Maybe I'm not a business woman?

Of all the projects I've done, I think the one I think back on most often is a funny, hand-sewn sign that I made almost a year ago and strung up between two trees while taking the kids to school one afternoon.  I felt sure that someone would take it down quickly, or that it would fall in the wind, but nearly a year lately, I pass by it every so often when we take that path to school and it's still there.  It's not exactly as I left it because someone tied curly ribbons all around it, the dye I used to color the fabric is faded and the letters are a weather-worn white, another person took glow in the dark paint and painted over the letters and another part where I can see that someone stitched together a part that had torn.  Once I mentioned that I was the one who put it up on a social media platform and I had five or six people respond and talk about how meaningful the sign had been in their life.  This little sign is certainly not the makings of a strong business model.  I will most likely never make a penny from its existence, and for almost everyone, it is completely anonymous, but I love this project.  I am moved as a maker by this project.  I am not compelled to make 'be brave' signs and sell them on etsy, I like that it remains apart from the marketplace, and I think that distance is what makes it meaningful to the people who experience it.  It is not beautiful, skillful and consumeristic, it's just what it is, a hand-sewn sign that says 'Be Brave'.   Walking that line then, the line between being a creative and growing your creativity into some sort of business with financial or social gain, is an interesting place to be.  For me, right now, I am most compelled to create without thought of the business that my creation will generate.  I want to take time to follow the stream that has already been carved for me, and that requires a lot of listening, a lot of quiet space, even space outside of the social media realm.  I'm taking a break from even the thoughts of business and what my place might be as an online presence, and I'm using my hands and body to create and move through the physical world that is nearby me.  I have hope that in doing so, I will better be able to merge the two world (business and creative) in a way that feels peaceful, productive and generous.  How do you walk this line? 

On Celebrating our Advocates

My three year old son is epic.  His whole world needs to happen now and with magical force and splendor.  He can be quick to lose patience in the quest for more, and more now.  He is not unreasonable, he is a compassionate little guy with the best of intentions.  Turns out, he and I, are not so different.    I've come to a humbling, and yet, totally necessary crossroads in my trail of making.  I've recently realized that I often forget how to, or rather, chose not to, celebrate the small joys of making.  The people that I make along with and for, and the people I look up to, deserve my celebration.  My own creations, my own attempts, deserve credit. I almost used the word victory, then I changed it to success, but I don't like either of those words for this occasion, because when you are speaking of people, success and victory should not be their adjectives.

Sometimes in the making, I am quick to get down on myself, and can even jump on the line "I am a failure".  It's an old friend who will almost always easily agree with me.  The thing that is embarrassing, and requisite of penance in my scenario is that sometimes I get so caught up in succeeding
(and not failing), that I forget people and think numbers.  Because, while it may be true that I am, in all earnestness, no stranger to failure, I've also had many times when there was meaning made between myself and another person. That cannot be accounted for in simple numbers.    It's okay for me to acknowledge success, and more,  I most certainly need to find and savor the joy in connecting with another person.  I need to take my time.

 I think though, that we live in a world that shouts the word, 'MORE!' a little too loudly, a little too often. I was grateful, surprised even, when a single person liked my brave women poster, or my first book enough to go to my site and purchase it, but I'm ashamed to say that the word that most easily came to my head after the excitement wore away was that four letter word, "MORE!"  But to what end?  Really.  To what end? and when would that word be satisfied?  I'm suspect that the 'MORE' would take us down a path that may eventually look great in numbers, but would be lonely in meaning if we didn't stop and shake ourselves a little, and look 'MORE' in the face to tell it that it is not the most important thing because we are busy celebrating other joys.

I've set myself to the task of celebrating each small thing. Though, of course, I do this pretty imperfectly.  I sent out five posters and five books this week, and while that will not make me rich, nor famous, I felt a happiness as I sent those things out into the mail.  People are worth celebrating.  Each person who steps out of the anonymity that is so easy to assume in this world should be embraced for their bravery.  It's been, dare I say, a miraculous thing these past two weeks as I've made very conscious efforts to change my attitude from that of inner critic, to that of a grateful celebrator.  It's taken bravery on my part to accept that I don't have to be incredibly critical of everything I do.  I can even celebrate my own creations, and then I can celebrate my own bravery.    

