Dear Stuck: What Are We So Afraid Of?

On ode to ordinariness + the one thing that will close the gap between the work we make & the work we love

Dear Jeannine,

I’m bound up and paralyzed when it comes to my creative life. I know you can’t solve it for me, but if you have any insight, I’d be grateful. The fact is, I know I’m a creative person. I always have been. I come from a very creative family. I played two instruments in high school and worked in art galleries for a long time when I was younger. I draw and paint and build things with wood. I even bake. But when it comes to taking the next step with my creative practice—finishing essays or stories and submitting them for publication—I freeze. I just can’t seem to make myself do it.

I know you’ll probably say something about fear, like fear of rejection, and I’m sure you’ll be right. But, honestly, I already know that participating in the creative community involves some rejection. I watched that up close in the galleries. So I get it, and although rejection is a bummer, it’s not the end of the world. It doesn’t scare me all that much. In other words, think I could handle the rejection.

So, what on earth could I be so afraid of?

Signed,
Stuck

Dear Stuck,

I’m so glad you wrote. I’ve been thinking about your question for a long time, actually, since long before I read your note. That’s because someone quite close to me is in this exact same predicament—a kind of creative paralysis that keeps him from the full expression of his creative aspirations, which, meanwhile, gnaw at him and cause him considerable misery. Not because he’s ignoring his creative desires, but, rather, because he’s keenly aware of them but unable to move forward toward their manifestation.

Why do we do this?

Why do we deny our creative impulses, even when we know it diminishes the quality and even the meaning of our lives? I think often of what Mary Oliver said about this phenomenon:

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

But I am not trying to make you feel worse about all this!

To the contrary, I want you to feel not only a little better, but also more empowered about stepping away from this paralysis and into the wild unknown of creative discovery and growth that is your birthright. I want you to be so close up to the world through your words that the sheer enormity of its beauty and despair raises the hairs on your arms and makes you certain you’ll never again lose hold, not completely, anyway, of your creative self again.

And although I can’t know for certain what’s getting in the way of your creative practice, I can share what helped me get out of my own way about ten years ago, when I first started on the path away from contract writing and toward literary writing—stories and creative essays and a memoir and now my novel, all of which represent the kind of artistic writing I wanted to be doing all along, but wasn’t.

What got me there?

Well, the first jolt was Mary Ann, a woman with stage 4 breast cancer who I met in 2013 at a wrting retreat I was leading on Stout’s Island, an idyllic little paradise in Wisconsin. Mary Ann catalyzed me to start taking my creative writing more seriously. She simply moved me, and when she died just a few short months later, well, that moved me too. I’ve spoken and written about that experience a number of times, including in this Hippocampus interview.

But there was something else, something far more subtle, that imbued me with the clarity and courage I needed to start making my own art. And it happened at AWP in Minneapolis in 2015.

It was the first AWP I had ever attended, and I had not yet submitted or published any literary work. In fact, I only registered for and attended AWP that year because I was about to start my MFA program at Vermont College of Arts later that summer—and, being that I live in Minneapolis and AWP was in Minneapolis that year, I didn’t need to deal with air travel or hotels or most of the other logistics that make AWP cost prohibitive and overwhelming.

What I discovered that April—I was forty-six years old that year, by the way—was that I was ordinary, would probably always be ordinary, and that it was okay to be ordinary.

That’s it. That was my big epiphany.

And it was one of the most creatively freeing moments of my life. Because it turned out that one of the strangleholds on my creative force until then was the fear—no, terror—that if I made literary work, it wouldn’t be brilliant. It wouldn’t be extraordinary. It wouldn’t be important. It wouldn’t be lastingly acclaimed or significant. In other words, it wouldn’t matter.

But wandering the Minneapolis convention center in the company of 15,000 other writers that spring helped me realize, with sudden certainty—a literal jolt—that the vast majority of successful working writers are just like me, making a perfectly ordinary life of words.

And what I simultaneously realized is how it is that perfectly ordinary lives of words are also wholly extraordinary.

That’s the paradox: to claim the right to be creative, to make work and send it out (whether to be rejected or accepted, both are scary), and to make visible to the whole entire world your “call to creative work,” which is usually kept hidden in a very tender and vulnerable spot deep in the recesses of your heart, is revolutionary and, therefore, extraordinary, no matter what that work ultimately becomes or does not become in terms of its so-called importance.

Put another way, I discovered, while drifting dazed, confused, and inspired through that sprawling, fluorescent conference, that an “ordinary” writing life was anything but, and that even though most of the these midlist authors and MFA students in that convention center would likely never achieve the acclaim of the keynote speaker or even the slender swath of more famous panelists, they were doing something just as urgent, if not more so, which was to show up for their own “creative power restive and uprising,” and give it “power and time.”

That, I decided then and there, was the beginning and end of it: whatever else happens—how good our work is, how important it is, how impactful and recognized it becomes—is mostly out of our hands.

Oh, sure, we have some control. The more seriously and regularly we show up for our creative practice, the better the art will become.  We will gradually close the gap between the art we love and the art we make. When I coach writers who struggle to finish things, one of the first things I tell them is that it hurts to finish work—sometimes a lot. I’ve written about that at some length, with strategies to get endure it, here, and spoken about it here.

But nothing I can say or do can wholly relieve the pain of finishing work. Because when we finish, we’re acknowledging, at least to some extent, that this is the very best work we can make at this time. It’s the top of our game. And that requires us to also acknowledge the gap between what we’d imagined when we began, and the reality of what we were actually able to produce.

It’s mournful, really, to finish something. It’s an act of surrender to our own limitations. When we get to the metaphorical “the end” at the bottom of the page, we’re forced to accept everything that this particular essay, story, poem, or book will never be. If that doesn’t hurt a little, well, then I have to wonder if the thing was art in the first place? Because, generally speaking, art leaves an ache.

That’s just the way it is.

As for the gap between art we love and art we are capable of making, Ira Glass speaks about closing this gap so beautifully, about how long it takes before our work “gets that special thing” that we want it to have. And his answer is about doing a lot of work, creating a huge volume of work, until the work we make is as good as our ambitions. I love and believe what Ira Glass says on this.

And I also think that it only partially matters that our work improves. Because what really changes, as we give time and attention to our creative power, is us.

We change.

We become a far realer and more alive version of ourselves as we heal the division in our consciousness that has kept us from our creative work in the first place. We become fully human as we make peace with the inevitable disappointment of the creative process, while celebrating its inherent joys. We become stronger as we endure that disappointment, along with the pain of rejection, criticism, and dismissal, all of which are real. But we also become braver, softer, and more resilient as we continue making work, engaging with the creative unknown, taking risks, and exposing our tenderest underbellies.

So, my hope for you, “Stuck,” is that ultimately you might be able to make peace not only with the inevitably of rejection—which it sounds as if you have already done—but also with the near certainty of falling short of your own aspirations, and of never making anything that will “matter” in the long arc of history. Such peace will free you not only to begin, but also, ultimately, to make more inventive and exciting work. Work that is strange and feral and full of possibility. Work that, ironically, will have a better chance of standing out as extraordinary than it would without this inward calm acceptance of ordinariness.

Love,

Jeannine

If you or someone you know is walking the long path back to yourself after a painful childhood, then my memoir, The Part That Burns, might help light your way.