Keep Fighting

I seriously am having a case of nerves every time I update this blog lately due to the amount of people I know personally who are reading it.

I’m a tough girl. I lift kettlebells and hike giant hills, I would rather punch someone in the mouth than put up with bullshit, but when it comes to updating this blog I am lately going, “Eeee!” like a little pansy. And it’s just some words from my brain we’re dealing with here.

I had this problem a few months back when I was doing kettlebell competitions and writing about the competitions I was going to—how kettlebell relates to writing, etc–which made my readership expand for a period of time. A lot of my fellow trainees started reading my blog, and then I’d have to see them in training, where they would ask me questions about what I wrote on the blog and I would be like, “Um, can we like, type about this or something? The face to face discussion of my blog topics is a little awkward.”

I do admit, I like to spend a lot of time alone, although I am social 50% of the time. But. There’s this crazy need in me to always speak my mind no matter what the consequences. I say things here, people read them, things happen as a result of me saying things here and I freak out and think a lot of things about those things I said and ask, “Who am I?” “Why must I be so vocal?” In the end, I leave my opinions up, my real friends stick around, and all the drive-by judgers go on drive-by judging me and the guy who hands them coffee in the morning and their own girlfriends/boyfriends and the raccoon trying to steal food from their garbage can at night like they always do.

Mostly lately I am just trying to stay strong in my own orbit and really go after my desires (the ones that aren’t completely crazy), like music and of course, writing. This blog is supposed to talk about music, art, writing, and generally give you all a pep talk or morale boost through my own myopic perspective of the world, my rainbow-unicorn-pony idealism veiled under a thick tar veneer of cynicism. This blog could even be called Pep Talks To My Own Damn Self That You Can Also Read If You Are So Inclined.

I’m always focused on the end result it seems. What am I DOING to reach my goals, have I done enough, when will I GET THERE already. But There is like a magic carpet ride. Exciting prospect but virtually impossible to make happen.

I’m sure we all remember the days when we believed we could actually ride on a magic carpet, that the world was all ours (oh, say, ages 2, 3, 19 and 20). But then time goes and goals aren’t reached immediately, except through hard work and dedication, and we look around us and realize, OMG, um, so many people have to work HELL OF HARD to reach their goals.

And then we buck up and start working hell of hard as well, one little piece at a time.

Seems a lot of my friends in their forties are having successes with their work. A couple of my friends in that category just got a bunch of work published. This writer I have been getting to know better in Portland is traveling all over the place and writing for big rags, I have a friend who just got an amazing summer gig playing for one of his favorite bands that will bring in a bunch of dough as well as give him major cred. My kettlebell coach friend just achieved her master of sport in the snatch lift after training and training and training. They’ve worked for years and years and years, with little to no end of working in sight (and are still working on the next thing now).

I’m proud to be friends with these people and to be able to see all of the hard work they have put in turn into success. And I look at my own life and see that if I continue to pick myself up every time I get knocked back, I too may reach some of the goals I have set for myself over the past years, albeit much more slowly than I ever would have imagined.

I can’t give up. Ever. I can entertain the thought of giving up for a minute, but then must banish it immediately by stabbing it to death with a mental spork. Then, if I’m feeling lost and aimless, I can ask myself if I am doing everything I can to move myself forward towards the goals I’ve set out for myself. And I can make my goals clearer if they are too vague. And I can blame being a Gemini if I can’t focus on just a few goals and instead want to do everything all at once, because that’s socially acceptable here on the West Coast.

Sometimes I believe I create sheerly out of neurosis. I am kind of insane, and have a lot more energy than most people. I also see and feel on a level that makes me want to barricade myself in the middle of a jungle sometimes with no humans around to affect my moods, but all in all, it’s a good life, just hard, and a lot of work. I feel like whenever I set my sights on something I am tested again and again, the universe making sure I want what I want before it gives it to me, and in the past, I kind of fell down in the ring a bunch of times, or just got tired of fighting. I blame genetic pessimism.

So now I’m fighting in baby steps, trying not to have too many expectations, but also seeing how each action I take influences my chances at success, and surrounding myself with only people who believe in me being able to be who I am. It’s really hard to be the first authority on believing in yourself, but I’m here to say that there is no other authority on what you yourself can do, and everyone has an opinion. It’s good to learn from others, but to always check back in and make sure that you are going where you want to go and your work is saying/portraying what you want it to say/portray. There are always people better and more advanced and more skilled and committed and beautiful and charismatic and successful. As my friends always tell me, “That’s life.”

So keep fighting. Don’t give up. No one else is going to believe in you like you can believe in yourself. You’ve got to have your own back, because that’s the first step to actually moving forward on your path. If you have no faith in your own work, your work is pretty much dead in the water.

Validation

Most of my successes are silent, seen only by me. Nobody sees me tweak a song all day, edit a story until it’s done, listen to my music until 2am in the morning trying to figure out if it’s cohesive, go through my old notebooks finding lyrics, poetry, material to work with…

Seeking outside validation is a crap shoot and bound for failure if that’s the only driving mechanism. It’s faulty and based on unpredictable and uncontrollable outside things, namely people. And each person in this world has their own goal, a priority of themselves first above all else.

Because I grew up with a father who was a local musician, admired in many circles, I always felt like I was living in shadows of someone more talented and bigger than myself. I started playing music when I was very young, and picked up the guitar at 13, knowing full well music was something I wanted to pursue, but somehow, I didn’t learn how to validate myself, because I always felt like someone was better. After my dad, there was a guy friend who was amazingly hot and talented at the guitar who I felt always criticized me. I wanted him to appreciate and respect my songs so badly, just like I maybe wanted my dad to look at me and say, “Damn, my daughter is super talented.”

After that boy, there was a string of other men I let become my harsh internal critic, and I constantly sought out their approval, in an endless empty desire to fill myself with someone else’s validation. I spent years searching for that better-than-me musician or writer who would make me real, like the velveteen rabbit, just begging for someone to consider me as an item worth handling.

I don’t know, maybe the Velveteen Rabbit story is another in a string of societal myths of outside validation making you real that set me up to be endlessly disappointed and searching for something more. I’ll have to take a look at that.

At 31 years old, I think I’m finally aware of the pattern enough to realize that I can only seek validation from my self, anything else is icing on the cake. I can connect with people, I can share what I’m doing with them, but I can’t expect them to make me feel better about my work or what I do. They can’t make me real. I am real, but I need to see it before I can even accept that anyone else can see it.

I’m not sure what it is that separates those who are majorly successful in the worlds eyes from those who are mildly successful, seems to me the talent is often there in both cases, but sometimes, those that are more successful simply believe in their work to a level that allows them to never back down. They don’t hide their art under a rock as soon as they perceive the slightest rejection.

One of my biggest lessons in life has been learning to accept myself and my own art, and not look to people who I admire or look up to to tell me I “have it” or don’t. It’s hard, it’s like drugs. I crave attention and connection and understanding, and I get so tired of trying to give it to myself all the time. It’s like living in the middle of a desert, patting yourself on the back for managing to bleed cactuses for water so you don’t die of thirst. It gets old, congratulating yourself for simply being able to survive.

“Knowledge, ultimately, means perspective. There’s knowing something and then knowing it. Another Taoist saying is that “you have to not know you know anymore.” That’s the hardest part. Because you can get real real smart. If you get stoned or high on a spring morning, or you’re fucking or in love–whatever it is that does it for you–it’s, ‘Ah, I know! There it is!.’ But it’s a bubble. It bursts. And when the bubble bursts, you’re right back where you were with your habit and your weaknesses and your fears and your loneliness and your lies and your stupidities and all the rest of it, stumbling through life and not really knowing what the fuck is going on…“

–Marco Vassi

“I thought I would stand myself a little dinner. I hadn’t quite enough sense to know what I really wanted was human companions. There aren’t such things. Every man is eternally alone. But when you get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the acute symptoms of its disease–that of thinking.“

–Diary of a Drug Fiend/Aleister Crowley

Seems that’s the eternal equation. We need to validate ourselves, but we want outside validation. So we have to go ahead and validate ourselves in spite of our wants. Because being human means wanting, and wanting is a disease in and of itself. I know I have an endless want monster inside. I get a little bit of validation and attention and suddenly I want more. I stop taking care of myself as soon as I realize I can get a balm from someone else, but then I always come back to me again and find that I need to get my own damn balm, even though it’s harder and it’s seemingly thankless and it takes longer and it gets so tiring taking care of myself all of the time because frankly, I’m a lot to handle, and I spread myself thin just trying to manage my own moods and desires and abilities all of the time.

But hey, that’s life.

So the moral of this story is: Validate your own damn self, because you know how to do that better than anyone else, and if you don’t validate yourself, you won’t even be able to accept anyone else’s validation to begin with.

Is Making Music an Exercise in Futility?

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
― Albert Camus

It’s true, I often seek happiness outside of myself. When this happens, I will be happy. When I find this I will be happy. When I figure this out, I will be happy, finally. And then, miserable, I find myself coming back to accepting that this moment is ALL I HAVE.

It really is. If I look back, there is a collection of previous moments to draw from, reminisce on, write about, but right here, right now, is the only thing I have. That’s it. No matter how bad I want to change it or keep it from being real, no matter where I want to be instead of here, this is it.

I can look ahead. I can set goals for myself to move forward, move along. I can do any number of things today to build a better tomorrow, but I can’t make anything happen that depends on another person, place or thing. Lately, I’ve been trying to start over from scratch, as my whole life was pulled out from under me. In the aftermath, I held on to whatever I could in order to get through the transition. I came to rely on unreliable things, and was left again with myself and the reality that unless I motivate me to do the things I need and want to do, there will be no progression.

No one else can push me along. No one else wants to.

I know this blog tends towards some combo of nihilistic anarchist buddhist zen crapshoot, but that’s kind of where I’m coming from in life. I started to pursue my writing and music as a lifetime enterprise a number of years ago, knowing I’d cared about these things my whole life, and as a result, some things in my life stopped working.

I’ve hit a transition point where I don’t know what I’m doing, where I’m going or if I’m even on the right path. Sometimes, when I play shows lately, there’s this existential voice in my head going, “But what’s the point?”

***

I was talking with a childhood friend the other day. He’s on his second record with a band he created and about to go on an awesome tour in Europe. But he was tripping on the fact that he only has 934 likes on his Facebook music page. “Why don’t more people hear this? I worked hard on this, it’s amazing, it says everything I want it to say, but it will never be heard.”

I, with my 164 likes (mostly family) on Facebook, just sat there and half-smiled. “It’s mostly access and marketing and promotion. But YOU like your music, right? You listen to it, don’t you?”

He nodded.

“I do the same with mine. And really, in the end, if I realize what I had intended to create in the physical plane, and I like it, and a couple of people hear it…that’s more than I was expecting.”

Of COURSE we want more people to hear our creations.

But I was thinking about how it’s easy to get caught up in more, more, more. He started tripping on the futility of it all, with his dark songs playing in the background, and I told him to cheer up, gave him a hug.

It’s so easy to get caught in the meaninglessness loop with art, to forget that it’s made up of the subtle things we glaze over while straining our eyes on the prize. I’m always looking and waiting for more. But life is right here. Here’s my friend, with another friend listening to and appreciating his music, and he’s tripping on all the people that aren’t listening to it. What am I, chopped liver?

I’m kind of teasing, but you see my point. We look over people and what we have. And it may be all we ever have.

Before and during my last show, a singer-songwriter showcase thing, I was tripping out thinking, “Shoot, what’s the point? Maybe I’ll I’m really meant to do is use my music as a tool to process my own emotions. Maybe other people aren’t really supposed to hear it. Maybe it all exists in a vacuum and that vacuum is all I have. What am I even doing playing for these people?”

Some Irish guy at the bar tried to buy me a drink after my set, told me I was really talented, and I told him I don’t drink (convenient in times like this). He was telling me about a band he saw when he was in South Dakota who he thought were simply amazing. “But the locals didn’t get it,” he said. “They were a bit ignorant. This great talent there in front of their eyes and they didn’t even see it.”

Seems like, in this cosmic joke of a world, for whatever reason (and I don’t think I’m bitter) many of us do not get heard by more than a few. We focus on the brighter stars, all the others blend into the tapestry. I don’t know why this is, and frankly, I don’t think I care anymore. I’m just keeping on keeping on, chipping away, for myself. Who cares what anyone else thinks. Who cares if I get heard?

