What Are You Doing, Julie??
I made a decision that is vague and formless and without guarantee, and also requires attention, detail, self-awareness, and tirelessness.
I am not working for a month. No day job, no part-time. I am meditating, working through “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron, and writing music for a month. This may sound ideal to some, stupid or entitled or not a big deal to others. One of many motivations for this month was that I recently had a conversation with a friend who had decided to switch from being an actor to going back to school for social work and possibly an eventual law degree. When I asked her why the switch, she responded, “When I really sat down with myself, I just knew I didn’t actually want to spend my energy putting in the kind of work it would take to be an actor. But I’ll always be a performer at heart.”
And I thought, “Good lord, have I ever been that honest with myself about what I want to do?”
For me, this month is a small protest against my denial of past years as well as an experiment. For almost a decade, I have gone through a series of begrudging and slow admittances. At first, I pretended that I just couldn’t find the correct job or career path, I wasn’t sure of what I wanted to do. (This kept concerned adults off my back for a bit). And so I bought myself some time and meandered in a career-malaise for five years after college, working various and multiple jobs, none of them satisfying whatever I was craving. I had an ex tell me I was never going to find what I was looking for – which is laughable considering no one should ever say that to another person, and also considering that I was years away from saying out loud what I actually was looking for.
I wrote two songs in college. Stopped. Started again in 2016 and wrote most of the songs I have now, maybe 10 “finished” – (are they ever fucking finished?) – songs. Stopped. I didn’t write again for three years, but all the while was reading memoirs of artists and musicians, how-to-creativity books while deeply embarrassed that I needed a how-to at all. In 2019, I admitted that I at least wanted to move to New York City so I could be near music, so I could see live shows, so I could perform if I wanted to. I was inching myself closer to the edge, like a little kid who’s still in swimmies inching her way to dip her toes in the deep end. But I still wasn’t writing.
After having a conversation in April with a fellow musician about Charlie Parker locking himself in his apartment for two years to play music for 16 hours a day and do heroin, I said, “Fuck it. I’m tired of saying I want something and not doing anything to move toward it.” It’s easy to think that if you love something enough, you will magically just find a way to do it. This is not the case for me. It seems that I find every excuse I can not to write. When I told a friend a few years ago how writing for me was often like extracting an arrow lodged in my chest and that I ran away from it as much as possible, his response was, “Well, maybe you just shouldn’t write.” I’ve hated that response ever since he voiced it.
Annie Dillard was the one person who gave me permission to realize and admit that I was cripplingly afraid of writing, and rightly so. Her small masterpiece, The Writing Life, is a mortar and pestle to the ego if you’re stuck in the shadowlands of thinking you want to write when all you really want is attention (large neon blinking arrow to my head.) In representing the frustrating, often fruitless, painstaking process of writing, Annie uses the metaphor of an architect who has a sole worker who refuses to work on the architect’s building design, claiming it is faulty. She writes, “Acknowledge, first, that you cannot do nothing . . . Subject the next part, the part at which the worker balks, to harsh tests. It harbors an unexamined and wrong premise. Something completely necessary is false or fatal. Once you find it, and if you can accept the finding, of course it will mean starting again. This is why many experienced writers urge young men and women to learn a useful trade.” I’ve always hated when artistic types say, “If you can do without this [art], you should try.” It’s always seemed egotistical or pejorative to me. But now I get it. The thought of so much self-accountability, starting and failing and having to be one the one who declares you yourself have failed, terrifies me and seems so pointless.
But I really do have masochist in my bloodstream. Whatever terrifies me, I’m a bloodhound for. So, when I realized I kept saying I wanted to be a singer-songwriter while simultaneously sneaking out the backdoor of my brain and action to get away from just that, I figured I should test myself. At least I’ll know whether I’m a total fraud and attention-grabber, or whether this is what I need to do. Bob Dylan’s words that the world doesn’t need any more songs ring in my ears daily. But I guess that’s a good litmus test if I persist in writing songs while the greatest American songwriter repeats that mantra in my ear.
So, I am dedicating this month to meditation, working through “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron, and writing music. I will be giving updates, either written or video recorded, each day. Not for attention or because “this is so original” but because I read a book years ago called Show Your Work by Austin Kleon and one of his pieces of advice was to share your creative processes with others rather than wait to show a perfected result. That and I am so horribly cock-blocked when it comes to expressing what I truly think and feel that I’m forcing myself to put out processes/anything I’m working on where a roving eye could see it if it wanted. Seeing as how I’m pretty obsessed with people’s sketch books and rough drafts, watching people apply makeup on the subway, and existential crises in the midst of trying to get somewhere, I figured keeping some kind of public record was a good idea.
Good lord, here we fucking go.