This was going to be a very different post, but sometimes things demand your attention and muscle their way to the front of the queue in a very un British way. So here we are.
For a long time now, I have been kicking around the idea of being an artist. I’ve written about it, talked about it, thought about it and made a lot of art. And yet, I still didn’t feel like an artist in myself. I wanted to and I went down the traditional route of thinking that I could ‘fake it to make it.’ It didn’t work. At least on the outside it looked like it was working but on the inside it very much didn’t. I still felt like a fraud to myself.
It’s a weird thing, because if you make art, I firmly believe you are an artist. Just like if you write, you are a writer. It doesn’t matter whether your art is hanging on a gallery wall, your book is in Waterstones, you’re raking in the dollar from Substack or you make things you never show to another living soul. The making is the thing that makes you what you want to be. The rest of it is what other people measure this stuff by.
And art, by my reckoning is a very broad church. I am not into sniffy, snobby, gatekeeping. Art exists in all kinds of places you wouldn’t expect: in bakery shops, on subway walls, in the way a leaf spirals down from a tree in Autumn. Art is everywhere when you really start to look, and it is inclusive. It welcomes you in. It makes room for you. It’s other people that don’t. And in my case, myself.
I believe all the above and yet I didn’t believe in myself as an artist.
Actually I think the root of it was that I didn’t believe in myself, full stop. And over the last few months I have begun to see how in ways great and small I have taken my power and given it to countless other people I decided I did believe. What I believed was that they knew better than me. Not only did I believe that they knew better, I believed that they knew me better than me. I am realising that all my life, I have waited for other people to give me permission for all kinds of things and to tell me what I could and couldn’t do.
I invited in a bunch of gatekeepers for all sorts of reasons and at all different times. I let them set up camp and build their gates on my property. I obeyed them when they wouldn’t let me back in to my own space, and I believed them when they told me why. Some of them didn’t do it on purpose. Some of them did. In some ways I don’t blame them. Who wouldn’t want to land grab something that extends your space and makes your life easier? Particularly when it’s not costing you anything. And of course, if you’re busy building a fence on my land, you don’t have to think about why your land isn’t fit for purpose.
It’s not quite that simple, of course, because nothing ever is. I am by no means a meek, trodden down, trad wife kind of woman. Nor am I blameless in the land grabbing business either. I’ve spent quite some time taking down the fences I made on other people’s property and I’m sure there are more than a few gates I need to burn down, still.
I made a fundamental mistake of fighting my corner with the big things, but letting the little things slide. I was mistaking the part for the whole. But the thing about little things is that they begin to stack up over time because life, for the most part, is just made up of those little things. I make a conscious effort in my day to day life to try and make as many of the little things I have and do as pleasurable as possible. I drink out of nice mugs, I think carefully about things like thread count and what things give me joy. I wasn’t extending the same courtesy to my insides though.
When I started thinking about it, I realised I was letting so many small indignities pass. Some of this I did entirely consciously because I had so much on my plate, there was only so much standing up I could do and I was tired, inside and out. Some of it was so deeply entrenched that it never occurred to me what I was doing. This stuff had become habitual. And I had let it make my life smaller than I wanted it to be, but I didn’t know how to make it larger because I was afraid.
I had created a life where I was obligated to all kinds of people, who didn’t have my best interests at heart. I have spent a great deal of my life feeling that I owe people things, apologies, explanations and actual stuff for starters. I didn’t know how to believe in myself and I didn’t know, at a core level, who I was, so I let other people tell me. That wasn’t all their fault, by the way. I quite often invited them in and asked them.
I felt that I couldn’t trust myself to make decisions. I felt I was too mad, too damaged, too much. I think a lot of that came about because at the time I was supposed to be figuring out how to be a grown up, I had a nervous breakdown and then, when I went back out into the world I just did the things that I thought grown ups should do and almost let that destroy me. I felt out of control and dangerous. I felt that I didn’t know where to stop, so for a long, long time, I didn’t even start until someone else gave me permission. I had the startling realisation yesterday that I was still behaving like a child, pretending to be a grown up.
Of course, on the outside I am firmly a grown up and I can do lots of the things that grown ups do. It was never about the outside stuff so much. It was more about my beliefs about who I was on the inside. I was afraid of myself and what I would do if I let myself be in charge of myself. I felt that the last time I did that, I nearly died. Of course, when I look at that time now, I realise that I was not grown up at all. I was still a child. I just thought I had reached that threshold of adulthood. I had vowed to myself I would never let myself have a breakdown again because of what it did to me. I kept that vow, but I also, inadvertently, stopped myself growing up.