I mean, I do, but, I’ve learned three things: Expect nothing. Learn from everything. Take care of yourself. People trip along beside you here and there, but overall, we have ourselves, and the universe has some unknown plan. We’re all (most of us) working in the dark, doing the best we can with what we have and know.

Imposter Syndrome

I think that many writers and musicians struggle with something called imposter syndrome. It’s an actual thing coined by psychologists in the ‘70s: an inability to internalize accomplishments. Basically, it feels like you aren’t really that great and that you haven’t done anything of noteworthy praise even if you have. All the hard work you’ve done is just the hard work you’ve done–you feel you should have worked harder.

I haven’t won any medals for my art, nor published in any famous literary magazines. I haven’t made a complete record or been signed to a label. Many of us haven’t. But I have made tiny accomplishments, and like many, I continue to practice most every day on making my writing and/or music more palatable to me and other people. I continue to send work out, getting published or being asked to play sets here and there, chipping away, realizing full well that a lot of times I’m published or asked to play out because of who I know or being in the right place at the right time. It’s a small world.

Regardless, there’s this deep seated fear when I’m around other people who are also artists. What if they find out about me? What if they find out I’m not really real? That I’m a fraud or a fake and that I can’t really write and I suck at music and I’m just pretending I know what I’m doing? What if they listen to my songs and cringe? What if they read my non-fiction stories and go, “Poor thing, deluding herself that she can write.”

When all else fails, resort to LOLcats

Every time I start talking with a new musician or writer and we get to the point where we want to collaborate or exchange work, I run through my list of creations and start backpedaling in my head. Maybe next time, I think. When I’m better. I can send them something then.

Practice has taught me to share anyways, to keep creating and honing and articulating in spite of the very real sensation that I’m not really real and any moment the art police are going to come in and arrest me for taking up space inside their museum of only the best and most pertinent creations. It’s an uphill battle fought with a too-flimsy stick on terrain that is slightly moist and covered with slippery rocks. Below me, at the bottom of the hill I climb every day I hone my craft are the creations I’ve sacrificed along the way.

Like a collection of disabled dolls with their limbs sewn on wrong, my prior creations make up a landfill of misfits. Each time I’ve finished something, I move on to the next thing, try to make the next thing better than the previous thing in an endless process of replacing an older creation with an upgraded version and discarding the previous experiment after seeing its glitches.

Above me is the holy beacon of recognition, thought to be obtained through self-awareness. It is tinged with the chance of social status, validation, an endlessly tantalizing carrot on the stick pulling me forward in spite of the years of hard work ahead (most of the people I know who are finally getting published to accolades are now in their forties).

Sucking at your art is relative. It depends on who you talk to, who you compare yourself to. If I say I suck because I only lifted 42 times on one arm with a 16kg bell and one of my readers says he can’t even lift one of those bells a portion of that number of times (which happened the other day, thanks Mike!) I pause for a second and go wow, my reality is entirely based on proximity and perception.

Of course, the whole thing unravels and I’m sloshing down a slippery slope straight into my pile of misfit creations just as soon as someone near me does better or ignores me or gives me some harsh and needed feedback. Then everything I’ve done up until that point simply doesn’t count.

It’s so easy to forget what I’ve done, to wish for more. To be impatient with myself. To feel like a camper in my own body. Sometimes I read my writing and wonder who wrote it. Sometimes I wonder if writing being a reward in itself is enough, if making music for music’s sake is going to continue to fulfill me the rest of my life, if it’s OK if I never “make it.“

It is and it isn’t. Like Pinocchio, I want to be real; like Christopher McCandless, I find that happiness is often only real when shared.

What Makes Someone a Successful Artist?

This may be old news to some, but I was pondering things in my car yesterday, on the way to go work on my music, and came to this conclusion: The difference between people who are more successful in producing viable music and writing and art and those who aren’t is that the people who are successful with their art believe in something they have. It starts with a tiny something.

They may not be at the point where their art is good enough for public consumption, or for other people to even relate to, but they can see that it has a fragment of that thing, that if they keep working on it, it can become great, if only to a few people, or even only to themselves.

Embrace your obstacles.

