I’m starting a new month-long workshop for this month. May will be focused on creativity and the public eye (it’s a natural segue from the posts showing up on this blog before the April hiatus). The first third of the month will zero in on the “fear of failure.” Because today, this workshop is no longer hypothetical to me. It’s real and personal. My latest book is on submission and my own creativity feels a bit frail.
So, without further ado:
What creative pursuit do you consider important to your soul? Do you write history, draw, design, take pictures, sing, create movies, or dream up magical worlds? Do you ponder the meaning of life? Do you, as Eric Maisel writes in his book, Deep Writing, “smile, comply, do the dishes, and trot off to school [or work], but inside wheels are spinning and gears are grinding?” Do you think to yourself, again quoting from Maisel, “Now, what is really true about the world and what is just convention? . . . What’s good and what’s bad? How can I use myself, amuse myself, and do some grand things?”
I do. I don’t know if I think actual thoughts like those, but I do wonder a lot about the world and things that make me ponder and say “Hm, I wonder if that’s true or not?” to myself. I’m a theorist, I admit. I create theories of the world and then turn them over and over like stones in my head. I realize it’s me trying to make meaning. I’m a human, a “creation,” sayeth Julia Cameron of The Artist’s Way fame. I seek to connect the dots, yearn to make some sense of this life that has been handed to me. I did not have a choice in the matter of being; I simply exist. I have no choice either in what happens to me; things occur. To put it all together and live each day sometimes requires that I look deeper than simply doing the dishes and “trot off to work,” it requires that there be some sort of plan or purpose. I need to find out what I’m here for. I must be “creative” just as I am created.
Now, my creativity will not impact others in the same way. Oftentimes, what touches me deeply doesn’t scratch the surface of others and vice versa. We’re individual “creations,” and, as David, a Hebrew psalmist, wrote, “fearfully and wonderfully made.” Not one of us is identical. Even twins are individuals, completely separate, something all their own, and unique.
Thus, I am careful with how much of my own creative pursuits I share with others. First of all, I don’t want people to think something’s wrong with me. Second, I tend to only trust my family and close friends to understand my creativity, because they understand me. They know me. It’s a human condition to not trust people we don’t know well.
Plus, it takes quite a lot to share your creativity with others. It changes the creativity action into something else—something more akin to handing someone an apple. To you, it is this thing that is red on the outside, but white on the inside. To someone else, this apple may look like a spiny core holding seeds, something to be thrown away and discarded. That’s why as humans handing our creativity, our apples, to others, we edit. We keep back the creative work we’ve done—how we view the apple—and remark instead at how perfectly ripe it is and how good it tastes. We leave out other remarks about the seeds or spiny core; those are unnecessary and we worry other people wouldn’t understand what we “mean” anyway.
Where did that fear come from? This fear of being reviewed, critiqued, and being told “no.” Why is it with us? Why does it attach to everything we do that is creative? Why does it attach to everything we do to live? It’s rather an odd emotion. Why would we have to fear that others would reject our creativity?
We fear rejection from society at large because to us it’s a faceless mass—an entity so big and overwhelming that it helps to shut down our creative. We feel that if our sixth sense tells us to fear the unknown feeling of rejection, we should. We are safer if we don’t share too much and just continue the status quo.
But we don’t actually fear the faceless masses; we fear ourselves. We know deep down (our sixth sense) that someone somewhere may reject us, may review, critique, and say “no.” And that is actually not anyone else. That is us. We reject, review, critique, and say “no” to ourselves.
The fear of the public eye, of being creative, of trying something new and stepping out with it to a world full of other creative people, is real. It’s palpable. And that’s why we’ll spend the entire month of May talking about it.
Action Step: What is one creative pursuit that if you just let go of all fear and did it, would make you extremely happy?
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