In Our Own Spaces #6: "Bring A Work You're Stuck On"
Intentions for a community hosted artist salon series
The following writing was created for and spoken at the sixth edition of the community-lead and hosted artist salon series “In Our Own Spaces” on May 10th, 2024. 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.
I get a chance to channel a lot of confidence into these writings, and into running the conversations in these salons. It fulfills a deep passion of mine: to share knowledge, open people’s minds, and create moments of human connection. I think I take on a sort of persona who is excellent at this type of thing— who has good questions, and always knows what to say. Sometimes, when I’m out in the world, I just feel so awkward. And I desperately desire to connect with people, to be known and understood. But a lot of the time, when I have an opportunity to share myself, I seem to sabotage it. I get all pumped up like, “Ok, this is my moment to say whatever I want this person to know,” but then I freeze up— all of a sudden I’m inarticulate. It’s like my mind, which is usually always running from thought to thought (to thought to thought to thought…), suddenly goes blank.
I wrote my undergraduate psychology thesis on “Interpersonal Defense Theory,” which claims that tied to everything we want is this massive fear that something terrible will happen when we pursue it: failure, rejection, scorn, loss. And due to this fear of what could happen when going after what we really want, we make compromises in our actions to “defend” ourselves from these bad things that could happen. This can be rather effective at keeping us safe, but the thing is, it also keeps us stagnant. This defense mechanism makes the chance of getting those highly desired outcomes that we’re looking for virtually nonexistent. It’s easier, it’s comfortable, to avoid what we fear then to move toward what we want. That’s how we become stuck.
In those moments when my mind goes “blank” there is, of course, something happening under the surface. All of this pressure I put on being understood could backfire, and I could be misunderstood. And oh all of the horrible things people could think of me if I’m not perfect. Needing to be THE best puts up these walls that make it hard for me to be MY best. To try and to fail, which is what it takes to learn. And the thing is, I know that this is what gets in my way, but for some reason, I still freeze.
Often the path to your greatest downfall and your greatest success start off exactly the same. Being afraid of what might happen, you prevent yourself from going for what could happen. So then you are stuck, frozen.
Some of you know I've recently started a yoga teacher training program— it's really cool, it's also a lot of reading and studying so that’s where I'm taking in most of my information right now. My teacher gave us a great analogy to help visualize this act, in the yoga practice, of putting in the effort— working toward what you want, balanced with non-attachment to the results— accepting the results of your efforts without judgment. And how he describes this is as simple as walking. Every step you take you have to use effort to move your foot in front of yourself— place it in the direction you want to go. But there is a very important other aspect of walking— you then have to release your back foot from where it is so that it can come up to meet you. That back foot is in this “stuckness”, and you have to face that fear of letting go to move it forward.
If you can recognize you’re stuck— that's good! It means you're already trying to get somewhere. You aren’t complacent. It means you don't necessarily have to put in more effort, but maybe, consider if there’s something you need to let go of.
I think this idea of “letting go” can be particularly difficult to grasp. There’s a clear distinction between “letting go” and “pushing down”. “Pushing down” is pretty easy: ignore it, distract yourself, hide it. But for “letting go”, there’s no clear instruction on how to do it, it's all very nebulous. People will say “just let it go,” to which I usually respond, “fuck off”.
Tonight for our open discussion, I want to know how you all let go in your life and in your art practice. Let’s try to write a better script for “letting go”.
We always love to hear the contributions of our community, particularly around this theme of getting un-stuck. We heard people speak about the importance of rituals, both personal and cultural, the ways they reconnect to themselves through nature, or shift their perspective by trying something new. Some allow themselves to move on from something that isn’t working through extremes, like destructive acts. We also discussed self judgment and it’s impact on our ability to tap into our skillful selves. I hope these ideas and questions will create an opportunity to open up new conversations and dialogues in your own communities.
