what stops us from making our art
is it just life, cycles of pause, or something else entirely?
There is a deep ache we feel when we want to make something but the practice is out of reach for us. Maybe we feel there isn’t enough time, we’re less connected to the material, or we have muted our connection with an embodied practice1. Maybe our inner critic has showed up and is on a rampage of ruthless feedback we didn’t ask for. It could be that our job or the state of the world is making us feel so depleted that there is little energy left for more work.
No matter where you are at, I want to sit in solidarity with you if you aren’t making the art you’d like to be making right now it sucks to feel stuck.
A lot of the advice I have come across around this sounds like:
“yeah, life gets in the way of art. But you’ll come back to it, you just have to start!”
It has become so clear to me this advice isn’t helpful. How do we even start when we feel like there is no way for us to have any time to do our work?
If you went to art school or have just taken an art class at any point in adulthood, the structure of a syllabus or the accountability of an instructor or classmates keeps us going. Classes create a structure. We know we have time set aside on a specific day to do that work, or learn a new technique. It’s scheduled, planned for, so we do it. In classes, we also have people going through the experience with us so we feel less alone. Community builds persistence beyond self-improvement or self-discipline. It makes learning a shared practice where we can adapt together.
Sharing with a supportive community of fellow artists will always feel better than trying to post as performance. This is why a lot of folks on my Discord Server really enjoy that the expectation is simply to show up, show anything you’ve done, and encourage others without any stats getting in our way. It’s about reciprocity not prestige.
In the era of short form video2, learning often leads you down a rabbit hole alone to influence you to just focus on self-improvement. The solution is you becoming “that girl” or “monk mode” or whatever the non-binary equivalent of those are… goblin mode? Whatever they call it, there’s yet another rebrand of just getting “consistent3” and doing challenges.
What I don’t think a lot of folks realize is that the shape of these suggestions often mimic the toxic aspects of workout and grind culture. It’s all about you. “Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps” nonsense. Artists build movements and scenes for a reason, none of us are making in a vacuum.
After recognizing we are stuck we tend to shift towards action in the form of:
“I’ll do a 100 heads challenge4” or
“I’ll do every day of Inktober5” or
“I’ll make a mid-year resolution to work on my craft three times a week by getting up 90 minutes early every morning” or
“I’m going to spend the next twelve weeks doing The Artists’ Way6”
Two to three weeks in, something comes up. The cycle repeats.
In every single one of these challenge scenarios, we set ourselves up for a few potential disasters.
First, we put a big expectation on ourselves that we have to do the thing in the specific way we said we would. And because of that, we cannot let life get in the way.
Erm, ok. Life always gets in the way. Maybe things work out for a little while, but then stuff happens. These expectations always open me up to to shame and self doubt. So, instead of focusing on the imaginative work I want to be doing, I’m shaming myself, and not making anything. This particular loop sucks.
Next, we get completely overwhelmed. Sometimes the ideas we create for ourselves are too ambitious and not shaped accordingly to our lives and minds. Maybe it is my particular brain, but doing the same thing the same way every single day just doesn’t work.
I can have a routine or repeatable versions of something, but I need adaptations. I need things to be flexible instead of rigid, supportive of my varied energy levels. Tasks that take into account the fact that I can’t always work at my desk or in my studio. Sometimes the work has to happen outside, on a walk, or after a good day of rest.
Finally, we find ourselves attempting to do this work alone, making it all about our individual capacity and abilities. Things like 100 heads or 75 hard7 are developed for neurotypical brains, for people with adequate resources to always make time, and for folks with non-varied energy levels.
I always notice how these “consistent” creators performing these “challenges” don’t have kids or family care needs. They also often have unspoken invisible labor8 supporting them.
The these scenarios don’t allow us to tap into real persistence. Instead we are focused on the myth of consistency. We must stop trying to live our lives the way someone else is performing theirs on the internet. Forgetting entirely how much editing is involved. Not considering the support structures those folks can rely on. But we can build these support structures or join communities to access them.
Let’s look at some sage wisdom from Ursula K. Le Guin on this:
“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.
Human beings have always joined groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be…”
- The Operating Instructions by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Our responsibility to our communities keeps us going and inspired by others.
We want to check in, and through that impulse to connect we are able to see how to support both ourselves and each other. When I am uninspired or at capacity, I check in with my community seeing what they are making and often feel energized to imagine what is possible or next for me.