The thing I really want to say is that as I've done all this inner celebrating, I have felt an increase of real and sincere love for people I have not met in person.  I have become more interested in wanting them to succeed as well.  I have had a renewed faith in the power of our 21st century mode of connecting (online, etc...) because my feelings have become more real toward the people behind those profiles.  I'm trying to more deliberately thank my children, my husband, my parents, my neighbors, my online friends.

I feel a real love for the people who have supported me, both in person and online.  Going out of your way to support someone else is not something that anyone has to do, but the best part of us does anyway.  I want to advocate for the people who have advocated for me.  I want to be a part of their success and celebration.  I want competition, comparison and inner judgement to fade as I scrub out the bright creator I believe I am capable of being.  I want to take part in helping others celebrate what they are making of their lives as well.

Also, please note: I'm writing myself into being a better person, I'm far from there yet, so please don't take any of my writing as me thinking I've figured it out.  The input and comments I've received in the little time this blog has been up have been incredibly useful, paradigm shifting and perspective changing, so I hope this can also be a place where the conversation can uplift your maker's trail as well.  

On Distractions and Finding Your Space

My making was listless today, both in mind and in physical representation. I have some suspicions as to why, but also a lot of questions.  When I was in college I had a studio for painting.  It was a glorious space and once you got in the building and up into the big room with partitioned cubicles of drywall, no one knew you were there, besides the occasional janitor that tucked his head past the door to pick up a trash can.  Those were good nights where often I would stay until I could see the morning light peeking over Timpanogos. I played Sigur Ros and Belle and Sebastian loud into my headphones and painted, drew, stood back to look, sat on my metal stool and thought and got to painting again.  I knew it was a luxury then because I loved nearly every minute of my hidden maker's space, but boy, I did not quite understand what a luxury until I moved into a small apartment and had two kids.  I love my kids and I would not trade them for art making.  I am not an oppressed stay at home mom.  (I sometimes feel like I need to wear a sign around my neck here in Palo Alto that assures people of this fact,) but man, what I wouldn't do for a space that was all mine to create.

A very small space would do, but just one that didn't involve fingerprints in my painting by the next morning.  But, I need more than a literal space, I need a mental space that is quiet.  My life now sometimes feels like I am in an echoey room with a thousand bouncy balls pinging off walls and jumping in corners and there is not enough time between rumblings of the room to put them all at ease, rolling quietly around the floor.  Sometimes the rumblings are cause of my children, sometimes my husband, sometimes other work, sometimes neighbors and their kids, life in general, time, sometimes a house that needs to be cleaned, and sometimes, it is simply me.  Have I become afraid of the quietness and what I might create, or fail to create there.  Sometimes I do find myself with a chunk of time during naps or after the kids go to bed, and like a little squirrel, instead of sitting and ruminating with the thoughts in my brain, I scamper around.  I go to instagram, Facebook, news articles, a tv show, a podcast, a phone call with a friend... anything but the refuge of my own body and mind.  Sometimes I even work, write and paint in the midst of these interruptions, but I'm never fully present in my making when this happens.  It's like I start down a good path in a cozy little woods, but I keep walking back to check that it's still light out, until it finally does get dark and I find that I've piddled too much time wondered what might be, or who might be doing what, and now it is dark and I have to be done.

Why?!  I'm serious.  Why?!  I can't be the only one that this happens to, right?  What do you do?

It does take a concerted effort to get into the space of real and sincere creation for me.  It is a learned and practiced skill that demands the attention of all of me, and I want to be in the place because I want and need to create with sincerity, but yet, I find myself syphoning off pieces of my thoughts, energy, speech to places that cannot pay off a decent return.

I think of my best space of creation like a softly lit, white room that is immune to criticism, comparison, self-doubt and fear of failure.  Oh, it's a good place to be, where I feel quite myself, but right now, my biggest challenge is finding the courage to step in and shut the door tight, turn the music loud and paint those white walls until they say something.

Below are three pieces that I made in my studio.  I love these pieces because I can still remember just what I was thinking about as I made them.  They are each about a person I loved, and I felt like I wove our story right, even for just a few moments because I allowed myself to feel some very real things, both hard and wonderful, and then I made from that place.

On Picking a Project and Seeing it Through.

