Thursday, June 26, 2025
People are gross sometimes. Artists can be especially gross to each other—it feels like that a lot these days. Heads down. Earbuds in. Quick reactions.
Watch where you’re walking.
Get the fuck out of my way, asshole.
I was here first.
No, that wasn’t your parking spot.
How did you get that grant? Or that show?
I deserved that teaching or exhibition opportunity more than you.
I’m suffering more.
We’re all suffering.
There isn’t a final barometer for who wins the pain Olympics, but it feels like we’re all competing—like suffering the most is now a kind of currency to get art opportunities. Who deserves them? And why?
Look, I get it—it’s survival. But I also think this relentless turning inward might be part of our final undoing.
I know I’m probably supposed to talk about the here and now instead of yesterday. Isn’t that the point of a morning journal—or any dedicated space, really—where whatever flies out is allowed to stick or land or maybe not even manifest at all?
The world feels like it’s imploding. And I have this tendency to feel pain deeply, especially after expressing something personal—like talking about my father and trying to write about it yesterday. I go inward. It takes a great deal of coaching to get me out of that protective shell.
But yesterday was hard in terms of how long it felt. So many gaps I filled with negative self-talk. And fear. Those two—I’m really good at them when there’s empty space to fill. Especially after I’ve been vulnerable. Especially after doing something creatively risky. Or experimental.
So much of artistic training gears us toward mastery: skill, craft, some version of perfection. And what we usually see is the perfect landing—the skillful, witty, seemingly casual improvisation.
But it doesn’t happen like that. Not creatively. At least not for me.
To get started, I’ll coach myself to make the thing. Do the thing. It could be as simple as just getting out of bed. But then there are the gaps—the spaces in the day. And for me, as someone who has the ridiculous privilege of being a professor and having my summers off, I have a lot of time on my hands. A privilege. But as the saying goes: time is the devil’s workshop.
Over past summers, I’d construct some elaborate project or hobby to fill that time. This summer, it’s about trying to get outside and bike more.
There are good days and bad days in how I evaluate the time I’ve been given to work. Most days, I require myself to do some form of yoga or meditation—for consistency. It helps. I think it’s good to have consistency when you’re trying to be creative. It can give you clarity—or at least help you connect the dots between things.
But lately, I’ve been noticing a pattern. When I try something new creatively, and I share that skill—at first, I get excited. I want to show what I did. And then there’s the second part. The second part has been tricky. Because the world right now feels like an imploding mess. It’s such an easy magnet for doomscrolling. Or just sinking into a sense of isolation and darkness.
To offset this, yesterday I tried to say hello to my new neighbor. They’ve lived next door for over seven months. We’ve exchanged generalized acknowledgments, but never a formal hello. I was walking to get Thai food and noticed I was looking down again. So I raised my gaze, tried to make eye contact, offered a friendly hello.
Their expression: irritated. Annoyed and bothered.
I thought—well, I tried.
I was thinking: when we are wounded, it’s a subconscious thing. We are seeking some kind of ointment from the world to calm the pain. And that’s probably a resistance to capacity. You can only give out as much as you can give to yourself. And I think this relates directly to our own capacity as creative people in our work.
It is better to integrate than to force yourself to play a role that demands more energy than you have.
The creative persona has evolved—and become more pronounced—with the integration of social media. In the past, there seemed to be a bit more downtime, more space between the public performance of the artist and the private, quieter act of creation.
Breaking down the barriers between private and public is, in many ways, a good thing. But there’s also now a performance of the artist in production that’s constantly on display. Instead of just working, creative people are expected to document every step of their process as a means to gain traction or generate interest in the work.
I can’t help but think this contributes to an energy drain—and it also affects our ability to let bad work be made.
The truth is, it doesn’t matter what the feedback is when we share something creatively with the world. What matters is the consistency. I can say with certainty that showing up for yourself—regardless of how you feel—makes a difference. Definitely.
This morning, while driving to get tea (another routine to get me out of the house), the phrase “Practice Makes Imperfect” kept popping into my head. And the more I ruminated on it, the more it made sense.
There’s this idea of the maestro—someone who struggles and suffers and creates their masterpiece in a dark, medieval hole. The misunderstood artist. The outcast. The tortured genius. A symbol of dedication, pain, and loneliness.
Did I mention I live in a coach house with very little light?
Maybe there’s some truth in clichés. But today I thought: Practice makes Imperfect—because the longer we do something consistently, the more we relax into our minds and bodies. That familiarity brings wisdom. But also, our inner creative demons and saboteurs become less volatile. We begin to see our imperfections more clearly. And some of them change—like how we render a beautiful landscape, or translate a poem perfectly onto the page.
But practice lets us sit more comfortably with the mess.
And I think for me, that’s when the real shift happens—when I allow myself to just create. To make something without expectation. To enjoy being in the moment with the work.
All the garbage—feedback, criticism, ambivalence—that’s going to follow us no matter where we go. And with the speed and expectation of today’s world, it’s only going to get more aggressive. More disengaged.
Practice makes Imperfect because we’re human. And good art isn’t a reflection of perfection. It’s a reflection of the human experience.