In community we learn to adapt and lean on one another. When we see each other’s work, we remember what is possible. When we share our struggles, we come up with solutions together.
In the Emergent Classroom over on Patreon we have been reading the Le Guin essay I pulled that quote from, thinking about imagination, and sharing what our practices need. Our conversations revealed that we need a gentle and adaptive system that we build with one another to guide our work. Finding ways to gently manage our expectations and gentle goals while also realizing how our resources could be tapped is key. We need to share and adapt with community and help one another carry out a plan that best supports our needs.
Simple things like getting a kid or pet sitter, having a neighbor drive your kid to school, asking a friend to cook dinner, inviting someone to help us instead of being stubborn9, actually taking those “mental health days” the company you work for said they wanted to normalize in 2020. All of these are different versions of remembering our craft is connected to one another. Other people in our lives help make time for art and imagination possible.
So much of our culture thinks about productivity and output as the thing everyone should focus their attention on. I think that the maintenance labor is the most important part. The slow act of gardening our ideas or building a system that works for our brain and life instead of someone else’s.
Taking a look at what truly works, and what doesn’t. Gently checking in with ourselves and each other to make sure the system or practice we are building is actually working. We rely on each other to make it stick. In this maintenance labor, we have to give ourselves grace by regularly checking in with and adapting our systems to best fit our needs.
What works for you this week, may not work for you the next. That is ok! We must begin to see things not working as planned or falling out of practice as helpful and crucial information rather than personal failings. These are invitations for adaptation and building a better system that supports you.
In the Emergent Classroom last week, I shared a demo on how to build a gentle persistence system that takes into account everything I discussed here: your needs, your life, your goals, where you are truly at, and walks you through how to adjust and simplify to energy and realistic expectations. You can snag the demo on its own for $29, but I ask that you do it with at least one accountability buddy!
If you need one, you should join us, it’s $19 a month! Our first live session is happening this Sunday May 24th at 1:30 PM PST where we will be discussing the systems we’ve created and adaptations together.
Want to work with me 1-on-1 instead? I just added 30 minute craft tutoring sessions to my booking page for just $40.
But wait, what about the inner critics part of it all?!
Our inner critics are the main reason why I get knocked off of my practices, and time in community tends to heal them. I made a video version the essay I wrote last month about how to defeat them here. If you choose to watch the video, leave a comment, hype it if you love it, or, even better — share it with someone! These small things help small artists like me so much!
Until next time, stay creative and find your own ways to persistently bloom.
-Mel
If you liked this post, consider reading more:
remember, embodiment with a practice is not always a given. even the old metaphor “it’s like riding a bike” doesn’t actually hold… we have to slowly and gently get into the practice again. I always think about this quote from Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown “it takes 300 repetitions to build muscle memory and 3000 repetitions for embodiment.” If we haven’t practiced in years, we may still have the muscle memory, but gently showing up to practice gets us back into embodiment.
the reason I quit Instagram and Tiktok and will never have them on my phone again is that short-form content will cause me to spiral, question everything, go down a binge rabbithole of someone’s ideas, and then completely memory-hole the entire experience only to get caught in it again shortly after. I’m too addicted to ever go back and watch a reel or a short.
I have gone on about this many times! The myth of consistency does not help artists…
this is a common challenge in drawing circles, if you want to get good at drawing people. I don’t think this challenge is pointless, but doing it without community, a tutor, or supportive peers means you will likely stop midway through.
Inktober is a prompt-based drawing challenge for humans usually completed by drawing and posting every day in the month of October. It’s one of many challenges on social media.
y’all know my thoughts on this book. I have never made it past week six.
I hate challenges like this that are so focused on consistency and performance. It’s like turning something that should bring your body and brain pleasure… yeah exercise should feel like that… into something that is rigid and shaming. 75 hard requires you start over every time you fall off and I’m sorry but no thank you.
in the form of a wife or partner or service cooking them meals, cleaning, doing childcare, and maintenance work.
hello, this is my biggest weakness ouch.
Wow! Thank you for this. You have described the hustle/grind culture individual accomplishment goal setting very clearly. I have struggled with the online culture of challenges and tutorials and have felt the shame of not living up to some arbitrary standards of creativity. Ugh. Thank you for helping me feel less alone!
“It’s about reciprocity not prestige.” Community is key!
Love how you use collage, it's so cool seeing tactile stuff in an increasingly flat, digital world. Excited to follow along for more!