I'm hyper.  I love to work.  I have a hard time following projects through to the end.  I've learned to not only be critical of this part of myself because I do have a lot of ideas, but to embrace it as well.  I write ideas up like a mad woman on the whiteboard in the corner of my room while Remy is at preschool and Thea naps.  Having a lot of ideas is not a bad thing.  It's fun. But following a consistent idea through a winding and unknown path can also be fun, maybe more than jumping after the starts of a hundred different thoughts.

In business and marketing, I've somehow convinced myself that I cannot promote the same thing for more than a short time period before I move onto the next thing.  I often find myself running full speed into the next thing before anyone has really even been able to react to the last project.  This is a funny cycle because by not giving a creation it's full lifespan (which could be an early ending or a long life) I cut off the possibility of even knowing what this project may be capable of.  Ideas and creations, like people, need time and patience.  They need time to move around and explore and be let wild.  I often think of my friend Susan from the moccasin company, Freshly Picked.  I own a little freshly picked hand-sewn wallet from about five years ago and we used to sell at the same local markets.  I remember her booth always having a variety of things, but she was so smart and she understood the people she was selling to.  She was brave enough to take one idea, her hand-sewn, leather moccasins,  and run with it.  I still follow her on instagram and she almost exclusively posts photos of moccasins in different colors, etc... I love seeing her photos and I'm not bothered by another pair of moccasins because I know that is what she does and I know she takes herself seriously enough to be brave in asking people to jump on board.

I almost abandoned my own ship (I know, like a month in) with the brave women project because I had other things I wanted to get to and I thought that people must be tired and annoyed of seeing about it already, but really?  After 3 photos on instagram?  I recently read a book called Essentialism:the Disciplined Pursuit of Less.  One idea in particular was so useful to me as I read.  The author speaks about this contemporary idea we have of 'priorities', as in lots of them, a list of priorities.  But he points out that a long list was never the intention of the word priority.  Priority is singular, there is one.  It does not share the top tier with six other ideas or pursuits.  For me, this concept was revolutionary in terms of thinking about what I am doing as a creator.  I spent a good deal of time working through what my priority in creating is for right now.  I came to trust my instinct and my heart when I felt that empowering women, teenagers and girls through my art is the priority right now.  It won't always be only that, though I suppose it may be, and I'm willing to trust that too, but for now, I need to work through a project until it tells me what it needs to be and where it can go.  It happens a little at a time.  I'm going to trust that the people that follow me, or like my art already, will trust me enough to work through this project with me as well.  In fact, the very project of studying historical women and telling their stories is testament to the power in consistency and work toward a priority.

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.  

On Learning Not to Just Get Sad and Quit

Two days ago I put my Brave Women Poster up on instagram.  The art sharing world in social media is a vulnerable and energetic place.  I had the poster done for a week, but I was hesitant to post it because I didn't want to inevitable up and down of emotions that come when you put your important things up for literally thousands of people to respond to. People are so kind though.  Remember that.  They are busy, and steering their own ships over choppy waters.  For so many people, the receiving end of social media flicks by in seconds, while you, as the originator of a post see the results all the day, continually.  Be kind to yourself.  And also, you might fail.  Learn to be fine with that.  Dust yourself off, take a bow, start up again, or don't for a while, and then feel alright about that too.

Having a tough skin is part of being and artist and entrepreneur, it has to be.  I've spent a lot of time in my life, or rather my work has, in front of people.  People whose job it is to critique with great honesty.  So, so much of it has been rejected.  I often don't know how to keep the score between rejections and wins, but I'm sure there have been more formal rejections than wins.  Acceptances outside of the formal category (acceptances to journals, book deals, sales, etc...) can be counted differently, and really, that can simply depend on your attitude. 

I went from a BFA in studio art in my undergrad, where the majority of our time was spent talking about one another's work, both the successes and failures, then I moved onto an MFA in Creative writing, where again, a good portion of time was spent putting my work forward and getting feedback.  It is both exhausting and confusing, while also necessary and refining.  One of my professors gave the great advice of just picking the one or two voices out of the group that you trust and know that you're on the same page with and only listen to them and do your best to be polite, but discard the other voices.  I've found that to be entirely necessary because everyone has something to say if you ask them, sometimes even if you don't, but it's not always useful to internalize all those voices.  How could you?  You would be left with a lifeless object that is trying to be a hundred things to hundred people.  I've found that every so often, it is imperative for me to sift through the voices, tossing some aside, while putting others in a keep pile, until I find my own.  The voice that is mine, that can answer to me why I do any of what I do is sometimes hiding or lost, but you will know it when you find it, you'll find that it is as refined and familiar as the palm of your own hand.  

So, in regards to my Brave Women Poster.  I put it up because it's been an important project to me. I don't consider the poster the final product, but a first and necessary step.  I'd already tried and failed several different attempts at this same project, and so I knew I needed to at least get something concrete.  I have to mentally prepare myself each time I do a project.  I have to dig my heels in real deep and tell myself that I am doing this because in my heart of hearts, in that intuition that has proven genuine, this is what I feel I should do. And then I have to work and work, and being willing to start over. Of course there is always the hope that people will immediately grab onto my project and care about it as much as I do, but how could they?  They have their own hills to climb, their own flowers to plant at the top.  The sea of social media and online business-hood can be real rough water.  It can be validating and celebratory and then terribly disappointing, within the span of two days.  We have to choose the severity of our response on either end. 

To be fair, I've been open so far, so I'll continue, at the risk of being too honest.  It was inspiring to me to see the response to the first post and giveaway of the poster.  Women were tagging each other with uplifting words and I was happy and surprised to see a positive response and I am literally almost always planning for my ideas to flop, or fall flat in the real world.  I felt good about all of the hours spent researching, drawing, painting and designing.  It seemed, for a day or two like maybe I was right in doing the thing I knew could never be fad, a business that would be laughed to shreds on Shark Tank because it's just not cool, or cute and it requires effort on the part of the viewer/buyer.  I felt energetic to keep working.  Then, as promised, I put up the winners for the giveaway and a coupon code to purchase the poster, and the response was a quiet field.  The auditorium full of women I had imagined in my head seemed to be still or on lunch break.  To be expected! and not the fault, unkindness or insincerity of anyone!  This I must remind myself.  Building something takes time.  Go easy.  Do not get sad and quit.  This mantra, though akin to a second grade poster on a classroom wall, is one that I have to repeat to myself often, because it is a real temptation.  Tonight I wanted to eat cupcakes and watch mindless T.V. because I felt listless and pathetic, and I halfway did that (half a cupcake, half a show).  Tomorrow, I will get up and try again.  I will keep working because when I think of my two babies, Remy and Thea, I want them to see a happy mom who is charting the waters with bravery, even if feigned at times.  I have the women i have researched and painted who seem to say thank you for caring enough to ask about them.  I have to talk to myself and say, do not get sad and quit.  There is a reason in all of this, you will come upon it like an unexpected field of wildflowers someday, sooner or later, I'm not sure.

On Trying to Be an Honest Creator

My first semester in college I took an art class from a professor I really wanted to impress.  He gave us a worksheet of instructions to take home over the weekend and we were to come back with the completed project on Monday.  I spent the whole weekend constructing, painting, gluing and perfecting my sphere-like, colorful paper sculpture.  When I got to class everyone else had a set of pencil drawings in front of them.  My teacher was perplexed and perhaps a little bit pleased with my project, but to this day, I wonder how I really and truly thought that I was creating something just the way everyone else was, when in reality, we were miles apart.  I've lived in this space for much of my life.  I both adore and despise it.  The one thing it has made me is honest.  Sometimes I think that's the only thing I've got going for me.  I hardly have a business right now.  I have boxes of books.  Lots of art.  Lots of ideas.  No capital. No space. And a good part of the time, little confidence in my ability.  But through it all, I can say that I've been honest, and I believe that anything that might eventually be successful must start from that deep, shy cave in your heart where everything is dark and no one gives you their approval.  That place where you have to feel your way around until you find a match, strike it on the rocks and light the pile of sticks on the dirt floor.  In the hard earned illumination you will see shadows on the walls, sparks flying up toward the ceiling.  You will hear crackles in the silence, and here, in this place in the deepest part of your heart, you forget about everything else and ask yourself, what is it that I can be most honest about.  What makes me tick?  What do I care about?  You may spend much time here ruminating, or just staring into the flames.  You may come back every night for weeks or months, but before you start anything, find out what you want to be honest about.  It won't be the same for everyone, and it doesn't have to come in the form of anything epic or earth changing, but you do have to care about what you do.