Continue reading →

How Kettlebell is Like Writing

There are a number of topics I want to cover this week, mostly to answer questions I get all of the time. Things as seemingly simple as “Why do you have so many tattoos.” It’s a question I often ask myself. Another question I ask myself, is why I continue to practice kettlebell (Girevoy) sport when it is so hard.

Continue reading →

Start From Where You Are

I was sitting at a coffee shop outside of Los Angeles, with a musician I admired and one of his hardcore fans. The hardcore fan and I had traveled to see the musician perform on television.

On the way to the coffee shop, I had given the musician a tape of my self-recorded songs that I had promised to show him months before. He surprised me by putting the tape into the car dashboard so that it played over the stereo as we were driving.

With this signed musician playing my tape in his chauffeured car, I felt like something big was happening. The small fact that somebody was listening to what I had created made me nervous and excited.

As we sat at the table after the ride, I expressed my desire to start my music from the ground up, grow it locally, have a small group of fans and keep it real without fiending for the big time.

“That’s a very Bay Area attitude,” he said, slightly mocking me.

Being from a small town near the Bay Area and having escaped, he was very into being on a big label and doing the big tour and video thing he was currently doing. I looked up to him for the music that he did and the success he had had, but to me, that life sounded empty and scary – it felt like a lonely rat race.

Not that I didn’t want success. I did. I just didn’t want to give up my freedom, my family, my friends, my Bay Area roots, to get there. So the carrot on the stick, the rewards-based model, didn’t work for me.

And I still feel the same way today, which is why I’m nothing special to the mainstream media. If you’re looking for a celebrity pep-talk, this isn’t the place. I’m just a fellow creative person who writes from a corner of the Bay Area about the power of starting where you are, accepting what and who you are, zen and the benefit of living a creative life through your art – whatever that may be.

I’m promoting a creative person’s manifesto. Whether you’re just starting, have been doing it your whole life, have fame or don’t, we need you in this world that relies so heavily on art of all types, yet doesn’t seem to have a proper way of maintaining its artists.

I’m going to diverge a bit off topic into another little vignette, so bear with me.

I learned when I was a hitchhiking, free-spirited, vagabond teenager that wherever you go, there you are.

The idea of a teenage population has been a recent installation in United States history. It started in the beginning part of the 1900′s, when laws were changing in order to protect children from working in industries from childhood on, and really took off after World War II, due to a mix of post-war boom and the savvy marketers who had realized that this demographic was untapped potential.

Being a teenager is hard because you’re separated from other groups: you’re kind of an outcast in a way.

For me, being a teenager was just an inferno keeping me from doing what my adult friends (who were 18 and up) were doing.

Every time I got pulled out of my travels, I thought some terrible vortex was forcing me back to the Bay Area. I was constantly flustered because the new life I had created, the friends I had met on the road, were now gone.

Now, fifteen years later, I commend that 15-year old girl that took off with her older friends to follow her heart. I don’t regret any of it. I miss the freedom, but that was my window for adventure. And though I have my qualms with our capitalistic, production-based society, I don’t think that I would have been able to find out who I was without the teenage demographic being an accepted quantity in American culture.

I mention my teenage self because I’m doing many of these creative things for her: because she wanted so badly to be a successful writer and musician, but didn’t know how. She didn’t know that success is defined by your experience of it, that success in culture is often just a popularity contest combined with being in the right place with the right skills at the right time.

I’m not anti-success. I’m not anti-marketing. I believe you can make a living being a writer, an artist or a musician if that’s what you feel makes you a true one.

But I don’t believe that receiving money for my works is what makes me a true musician or a writer. I believe that creating something for me, that I am proud of, that aims to help others, and then giving it away in whatever shape or form, to however many people I choose, is the core foundation.

And I believe in starting small and appreciating the people you have now who are all you really have in the end. Life is short. Too short for us to really do everything we want to do with it. There is a small window for each of us and a lot of us make mistakes that we can’t take back.

But the act of expression is one of the most sustaining things I’ve found for this life. All of the things I have seen: boiling them down and regurgitating them through the medium of what is uniquely me; being able to appreciate what others have created; being able to feel that deep peace inside when you know you’re following the right path: this is what being an artist is to me. My life is an art. My creations are the byproduct. This is what I have and it is enough for today.

Thestifledartist's Blog

Pep talks for writers, musicians and artists (myself included)

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