yourself if what you’re feeling could be excitement instead. Feel into those tingles in your belly. Enjoy them. Love them. Meld with them. Let them be.
Think about all the good that could happen instead of what you’re scared of. Ask yourself why you’re scared of those things in the first place—see if they’re even real.
This was one of the hardest lessons for me, I think.
To realize that much of what I was fearing or avoiding wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. I looked at desert oasis and saw post-apocalyptic wastelands, as the saying goes. Now stop that.
And always, make great art.
The kind of art that feels like you’re walking down the street naked.
(Remember that Your art can be anything. Writing. Painting. Gardening. Cooking. Cycling. Hiking. Running. Whatever you love doing most in this world.)
With love from the fog,
~ Alexander, Flamebearer of Emberbrook