Ironically, in the last few years of my life, many of the things that I have been deeply afraid of have actually happened to me. My kids lost their way. I lost my home (I still had a house - there is a huge difference). Our finances turned to liquid shit. Illness, addiction, harm, craziness, death and taxes all came knocking at the door so often, they were shoving each other off the front step at one point. I was fighting big demons.
I did not feel safe. Also ironically, this felt familiar to me, because as an extremely anxious child, I didn’t feel safe then, either, so I didn’t interrogate this feeling too deeply. Sometimes we find pain and fear comforting if it’s what we have known and lived with before. I realise that what really felt very dangerous for me, was the path to real safety because it was something I didn’t know very much about. It was unknown territory. The path to evicting the gate keepers and land grabbers, to reclaiming my space and making myself a home seemed fraught with more danger than all the crazy, batshit stuff that was going on outside. I was afraid of making a home inside myself that belonged to me and where I was in charge of who came in and who didn’t. I was afraid of owning the body that had seen so much pain. I was afraid that if I gave myself the keys to the kingdom, that I would make it a hostile place. What I didn’t realise was that it was already hostile, and the real me had given up and gone to ground long ago to wait until all this was over. All the things I was giving to other people, I wasn’t giving to myself. The care, the work, the standing up, it was all for other people. And because that wasn’t the right thing to do, my life was getting more and more intolerable.
They say that rock bottom is that moment when you realise that you are so low, that the pain you are currently in simply cannot be worse than walking into the unknown you are so afraid of. I got there. Which is something that has been deeply, deeply terrible but also such a gift and a blessing. I have been walking out of that hell, step by painful step ever since that moment of surrender. The moment I stopped being ‘strong’ and stopped fighting. When I put down my weapons, admitted defeat and decided to try something else. When I couldn’t see where there was to get to, but I started going there anyway. That’s when things began to get better.
In walking away from my old life, in making a home for myself, I had created a platform from which to begin walking into my new life, with therapy and, with the art that I make. What I realised as I was making the dolls was that I was making them for me, of myself. I was taking the parts of me that I had hidden away, deep inside myself and I figured out ways to bring them back to life and put them out in the world. As I was doing that I realised that this art is the right art for me. When I was making the dolls, I felt like the artist I had wanted to be. I realised it wasn’t what I was making that was different, it was the feeling I was putting into the making and that I was making something for me. The making allowed for the feeling and that feeling was a rightness about what I was doing. It felt so strange. It still does, but that’s because it’s new. I can do new.
The last pieces of this knowing about being what I need to be as an artist came when I watched The Great Pottery Throw Down last night. The brief was that the potters had to make an abstract piece that was an expression of light and shade, using two, disparate ingredients, bringing them together to form a lamp. Each potter made something intensely personal, and you could see and feel how hard it was for them to articulate emotions which were difficult to express in regular ways, let alone in the abstract. The form and the materials didn’t leave anyone anywhere to hide. It was raw, powerful stuff that finally allowed me to click the pieces of the puzzle together for myself.
What had been (mostly) missing in previous things that I had made was the connection I needed that linked my head, my heart and my hands and allowed me to travel from the inside out. I had been making things for other people, just like I had been allowing people to tell me who I was. I had also been attempting to make things that were ‘right’, either technically or aesthetically or which were approved of by other people. I had come close a couple of times to making things for myself. I knew that self was there, but when it came down to the wire, I either stopped or I prettied things up.
In art, like life, I had stopped at the point where I started being true to myself. I had stopped myself from growing up. I think I reasoned that if being a child was this scary, being a grown up would be intolerably frightening. What I did was stop myself growing into the adult who could deal with adult things. Instead I became a child, playing at being an adult, and that was indeed, intolerably frightening. Then I did the maths wrong. I reasoned that I had proved to myself that being grown up was terrifying, because I was grown up and it was terrifying. I didn’t realise that there was a bit missing. I do now.
i appreciate so much that you share with us. You are incredibly reflective and insightful in a way i am always learning from. thank you katy xo
So much of what you write resonates with me.
You articulate your experiences so well and with such grace. Xx