#18 Sorry, I Can't Make Art All The Time
A letter to myself, but also to anyone who expects too much from themselves
Good morning!
Do you sometimes tend to inflict unnecessary pressure on and demand too much from your speck of a human self?
Come, let us knock some sense into you. And me.
(If you’re special and free from excessive self-expectation and thus probably not from this world, then k, congrats! we hate you! bye! jk)
Now as a (tough) love letter to myself, this may be very specific to my writing life. But that was my intention: to illustrate exactly how and why one’s expectations from one’s self can simply be unreasonable.
Basically, I think I’m partly deranged. Here’s how I’m talking myself out of it.
Dear self,
I know you’re very much committed to your writing as an artistic pursuit. I know you want every single thing you ship to feel or seem like art. And I respect that!
But I’m sorry to break it to you.
YA CAN’T MAKE ART ALL THE TIME.
You know why?
Remember The Birds of America by John James Audobon? That beautiful, big-ass sketchbook with an intricately painted bird in its habitat that you saw in the New York Public Library? As you learned in the description, it took Audobon twelve years to complete that.
Remember when you were writing this newsletter and you found out that it took Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet to whom we owe the famous line “It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all”, seventeen—seventeen!—years to finish his masterpiece from which the aforementioned line was taken?
Every Pixar movie takes about five years to create. Your all-time favorite personal essay on Medium that you’ve read a dozen times? It took the author “seven months and 10,000 words scrapped” to finish it. Your birthday essay from last year which you consider your personal best so far? You wrote that for a whole month—and had been mulling it over for much longer!
See what I’m tryna say?
Art. takes. TIME.
When you feel like haven’t been able to make much *art*, it’s not you.
IT’S ART. IT DEMANDS TIME TO MAKE IT!
If you were making art more quickly it wouldn’t most likely be art. That would be, idk, this thing that starts with the letter C and rhymes with schmontent?
Srsly, I don’t understand why you beat yourself up almost every week feeling like you’ve fallen short of your standards. Oh wait… Actually, I do know why. It’s because your expectations are too freaking high for your fun-sized Asian self. I mean you’re not even five feet!!!
(Okay, that was uncalled for.)
Take your inspiration for Skinny Deep: Haley Nahman and her newsletter, Maybe Baby.
Look, I know she’s your ultimate peg. She showed you that it’s possible to write about whatever the hell you want to write about, in the way you want to write it, and build a readership from it. The nature and caliber of her work served as some kind of compass for your lost baby writer soul.
And you so badly want to write at that level. To be able to pump out a hard-hitting piece every week the way Haley does.
But let’s pull up the facts.
Haley was a feature editor in an actual publication for four years. She’s written for various other publications including the New York Times. She was an Instagram influencer at one point. And her newsletter now? She does that full-time.
Meanwhile, you, a self-taught writer who just started over the pandemic, have a day job.
I don’t know about you, but to expect yourself to produce at her level is NUTS.
This is not to say you won’t ever. You will get there. But in the meantime, for the love of god, you’ve got to adjust your expectations. Meet yourself where you’re at!
Don't compare your beginning to someone else's middle, or your middle to someone else's end. Don't compare the start of your second quarter of life to someone else's third quarter. —Jon Acuff
Also, consider this: WHAT IF… it’s all really, kind of, in some way… art?
Like I know you think a piece has to be The Most Important and Most Eloquent Essay Ever for it to be art, but what if you might just be gate-keeping what counts as art?
What if your mere willingness to experiment, your refusal to abide by any kind of template or to write according to “what works”, your insistence on honing your voice and preserving your creative sovereignty, your courage to mine your life and simply write something honest (while this voice in your head keeps saying “Who the hell are you for people to care about??”), your persistence to close that gap between your taste and your ability, are what makes all of this… art?
What if “art” is less in what you produce, but in the process and spirit of producing it?
And WHAT IF *gasp* you actually allow yourself *gasp* to be proud of everything? *gasp*
When you decided to start writing, you signed up for all of it: great work, good work, and, yes, a lot of okay work. And you’ve been told: the quality of your work and your feelings about it will fluctuate. Why? Because you’re human! It’s not human to be “on” or to function at 100% all the time!! Not only in creating, but in life in general. There will be slumps and you will suddenly get hit by the flu and your schedule is gonna get wrecked as your best friend asks you to spend the weekend with her as she nurses a freshly-broken heart. And that’s okay.
Like any rewarding process, your creativity is dynamic. Sometimes you’re going to write something emotionally draining and immensely cathartic, and sometimes you’re going to write listicles. Sometimes you’re going to dare to try new things, and sometimes you’re going to stick to your forte and share another life lesson. Sometimes you’re going to write The Most Important and Most Eloquent Essay Ever—and absolutely revel in being as precious AF about it for a month or two or more—, and sometimes you’re simply going to write a letter to yourself overnight. The latter may be far from polished, but it is just as real—and certainly no less valuable.
Take it easy on yourself. I have a feeling you’ll create better if you do.
Your kind, compassionate, and very reachable self,
❤️ Ria
*PS. Replace the word “create” with virtually any other verb.
If you liked this, help your girl out & like this post! Or recommend it to someone who might relate. You can also comment on the post or reply to this email. In any case, it’ll really motivate me! (which I definitely need, lol) ♡
This was so beautifully crafted. Just the perfect inspiration that I needed. Its undoubtedly hard to churn out content while having a regular day job. I read your few articles and found them deeply motivating. Keep up the good work Ria :)