With these words, I launch a blog, an endeavor which may seem hopelessly old-fashioned these days. It’s not even a new idea for me, personally. I’ve actually started three before this one, and thought about a couple of others. None of them lasted very long, and they weren’t very interesting, anyway.
Why am I telling you this? What kind of confidence am I hoping to inspire in you, by telling you about my past failures? Well, “begin as you mean to go on”, they say1. So, that’s a little hint as to what to expect from my writing in this space.
Historically, I’ve been very afraid of admitting my failures, even to myself. Then my failures got REALLY LOUD for a while there, so I had to admit them to anyone who looked my way. And an interesting thing happened: I got happier. I started learning more and doing more interesting things. I started having deeper relationships with everyone in my life. I also realized that the most interesting people I met were open about their own mistakes and failures, so I was in good company.
Over that same period, I’ve learned a lot of other things about how to nurture a creative spark, about how to build a better relationship with my own work, about how to channel both discipline and joy. I’m STILL learning about all those things, and that’s another hint about what to expect here.
I’ve held a lot of different jobs in my life and had a lot of different adventures. Central to pretty much all of them is the truth that the world isn’t very kind to artists these days. (Has it ever been?) I want to join and amplify a conversation about how artists can take care of themselves and their work when there aren’t a lot of structures in place to help with that.
I want to talk about self-care and how to avoid burnout. I want to talk about how to work authentically and honestly in the world.
I want invite artists to talk about their idea seeds: where they get them, how they nurture them and how they eventually harvest those ideas as completed projects. I also want to ask artists how they take care of themselves when things aren’t going so well.
I don’t want to promise one-size-fits-all advice, because I don’t think it exists. But I do want to collect a lot of different ideas, in formats that are hopefully bite-sized enough that you can read them, chew on them for a bit, and then decide whether they’re useful to you, specifically. I’m no longer hinting: that’s what I’m up to here.
I hope you’ll join me.
- Actually, as Charles Haddon Spurgeon said.