I just got off the phone with my therapist. She's a new therapist (to me). This is only our second session. But I feel that she is a good one.
A good therapist is one who listens, then asks good questions, then listens again. A good therapist is one who, in the last three minutes of your session, recommends a lengthy interview with Laurie Anderson published in the New York Times today. Just seven hours ago, according to their website.
In our conversation today we brushed up against the idea of creativity and purpose. How the identity of the artist is lost or subsumed in corporate work. I'm speaking loftily of "the artist," but I mean to say "me."
I've noticed that in times of feeling particularly foul ("down in the mouth" as I called it today, for some reason), I have been able to kick-start myself out of the doldrums by setting myself a concerted daily creative task. This time, it's writing here, but last year it was my "Daily Practice" styling and photography project.
The creative project must be specific, repeatable, and not too time intensive. It also must require some daily output. Progress is imperative. I said to my therapist, this way of working feels like flooring the accelerator out of despair, and with every daily output I feel gratified and reminded of "my purpose."
I've been circling the idea of purpose for a while now. In past months, I've written long journal entries about what I feel the purpose of my life is, what my orientation on work and success should be, how I want a job to fit into or support my life. As I wrote in one such entry, my personal creative work "gives me a stronger sense of self and can make the world feel expansive and rich with creative inputs and catalysts. It feels like a way to connect with people and the world."
This is how I want to pursue my purpose: I want to engage in multi-sensory and multi-disciplinary creative outputs. I want to steadily, even quietly, work to continue to read, learn, process, and produce (much as I have done this afternoon). That's why Laurie Anderson is sitting above this as you read, in her studio in 1980. Her posture, the intensity of her gaze, the cubby-like space with all her things on the table... I recognize something in this: the self-motivated, absorptive way of focusing that comes from being engrossed in work of one's own creation.
Anderson's synth setup reminds me of my childhood desk. For my seventh birthday, my uncle built a simple wooden desk into the left side of the closet in my bedroom. The desk was painted bottle green, and I adorned it and the walls with my things. My pens, neatly displayed in a tin tea canister. A stack of colored square note sheets. A black metal desk lamp that, in the winter evenings, would be the only light in the back of the house as the sun set and the family gathered in the kitchen for dinner.
As the eldest of three, I remember being very self-occupied as a child. I spent a lot of time in my room with my door closed doing my own thing: reading, dressing up, hatching plans. Maybe that's why my personal work feels more natural and more important to me than my job. Perhaps, in all my creative pursuits, I am returning to my childhood bedroom with the door closed, wrapped up in my own thoughts and inventions.
Seeing Anderson in her studio, I feel drawn to the same thing that struck me from the interview with Sally Rooney. The idea of cozy, self-sustained work. A place to put my energy that feels focused, ordained by an inner compass.
In a dream at the end of August, I dreamt of playing in an orchestra again, of sharing my poems with an editor, of dancing and singing and creating a short film. After waking up, I wrote:
I felt buoyant & stimulated. So many avenues for the same light to pour out from. A confirmation that all these tools and channels indicated I was doing what I was supposed to — making, effusing, performing: ART, ART, ART.
No comments:
Post a Comment