No. 45 – Try Caring Less
Focus makes a practice
Welcome to the latest issue of Feed the Monster: a monthly art journal for creative, curious, imperfect and sometimes disheveled humans.
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I recently counted how many Feed the Monsters I’ve written and it turns out to be forty-five—once a month for almost four years now (pre-Substack issues can be found here). This means a lot to me because I struggled for years to establish, let alone maintain, a “practice”. Various mental roadblocks, child-rearing, and a pesky day job all contributed to my poor output. But mostly I was just scared senseless. LONG STORY.
I was raised in a household not exactly replete with art or literature. Any explorations I made in these areas came of my own volition, and God only knows where I got the idea to go to University. I applied to Concordia University in my mid-twenties and initially wanted to study both Psychology and World Religions, with some idea of marrying the two to form a world view I could live with. That lasted one semester, because the one art class I took that first term punched me in the gut and showed me where I really ought to be (whether I liked it or not).
It wasn’t full steam ahead from there. After graduating with my Fine Arts degree I moved back to BC from Québec with my husband-to-be, got pregnant, and launched into my years-long struggle to fulfill the “promise” I’d shown at University (I’d even had one instructor tell me I could be “the next big female Canadian artist”, which is a ridiculous thing to say to a student). LONG STORY! I had no clue how to translate my successes at school into real life action. More importantly, my brain was a breeding ground for every self-defeating mental message you can imagine. Coming to understand and address disabling patterns I’d developed as a child helped me to sneak in through the back door and kick those tendencies to the curb. But that—eep!—took a long time.
Part of that process, when my daughter was little, was reading The Artist’s Way and following its advice on nurturing and providing fuel for “the artist within”. I couldn’t stomach a lot of the language in the book: take myself on an “artist’s date”? Pleeeze. If nothing else however, I must have got the message that if I didn’t FEED THAT MONSTER—the part of me that was an artist—it wasn’t going to live. What you focus on grows in strength, but “set and setting”—your mindset and your circumstances—play a large role as well. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep trying.
There were a number of thwarted efforts and false starts before things started to fall into place for me. And even then, it wasn’t a linear path, a steady ascension from low to high. It’s life after all—it’s messy and it’s circular it’s always throwing large rocks in your way. One of the biggest factors that makes it easier for me nowadays is that I simply care less. I care less about what people think, and I care less about making “perfect” art. It’s just not possible anyway, as it turns out. I also have far more time and freed-up mental space these days, so—focus comes more easily.
Flash forward. There’ll be an exhibit for Life’s Work—my visual memoir about my mother’s Lewy Body dementia—at the Victoria Arts Council in June 2022. I’m continuing to produce new artwork for that, though I have nothing I can show you at the moment (I’m grappling with a triptych on paper that’s staring me down as I write). I’m concentrating mostly on the writing aspect of what will be Life’s Work, the graphic memoir. There have been some imposter syndrome feelings as I don’t “identify as a writer”—thankfully, those feelings have been sporadic and fleeting. Mostly I’ve felt in awe of the fact that I appear to be writing a book—albeit a graphic memoir— and it reminds me that anything is possible in this life, the same way finally getting up and singing in public did when I was forty-two. Now I’m the 61-year old poster child for the maxim it’s never too late. It never is—unless you make it so, in your persnickity mind.
When it came time to focus in earnest on the writing for Life’s Work, I wanted to work out the structure and the flow of the book with the actual turning of pages, and the ability to move those pages around (as opposed to sticky-notes on the wall, which I had tried). But I didn’t want to use a clunky 3-ring binder that makes that loud THWACK sound every time you close the rings. I found the Blueline MiracleBind Notebook, and it’s been perfect (apart from the fact that it doesn’t hold enough paper, so I’m using two). Inspired by Lynda Barry’s method of writing Cruddy that I wrote about last month, I’ve written the entire thing out with brush-pen, and all new writing has been done that way, too (when it comes to executing the final art and writing for the book, I’ll be using brush and bottled ink).
I may not be breaking the interwebs with my work and my influencing at this point, but I’ve come to a place where I feel a fortifying and divine convergence of art and writing that brings me a satisfaction I haven’t experienced before. It feels like I’m doing what I should be doing, finally. I think maybe I can die happy—though not yet, not yet.
Addendum: This post was written under the influence of some low-key pandemic-y anxiety levels. Talk about focus: hoo-boy did I find that hard to do here. The confluence of all the raging factors of the day upon a person’s tiny mind can be debilitating at times. All I can do is try, try again.
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Thanks for this B.A.! Although not a writer myself, I feel encouraged to add the odd line here and there with my visual art after reading this. It'll be a good chance to practice calligraphy too :)
Just what I needed to read. Thank you.