Hiya!
I spent a lot of this year moaning that I quit art school when I was 20 because I didn't think I could make money as an artist and then became a broke-ass writer anyway.
A recent oil painting inspired by Donald Elder.
What precipitated this lament was doing the Artist's Way, which for the uninitiated is a kind of woo-woo book that takes you on a 12-week (or in my case, 6-month) journey that attempts to unblock your inner artist by challenging deeply ingrained fear, self-doubt, societal pressure, and beliefs about who’s allowed to be creative.
The two main tenets are Morning Pages, where you dump whatever nonsense is swirling in your head across three journal pages, and Artist's Dates, where you do something by yourself for like an hour a week that inspires you, like watching YouTube watercolor tutorials or going to a museum or whatever. There are also essays to read and other reflective tasks to choose from, like identifying your favorite foods from when you were a kid and then eating one of those foods (mozzarella sticks over here).
Another one!
The Artist's Way, combined with moving and now living eight minutes away from an art school, got me from barely doing any art at all to drawing and painting almost every week for at least three hours and regularly ruminating on what could’ve been if I had spent that last 15 years developing my art skills instead of building a writing/editing/content career.
And then I stumbled on this Reddit thread (ignore the r/adhdwomen subreddit for now THAT’S FOR ANOTHER NEWSLETTER) about the idiom “Jack of all trades, master of none.” OP discovered that the complete phrase is actually "Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than master of one,” which blew her mind, and subsequently my mind, because she, like me, has been using the first part of the phrase to be self-effacing about her cornucopia of interests and feel bad about herself for not putting in the time to get really good at one specific thing.
And I realized that so much of my annoyance at letting my art skills atrophy is rooted in feeling like the only way to be successful (rich and/or celebrated and/or meaningfully impactful) at anything is to master it wholesale at the expense of all other interests/hobbies/career paths, and now I’ll never be able to “catch up,” whatever that even means.
This messaging is deep in my bones for various reasons (shakes fist at society!!), and my definition of success changes quarterly, so that’s also not helping things. But the reality is that my writing work is better when I’m doing art, and though I don’t know this to be true, I can assume, given the way my brain works, that doing art full-time for money would degrade the joy I find in it. As of today, I'm mostly just curious about what I can do with the next 15, 20, 30 years now that I’m actively paying attention to both.
Another one!!
I'm generally not a big Huberman girly, but I do find his dulcet tones and deeply boring scientific jargon an excellent sleep aid. I was listening to a recent meandering conversation with Martha Beck (which spends a funny amount of time on Huberman’s dating troubles), and a particular section caught my ear.
Around 2:19 (right after the story of the golden retriever), Beck talks about this idea of staying within your integrity, i.e., doing what you want to do without fear of what others think, and about how when people live from their joy, they often find that they can channel that into income.
She also talks, and I’m paraphrasing here, about our weird economy where you’re expected to get a job, go to a place you don’t really like, and receive an allowance. She argues that this system is based on a factory work framework that has only existed since the Industrial Revolution, which is at odds with how people lived for hundreds of thousands of years before that — hunting, fishing, gardening, woodworking, making music, telling stories, and generally spending their days doing what we now consider hobbies.
And another one!!!
I don't actually know how true that is, as people were doing terrible jobs for money well before the Industrial Revolution, methinks, but I get where she’s going: that we've mostly sidelined the fun stuff that we’re naturally inclined to do. What I do feel to be true is her assertion that a lot of us have a mindset that says, “If I do things that bring me joy like a hobby does, I’m being weird, and it won’t work,” which I take to mean “it won’t generate income.”
Obviously, not all hobbies, no matter how diligently pursued, will turn into mad cheddar, but the point, I guess, is to follow the joy where and when you can, and if that means you end up cross-training your primary creative skill and are only sorta good at a lot of things, but you’re having a good time, your work will probably be better and your life, too.
Thanks for reading, thanks for all the projects this year, and thanks for staying connected!
Happy holidays!
Carrie <333333333333333
(Originally sent via newsletter December 20, 2024)