Digging right in…
Throughout the past decade or so (since I began a transition out of institutional religion), I’ve found great satisfaction in dismantling and rebuilding my own personal morality, values, and ethics piece by piece – keeping only what feels deeply meaningful and true.
I’ve always been decisive, so this process has mostly felt fairly smooth, if often accompanied by grief for the decades spent ignoring my intuition in the name of obedience.
When I began preparing for this essay, I planned to focus on one of my favorite self-imposed values, loving without fear.
Of course, there is always fear. What I mean is I’ve believed that fear mustn’t alter the path or actions love moves me toward. In matters of love, I’ve been determined not to let fear into the decision-making process.
Alas, one major reason this essay is so late is that this particular value has been seriously rattled in the past few months, leaving me existentially unmoored, and deeply, deeply confused about so many things.
While I remain confused, I’ve harnessed enough clarity to see another [adjacent] pathway through my notes from this lovely batch of Artifice episodes. Indeed, I’ve realized I can hit the nail right on the head and write about searching for, discovering, and living through carefully chosen values.
My October guests all shared gentle wisdom on this topic.
It was an incredible honor to interview Dhyana. I have easily four more hours of questions for her.
Dhyana shared with me that she didn’t speak much during her childhood. As she puts it, “my greatest power is thinking,” and while she wasn’t saying much, her child mind was ablaze with all manner of mulling, puzzling, and figuring.
Like so many of us thinky art types, Dhyana didn’t quite fit in, but she yearned to be seen, to be witnessed, and to know it was ok to be herself.
God – knowing it’s ok to be yourself. I can’t quite even picture it, if I’m being honest.
A quick aside…
In about a five-week period this fall, three completely independent people asked me point blank if I’m autistic. I think it’s probably the CPTSD (also a form of neurodivergence with many overlapping “symptoms”), but the message is clear. I’m different, maybe difficult to understand, maybe frustrating in any number of ways.
Frankly, I’m relieved to hear a few people acknowledging my ill-fittingness directly. It does make me feel a little less insane.
All throughout my life, I’ve been earnest. I’ve always, always done my best. And I’ve tried to live with utmost integrity. With equal consistency, I’ve been misunderstood. My intentions have been misinterpreted. I’ve not been believed.
With all of this in mind, one of Dhyana’s quotes hits me right in the gut.
She said, “they couldn’t see me dancing, but the rhythm is there.” I don’t think I’ll ever forget this one.
I’m so inspired by Dhyana’s ability to trust her own rhythm, regardless of whether anyone else can see it.
Eventually, Dhyana’s dance led her to become an endowed chair in ethics at Florida A&M University. But long before that, she was searching, moving with that inner rhythm.
“Above everything, I wanted to make good choices. I wanted to be peaceful, I wanted to be kind, I wanted to be a good person. I wanted to grow spiritually. And I’m like this still today. There is so much more, I know, that is out there.”
Dhyana shared that studying Buddhism taught her it was ok to be quiet. She says, “it made me feel alright about me.” A full circle moment, for sure.
Dhyana learned that while “I like to master skills and knowledge,” understanding logically isn’t always enough. In her words, “I really have to settle in. I have to really dig down on the intuitive side, because I might not always know my knowledge is correct.”
I’m so here for this. I feel it in my body, too.
Dhyana opens herself to all sorts of experiences. She says, “because I was on a journey, I witnessed everything. I went through the pain. I went through the joys.” She learns from everything she undergoes.
Dhyana holds herself to excellence. “I have a reputation for doing what I say I’m gonna do. They know if they give it to me, it’s gonna be done, and it’s gonna be done well. And that’s what I like more than anything else. And if I can’t do it well, I’m not gonna take it.”
These values! I love them all, and so admire Dhyana for them.
Finally, while I know Dhyana was speaking literally here (she loves a walk at sunrise), I prefer a metaphorical read of this last quote:
“I have no fear when I’m walking into the light. Those colors. And what happens to the sky. Seeing that is just so amazing to me. It does so much for me. It makes me center in my spirit.”
I think this is what I’ve felt about love in its many radiant forms.
Maybe I still do.
Maybe I’m just finally being forced to confront the frustratingly blurry boundaries between nascent love and dopamine flooding, between hope and delusion, between passion and distraction…
The problem is, as far as I can tell, there’s no reliable way to know one from the other on the front end. And I just can’t wrap my mind around the idea that my life might be improved by leading with cynicism or suspicion. The “fool me once” rule only applies when you’re barking up the same tree twice. Right?
And what of patience? forgiveness? growth? grace?
I’m struggling to make heads or tails of it.
Happily, Amy left me with lots of good stuff to chew on.
