Vulnerability and risk and failure
Oh, hi friends!
I’m trying to think of the last time I was vulnerable that really, truly failed.
I’m coming up short?
Certainly there have been many things that haven’t worked. Plays where no one laughed, cringe-inducing conversations, stories no one read, etc. And certainly at the time I wished to crawl into a dark hole and be swallowed up by the Earth's magma, but...
None of those feel like failures. They feel like necessary exposures. Nudges in the right direction.
Sometimes I think it’s funny—not funny ha-ha, exactly—that you almost always know what you should do, or should say.
So why don’t you do or say it?
Fear, yes. Of rejection, of dismissal, of looking silly or stupid. Of being ignored.
But to risk being vulnerable (like the great Brene Brown preaches!) is to risk connecting with other people in a real way. Or to risk and invite criticism. Or to risk and find that…nothing happens.
Either way, you’ve risked. You’ve moved. You’ve learned. You’ve grown. You’ve nudged. But you’ll never truly fail.
Does Having a Day Job Mean Making Better Art?
"But then there is another category of artists-with-jobs: people whose two professions play off each other in unexpected ways. For these creators, a trade isn’t just about paying the bills; it’s something that grounds them in reality.
In 2017, a day job might perform the same replenishing ministries as sleep or a long run: relieving creative angst, restoring the artist to her body and to the texture of immediate experience. But this break is also fieldwork. For those who want to mine daily life for their art, a second job becomes an umbilical cord fastened to something vast and breathing. The alternate gig that lifts you out of your process also supplies fodder for when that process resumes. Lost time is regained as range and perspective, the artist acquiring yet one more mode of inhabiting the world.”
I think a lot about returning to a day job and all the benefits it can provide, but nothing has ever made me think about it—and the act of “losing time” but regaining it with a new perspective—in quite this way. WHO'S HIRING?!?! (h/t Aunt Gina)
Apparently, this song was on Grey’s Anatomy, but Spotify recommended it because it knows I looove anthemic word repetition. Aloe Blacc’s “Make Way” is my new morning/running/making coffee jam. And here it is on Spotify.
"Make way for me. Make way for me. You know I'm gonna be...leg-en-dar-y."
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara