Vulnerability

I’ve written about five different versions of this opening. I started with a story that I ended up cutting out because it was only tangentially related to my topic, but hey, it got me warmed up, so thanks for that, Shitty First Draft! Then I went off on a different tangent a couple of times trying to make similar points but with even more of the life story aspects sanded off, which of course made it boring and disconnected and felt less like vulnerability and more like I was trying to hide.

So now we are here at this version. And in this version, what I most want to say is that talking about vulnerability is hard. Writing this post for serious has had me feeling kinda desperate and wondering if I should even launch it into the world at all. Being without my jokes is difficult because, if I’m not making you laugh, then why are you even still here? But being vulnerable with our creative life is what makes our work real and relatable. That vulnerability is what I’m considering today.

The tender parts

When I make art I am putting some of the deepest parts of me into that work. Is it always visible in the finished piece? No, I don’t think so, but there’s still a lot of me in there. I have a sense of peeling back my skin and showing what’s underneath when I put it out in public. Practicing this kind of vulnerability is something I’ve been working on for a long time. There are things that I don’t show on the internet. There are things that are too personal to put out there. Maybe someday. Maybe not. But every time I put anything out there, it’s a reminder that this is a process to practice for a lifetime.

This quote came across my timeline the other day:

Art is when a human tells another human what it is to be human.

Adrian Elmer

In an upcoming artist interview, my friend Aynslee sums up her creative practice so well: “It shows me how much love and hope exists in the world. I see creativity as an act of hope. It is easy to get lost in worry about my own troubles and the troubles of the world. But when I create, a light comes on, a warmth that leads me out of the worry. When I create, I am hoping to put something in the world that wasn’t there before or to see/understand something that I didn’t see or understand before. I am hoping both to help myself and to help those around me. My creative practice has led me to the most meaningful relationships. In my experience, creativity brings out the care in people: the care for making meaning, the care for community. It has shown me how much people do appreciate art and how it can make shared spaces and the human spirit come alive in ways that it otherwise wouldn’t.”

Let me tell you, I cried when I read what she wrote. Because 1) she articulated perfectly in one paragraph what I’ve been trying to sum up with this whole entire blog, and 2) this is the gauzy, intangible cloud of creating, attempting to connect through that creation with others and also explain it with words that my head lives in pretty much all the time.

We artists are all just telling our stories and hoping that what you see in what we make resonates in the space between us.

When I’m not making art I’m writing

Making art has been my preferred method of coping forever. But I wanted to be a poet as a teen. (I’ll take “What profession pays even less than visual artist?” for $1.20, Alex.) I wrote incessantly from about age 13 until my mid-twenties when I was working a 60-hour-a-week job that had an hour-a-day commute. I worked so much at that job that there wasn’t much of anything to write about because all I did was eat, commute, work, and sleep, so I stopped writing. While I was in college, though, I took the creative writing class so many times that I think I got an English minor on that alone.

It’s taken me a long time to understand that writing and making art are so completely bound up together that I can’t separate them. I thought for a long time I had to choose. Write or make art. Now I know that for me, they just go together. I think that’s why there are so often words and writing in my visual art. It’s why I work in books so much. It’s why I blog about my art practice. I always have to be making something, and if I can’t make visual art, then I’ll make something with words.

Do the vulnerability skills transfer?

I’m not great with my own vulnerability in most aspects of my life except my visual art. I’ve spent a lot of hours learning to ignore that critic who lives in my head telling me that what I make is crap. I feel like that should be a training ground for life. Art making teaches all sorts of lessons if I will only get out of the way and let it. Every time I pick up an instrument and put it to paper, I am confronted with my own frailty and humanity. My own fear and longings. My own shortcomings and delights.

But even as I write this, I realize how uncomfortable it is to write about this vulnerability. The urge to joke is strong. To lighten up the load with a laugh. Pull apart some of the angst and let laughter dissolve it like so much cotton candy in the rain.

I’m practicing taking what I know from my art practice and applying it to other aspects of my life. It’s slow going, though. Lemme tell you, if this is growth mindset, it’s HARD.

Journaling helps

I’ve been a part of an online journaling community for a few years now. I credit that group for allowing me the space to explore my own vulnerability in a way that isn’t art making. My go-to defense is to make a self-deprecating joke so we can all laugh at some common human foible. If people are laughing with me, then the hard parts don’t seem so hard. I don’t have to be so vulnerable if I coat the hard stuff in a joke. But I’m trying to learn to just sit with the hard stuff as I write it, and voice that as the reality it is and not be jokey with it. Let’s face it, sometimes life just gives us really hard stuff, and there’s just no good way to sugarcoat it.

So, yes, writing about my vulnerabilities is good practice for life. Being intentional about that and breathing through it. Not making the joke. Just being wide open.

Try over and over

I have a note stuck to my computer where I can see it every day. “I have the capacity to try over and over. I can remake what I am given into what I need.” This is a personal mantra I developed in a workshop I attended a few years ago. My mentality has always been, “Get it right the first time or you’ve failed.” Allowing myself the room to try over and over is a skill I’ve had to develop over time.

This statement represents so much vulnerability for me because it allows for my humanness. I have messed up. I mess up. I will mess up again. But I also get to try over and over to make it better. That really is just like art, where I make a mess ALL THE TIME. I figure out how to fix the mess. Try again and again. Cut it up and reshape it. Maybe, if I’m lucky, turn it into something beautiful.

What about you? Where are you practicing vulnerability? Catch up with me on socials, email me, or go old school and leave a comment on this post to be immortalized for all of time.

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