I related so much to Amy, another fellow neurodivergent, when she told me about the isolation she felt as a child seeing other children “interacting with the world in ways I never could,” because “people would know something was off.”
I know this feeling too well. I find myself equally unable to convincingly wield the behaviors I see working reliably for most others. As the youths say, the math just isn’t mathing.
My gut tells me creativity is wrapped up in all of it, though I’m not sure exactly how…
Maybe naturally-ample creativity (with its coincident quirks and eccentricities) catalyzes the mis-mathing somehow, or maybe creative audacity comes online in search of solutions to the problem.
In any case, like Amy, I’ve always “needed art to process the world around me.”
I was absolutely tickled to hear Amy describe a peculiar creative practice we share. She says, “I love making up rules for myself and following them.”
It’s a full squee for me, babe. I couldn’t agree more!
The use of the word “love” here means so much, and is accurate in the most delicious way.
There is a love, a real tenderness in designing rules for ourselves, rules that help us organize the world and organize ourselves within it. I feel seen and held in this shared practice.
I also recognize the seriousness of the second piece, “and following them.” I’m a rule-follower in many ways (as long as the rules make sense and are ethical, duh), but I don’t keep any rules quite as loyally as I keep the rules I make for myself. I feel certain Amy is the same.
It leaves me feeling so precious about our resilient, resourceful, earnest baby selves—just following our bespoke codes into creative adulthood.
Though, I do think there is more to wonder about and consider here…
I’m curious about the mechanics and specificities of the rule-making, Amy’s and my own. I wonder to what extent the rules are part of a broader creative and/or ethical ecosystem.
A bit later in our conversation, Amy told me how she began to home in on her artistic purpose and aesthetic during college. She says, “I wanted to pursue small details really fully.”
So many things strike me about this wording. There’s something really special about the use of the words “pursue” and “fully.”
I’m very pleased to report that “details” have been on my archetypal art behaviors short list for a while now. SO many artists report a love affair with detail as a primary driver of their work.
Maybe because I find this detail phenomenon personally relatable, I’ve been less desperate for a why here. Like – because details are rad. That’s the why. 🤷♀️
Looking back though, I wish I’d asked Amy to say more about this. My hunch is that examining the details helps make sense of the broader whole, that pursuit of details is by another name pursuit of understanding.
Amy, you’ll have to let me know if I’m on the right track here…
Regardless, in this moment I’m compelled by the idea that details lead to sturdy rules. And at least as it pertains to my “love without fear” rule, I think I’m worried I may have previously been unaware of a few details (neuro-chemical and otherwise) I now must pursue more fully.
On the other hand, Amy and I also discussed the way that motivation leads to discipline, and motivation comes from desire.
Certainly, it takes discipline to follow rules, self-imposed or otherwise. And while fear can also be a powerful motivator, I’m in full agreement that there is no motivator like desire.
It’s something I’ve elaborated on in other recent Deep Dives, but I’m generally disposed to believe that desire ought to be pursued wherever ethical or benign.
So, I guess the thought I’m having now is that if an optimistic approach to love and loveliness is somewhere my desire naturally settles, maybe that’s the only answer I need?
…Or maybe I need to engage some sort of Jungian detective mode to determine whether fear is camouflaged somewhere deep inside my heart-on-sleeve hopefulness.
The truth is, it’s entirely possible my creative ingenuity has that sneaky bastard tucked somewhere he doesn’t belong, all covert and costumed, arm-in-arm with unsuspecting besties purpose and verve.
All of this leads me to another of Amy’s wisdoms, the critical need for mentors and trusted peers to help us more clearly see what we’re up to.
Of an especially impactful teacher, Amy reflects “you are the first instructor to genuinely humor all of my random ideas and ask me questions that made me think through the process and make better decisions before starting a piece, instead of just questioning the entire thing, which made me a better planner and a better artist.”
I also loved hearing Amy talk about her relationship with kindred-spirit peer, Cricket. Cricket just gets Amy. Effortlessly. It’s the kind of painfully rare easiness that soothes the deepest, most primal disenfranchisement.
What a gift to have someone to experiment alongside, someone to witness you, to receive you, to help you troubleshoot.
I’m immensely grateful for the intimate clutch of friends whose counsel I’m able to lean on in my present-day confusions and conundrums, who hold my dreams with me, who welcome me to share theirs.
Spoiler: I did interview Cricket for Season 13. #comingsoon
In keeping with pattern, I’ll close the Amy portion of this essay with another non-metaphor I’m inclined to read metaphorically…
To Amy, her medium feels equally sculptural and painterly. She says, “you start with something flat and you have to wrap it around a three-dimensional form to make something that fits on something that isn’t flat or angular or perfect.”
