Beauty is embarrassing
I don’t want to motivate myself off the couch but instead potentially compel myself of the ouch and onto my back deck and open my laptop and keep writing. There is such an eye-rolly persona I feel wrap myself around me each time I show up online to say “I’m working on my book”. But I remind myself I am not the one dimensional artists projected onto a screen and that beauty and art and creation is inherently embarrassing and I was never great at staying cool.
Writing takes place while sitting on the couch for long stretches of time. Staring into the abyss not even waiting to have an idea. It happens on the walks home and sitting in baths longer than your pruney toes advise. Art doesn’t happen at our canvas or in our tarot decks but in the moments we’re staying open to the creative conduit.
We default to “need more time” but I think if I were to have more time granted in my day I would still just scroll my phone the same percentage of the day. Avoiding the work we want to make because it might be to vulnerable to go there. I ask “am I the drama” each time there is a new pillar placed in my way. Or potentially a pillar I placed there on purpose. A spot to avoid the embaressment of a blank page.
Showing up to say “hey this is what I want and here is how I am doing it” is extremely uncool and as the internet loves to tell us – cringey. So we keep it opened ended, never hitting the goal because the goal can’t me met or measured. Shame can’t catch me if I don’t give it legs.
The task for asking myself to just write 1000 words a day is both linear and abstract. What 1000 words will they be? How much time will it take? And who will I be after showing up to my craft? But I also know that hiding behind work and clients and inherent and the uncoolness of never talking about your art isn’t a timeline or reality I want to be in.
So I get ready to get embarrassed.
FINDINGS 🗺️
Beauty is embarrassing and one of my fav docs about being an artist and human
More rambling on time from the couch on the clock app
Very jazzed for Gabrielle Ione Hickmon’s masterclass on Applying For Fellowships & Residencies
- book tour that i think it BRILLO
The beautiful spark I feel each time someone drops a couple bucks to support the art I am writing here ✨ You can become a paid subscriber here ✨
the next essays for paid subbies (that I didn’t think I was gonna put out this week but its very weird and very unpolished but I am loving how weird and unpolished it is) 👇
People talk about their gut feelings but no one ever wants to talk about the chronic IBS that comes with gut feelings. The time missed having sex, parties, drinks, dinners, life because we were all too busy on the toilet.
It doesn’t feel like the internet if I am not talking about whatever fluid has just left my body. We’re all down with vulnerability until the vulnerability is so confronting there is a physicality behind it. The spill over of emotions is raw and vulnerable, to be applauded on televisions. But if we clog the toilet at our friends birthday party we’re “responsibly for the damage”. Everyone wants to talk about intuition until intuition is keeping your friends from hooking up with the bar tender while you’re googling “is tequila low-fod map” in the bathroom stalls and reapplying lip liner in a way that works to detract from your bloated stomach making its way out of your now unbuttoned ultra high rise jeans you got your cousin to buy for you with her urban outfitters employee discount. You wonder why pregnant women have the monopoly on belly rubbing in public and vow to change that, and if no good ideas are crafted after 2am in a bar with an empty dance floor then why did we just get here.