On Determining what I call success

How I let the feelings about my work affect my life is up to me.  This has been a hard lesson for me to learn.  I am still working through it.  Of course I want everyone to love what I do!  Follow me, want to be a part, purchase it.  Who doesn't want to be a little, or a lot famous?  That's fine and reasonable, but there is also a point at which the online world cannot offer to us what I believe so many of us crave in creating.  I love interacting online and through social media.  I've made meaningful friendships, been inspired, made better, felt jealous, sad, happy for the success of others, really, the whole run of emotions that happen with being a human interacting with other humans.  The past couple of days was spent feeling like a failure though, I'm not totally sure why.  Mostly because I'm too hard on myself and because I love things to happen right now.  I have a sense of what I could be and do, and I'm so far from it, it sometimes feels like I'm trying to pull down a balloon the size of a house with my little arms, it just feels too big, too impossible.  Those feelings can be amplified and grow to epic proportions if I let them.  Especially if I turn to social media to fix them.

In order to break the cycle that tells me I'm a failure, I picture my self standing in a paper box and I have to punch and kick and be wild to get myself out.  In the past couple of days this wildness took three forms: 

1. I left my phone at home and took my babies to Costco.  I let them sample everything their little hearts desired.  I bought produce. I picked up melons and ran my palms around their nobbly skins pretending I knew how to find the best one.  At the end of our trip, my wild babes and I got a hotdog and an ice cream.  They smeared ice cream on the white laminate tables and ate their hotdogs with great earnestness.  I started to talk to an older man across from me.  Through his thick, Egyptian accent he told me I was doing a good job, that he had two little ones at one point too.  He went and got us napkins, and gave me a slice of pizza from his box.  

2.  I went to a work meeting (a new part-time job as an art teacher in one low-income school and one very well-to-do school).  I met with the teachers in whose classrooms I will be working.  I have this problem, which is actually so embarrassing, that when I'm talking with someone, particularly strangers, I often get overwhelmed with love? emotion? nervousness?  I'm not sure, but my eyes get all watery and I just hope they aren't weirded out, but probably they are wondering a little.  Well, in planning our objectives and working through ideas with these teachers, I was so happy and touched that my watery eyes were indiscreet enough that I had to stop and explain myself.   I brought the Brave Women poster as an example of my art, and because I had it in the car.  Both teachers, to my surprise were so excited about it, and by the end, we'd made a plan to create our own poster with portraits of people from the student's heritage. 

3.   One of our families dearest friends, Jack, works on Stanford's campus and sometimes just stops by to say hi to the kids.  He pulled up behind me just as I got home with with a car full of groceries.  He was a college rugby player and so in a swoop, he scooped up all the groceries and set them on the kitchen table.  He'd stopped by to bring us a family gift and in return, I sent him home with a Brave Women poster for his 13 year old daughter.  He loved it.  We talked about the stories of some of the women and he left me with a whole list of women to research.  He said he was going to take it home and talk about it with his daughter and wife.  

These experiences are small and simple and full of life for me.  These three experiences are reminders to me that I HAVE to be in charge of the way I allow myself to feel.  I get to count what I think of as success. For me, there has to be a balance between my real life interactions with my art, and how I perceive them to be accepted in the worlds I cannot talk with directly.  It is far to easy for me to talk myself into feeling like a failure before I have spoken in person to anyone else. Even when people are so kind on the internet, it is so easy to bypass all of that and hang desperately onto the one negative thing that was said, or perceived to be said or thought.

These three real life interactions reminded me why I set out on any project at all, because I love people, and I believe in our potential to be brief sparks of light in each other's worlds.  I don't know what lesson all this might be, except that for me, all of this creating and working late and believing  must be grounded in both the near and far.  I have to be responsible and accountable for the way I allow myself to feel about what I do.  Love people.  Talk to them in real life.  Appreciate and recognize their efforts at supporting you, both on and offline.