I’m finding this a gorgeous metaphor for taking a perfectly abundant, ethically robust rule and wrapping it around real life. Maybe the rule can remain unaltered, but the application to life’s messy, multi-faceted curves and corners will require finessing. It’s a string to pull, at very least.
Y’all, it’s Ann time! Omg I am so taken with Ann. She is #goals in a serious way. At the end of our chat, she told me “I feel like you and I have got a similar vision of how art comes out of and is shared to the world.” And gosh – this really makes me feel like I’m doing something right. It’s a boost I’ve really needed.
Ann seems absolutely unshakeable. She is unabashedly who she is, and beautifully so. She tells me, “we own our stories, so how can we be wrong? How can I give you a wrong answer when I built the story?” 🤯🔥
Ann’s current work is my favorite example to date of the archiving/collecting/chronicling archetype. She collects rare seeds, lovingly cultivates a garden, studies the construction of individual specimens via careful dissection, and recreates each being in three-dimensional paper (truly bewildering).
Then, every winter, she captures her favorite wild things on painted eggs. Each part of the process further distills the little muse. The whole world of it delights me. It’s exquisite!
I loved hearing Ann talk about the ways her mother helped her build values early on.
She tells me she was allowed to paint all over her bedroom walls. She says, “it really gave me that feeling that I could have the permission to do things that other kids might not be able to do creatively. So that was a real esteem booster in a lot of ways…my mom was a really good facilitator of creativity.”
Oddly, or maybe not at all, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard an artist citing the importance of independence in childhood bedroom décor…
Of course, I have the opposite experience. My mom always said “this is my room.” She painted my space in her favorite color, a color that makes my nervous system seize up to this day. She made all of the choices for my physical space, and for as many other aspects of my life as she could control.
She threw away my artworks and criticized my performances. She diminished me in every possible way, as did the entire family system.
I’m nearly forty, and I feel like I’m just beginning to scratch the surface of this damage. I get so discouraged when I think about all of this lost time, this dark time, all of these things I need to somehow undo, all of the confidence I have to build from the ground up.
But I do love the idea that permission is an esteem booster. It’s blessedly simple. And I’m learning every day to give myself permission to trust my instincts, my preferences, my choices.
I can’t pretend it isn’t difficult. It’s a messy slop to sort through. And it brings me back to the flux I’m currently facing.
I’m too much in the middle to say anything for certain, but I feel myself investigating old survival mechanisms, various solutions cobbled together by my brave and brilliant child-self. And I’m asking my now-self which of these things is completely, inextricably interwoven into my personality (hopefully mostly for better), and which things have protected me long enough, and can begin to fall away.
Year of the snake, anyone? 🐍
Sincerely though, hearing so many creatives talking this fall about shedding and renewal does settle me in good company. It reminds me that childhood conditions aside, we’re all awash in uncertainty. We all have searching still to do, discoveries still to make, and eras to move through.
In Ann’s words, “this was what I was meant to do, but it took several decades to get to this point.”
Ann is unequivocal about never settling for what’s not quite right. Regardless of the resources invested (time, money, energy), you must “keep going until you get the thing that only lights you up.”
I love the use of the word “only” in this sentence. Look for the thing that exclusively lights you up.
And, Ann reminds us, “no skill is really a lost skill.” What a balm that is. No regrets for time spent earnestly. Everything goes in the toolbox.
Thinking back again to my original quandary (whether fear ought to inform love), another of Ann’s quotes gives me pause…
She says, “grief is the love you have flipped around in reverse.” There are probably a few ways to interpret this, but today I’m considering that if grief and love are indeed each other’s inverse, they must wield equal intensity and power.
And I’m wondering whether this idea of loving without fear (more accurately, not allowing fear to contaminate or sabotage love) might benefit from a slight reframing.
Like perhaps my desire or inclination to love without fear is really a gut instinct that the grief of past loves lost—loves unrequited, unreceived, discarded, weaponized—mustn’t hamper a wholehearted openness to fresh loves.
Alternately, maybe the ferocity of these griefs drives me to recklessness—so desperate to replace this excruciating, untethered emptiness with something bountiful that I’ll prevent fear from doing its job.
Or maybe the kind of fear that hovers around love is always ultimately fear of grief anyway…
See what I mean? I’m confused!!!
I’ll undoubtedly continue to ruminate on these questions.
Maybe a new rule will emerge. Or maybe I’ll double down on optimism…
In any case, this is enough words for now.
One more essay coming your way before this year takes her final bow.
Cheers!
Emily
P.S. I’ve officially recorded all of Season 13 and I CANNOT WAIT to hit you with the lineup. It’s gonna be so fab.
One of Amy’s Rad Pieces:
Some of Ann’s Beings:
