In Our Own Spaces #3: "Bring The Work That Scares You"
Intentions for a community hosted artist salon series
The following writing was created for and spoken at the third edition of the community-lead and hosted artist salon series “In Our Own Spaces” on October 21, 2023. My partner and I founded this salon series as a space for communal gathering, radical conversation, and redefining uses of art in our current society.
Earlier this month I was so afraid to speak my mind, I stored my truth as tension in my body. I literally let my fear suffocate me. As I held my tongue, the muscles around my neck constricted, spasmed, and froze up. My larynx has been so restricted that I can barely get a few words out without great effort. It’s caused me so much agonizing pain, both being unable to speak and the tension itself, that I found myself throughout and at the end of each long day in a mess of tears that seemed never ending. That’s another fear— that the darkness of this feeling is infinite, that my suffocation will grow to completion inside and out, that my fear will swallow me whole.
Fear is parasitic in that way: it feeds on our turning away from it, tackles us from behind and sucks the life from our souls. The more we fear something, the harder it is to face, and so the fear grows and grows. We stay stuck in our ways out of the fear that reaching for what we really want (or at least think we want) will end in turmoil and defeat. Fear of failure, fear of change, fear of fucking everything up. Fear of the unknown.
I create my own fear and hide in that cave of fear. I hold up my sword with my back turned, eyes closed, hoping the monster will voluntarily fall on the point and split to pieces.
We fear our own darkness, the secrets we keep even from ourselves, but the monsters, demons, and ghosts still haunt us. Something Lauren and I learned the importance of when rehabilitating our extremely fearful dog is that it’s possible to hold two beliefs at once. Olive, terrified, eyes wide, tail tucked, would often take one tiny, tentative step toward the object of her fear to give it a little sniff. We struggled to understand why she would do this, how that curiosity could break through every nerve in her body telling her that she was not okay. But it did! That small, magical little animal could recognize what we couldn’t see— that just because we are afraid of something doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue it. In fact, it’s often the opposite; the things we fear most are those most worthwhile, because when we embrace fear, we make room to feel the full spectrum of that emotion, and on the other side is joy.
And that all sounds great in theory, but when it comes down to it, shit is fucking scary!! So what can we do about fear? How do we learn to embrace it?
Tonight we asked everyone to “bring the work that scares you”. In the private creation of artworks, a space for vulnerability is created in which our fears reveal themselves to us. This can manifest as work that, in itself, scares us and makes us want to turn away, and that work can be that which, when viewed by others, is incredibly profound. I personally love looking at work that scares me— that makes my heart race, that makes me feel exposed in some way. It’s exciting and dangerous, but there’s also a comfort in knowing that the darkness I feel inside me exists elsewhere; that it can be held and seen.
We introduced in our first salon the “crisis of the privatized world”— these salons are all about creating public space for gathering and viewership, creating the opportunity to share and feel supported in our work for everything they express. We can fear our work, hide that revealing, seething object that represents the repressed parts of our souls, or we can let our work scare us. Put it all on the table. Allow others to support us. In that courage, we stop turning away from that fear to face it, explore it, and love it for all that it is. When we feel so isolated and alone one of the scariest thoughts is that we do, in fact, need each other. But we do!
