Freeformist

As 2023 began, I was flying high. 

My band, Mystic Tiger, had just performed an incredible single release concert for our biggest audience yet. I had set up all my original paintings on the wall behind us, and got several purchase inquiries after the show. 

What an epic start to the year, I crowed. I envisioned that by the end of 2023, I’d be a thriving, financially successful artist. My band would be performing for thousands of people all over the West Coast, I’d be doing creative expression work with six genius kids a week, and I’d be selling my art online, in local stores, at markets, and to wealthy patrons all over the state. 

That didn’t happen.

Nope, what actually happened is that my band – which I had put so many hopes and dreams into over the past five years – disbanded. 

Despite all my attempts to attract creative expression clients, from flyers and Facebook posts to vendor fairs and sample classes, I only continually worked with one kid, the same one I’ve worked with since 2020.

As for selling art, I set up a booth at an art market and in eight hours, made a grand total of $0. 

If I wanted to write a story about how I had dreams and aspirations for this year and failed to achieve them, and how I failed to make more money than I spent, those are the details I would use. 

But that’s not how I choose to tell the story of this year. 

The story is so much deeper and more beautiful than that. In fact, it’s much deeper and more beautiful than the grandiose one I had initially crafted for myself at the start of the year. 

This is a story about what happened when I stuck with the artist’s journey – when no matter what hardships arose, I kept creating. I kept singing, and I kept painting. And I kept listening to what wanted to be created through me. 

___________________________________________

“Go to the woods and sing.” 

“Wha?” 

“Go to the woods, and sing some melodies, and try to visualize the sound. That might help you understand how to capture it in your painting.” 

These were the instructions given to me by Joe Bob, one of the teachers in my weeklong visionary art workshop, Mixtek Mystics, at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in upstate New York. It was October, and I stood in front of twenty of my fellow artists in the freshly-remodeled classroom for intensive visionary art study. Every day for the past week, each of us had spent hours and hours sitting at our easels, looking into the mirror, and drawing what we saw. Our facial features, the light reflecting on our hair, the subtle blues and greens mixed in with the yellows and pinks of our skin. 

I had decided to draw myself singing, with my mouth open and my hands outstretched. For almost the entire day before, I had been stuck on the hands. Drawing, erasing, painting in, then painting over. Just when I thought I had captured their exact pose, Amanda, our teacher, would come over and point out something I missed. The positioning of the second left knuckle. The bend of the right pinky finger. Over and over and over I tried, until I wanted to throw something. 

I cried at lunchtime that day. I felt so frustrated by my inability to make my hands look real and alive. I felt so humbled, knowing how many more hours and years and decades of painting experience the visionary artists of CoSM had on me, and how much more complex and vibrant and dedicated their pieces were. I felt worry that I didn’t belong at this workshop, that the students around me had moved on to later stages of their paintings and I was falling behind because I had made things unnecessarily hard for myself and because I was so goddamn precious with every tiny stroke I made. 

“Why am I spending so much time on this??” I griped to Joe Bob.

He paused. “Do you want to render the hands well?”

“Yes,” I said instantly, without thinking.

“Then that’s enough. Who cares about the why?”

True that.

Eventually, with Amanda’s patient guidance, I got my hands in a place I was satisfied with. My physical form was more or less rendered well. 

Now, after all the careful looking at observational 3D reality, it was time for the inner eye to do its work. Hence, why I went to the woods to sing to the trees. I needed to figure out how to paint my singing. 

On the grounds of CoSM, the fall leaves swayed in the New York autumn breeze, and I breathed in crisp air, trying to bring it into my chest and ease the tension that had built up there.

Tension was a thing I had been constantly feeling in my chest and body since I got laid off at the beginning of 2022 and decided to become an artistic entrepreneur. 

“Tension makes it hard to sing,” Crystal, my new voice teacher, said to me in one of our first lessons at the start of 2023. “The stress we experience manifests as tension in our bodies, and that shuts down our voice, because it’s all connected.” 

She taught me a series of body exercises designed to access and release years of pent-up tension in our bodies, to free our voices. In her intimate zoom class of four students, I laid on the floor of my bedroom with my legs in an extended butterfly shape, and felt my thighs vigorously trembling of their own accord. The shaking spread to my torso and flung my arms all around. It felt so forceful that I would have been scared if she hadn’t assured us that this was what’s supposed to happen. 

I worked once a month with Crystal for the whole year, and she taught me everything from releasing my tension and straightening my posture to letting my body’s wisdom steer the ship of vocal technique, rather than my mind directing. 

“Your body knows,” she would say as she had me cough and feel which part of my diaphragm was engaged, and how. She had me sing the most difficult phrases of my favorite musical theater songs with an exaggerated expression like excitement or wonder, and let it naturally guide me to the right vocal placement. 

After I sang “The Light in the Piazza” in our March lesson, more easily and freely than I thought was possible, I cried and she held me. “I feel so grateful,” I sobbed, remembering the years and years of frustration and despair I had felt, trying and failing to reach the level of control and precision and power that all my favorite Broadway singers had. Going all the way back to auditions for my second grade talent show, when I stood in front of my class intending to sing “Journey to the Past” from Anastasia but struck with so much fear that nothing came out. 

“I feel so happy that you feel that way,” she said, still hugging me. “It’s a new beginning.” 

____________________________

As the trees swayed in the woods around me, I started singing a made-up melody with made-up words. “What is the shape of my voice?” The sound meandered freely out, full and clear. “I don’t know, but it flows,” was the responding melody. On and on like that, until I had some quality adjectives to works with: flowy, nuanced, focused, multicolored. I came back to the classroom and started playing with a few sketch concepts, until I had one I felt was right. 

It was the last night of our art seminar. We had all been pulling late nighters as the week went on, and developed a special kind of camaraderie as we got delirious and silly from painting until 2 in the morning. Each of us with our unique faces to paint, and visions to render, and set of challenges to overcome. The night before, I had sat at my easel and stared at my self-portrait while doing intensive breathwork, until I saw a lotus appear in the empty space above my portrait’s head.

“Noooo,” I complained to Niko, who sat at the easel next to me. “I don’t wanna paint a lotus. So much worrrrk.” 

He laughed and I heard Amanda’s voice admonishing me in my head: don’t be lazy! So, it was 2am, and I started painting the goddamn lotus. I also painted lightning coming out of my ears because it was 2am and fuck it. 

So, on this last night, we were all in. A bunch of us went outside to commune with the spirit of cannabis, which made me feel goofy and want to dance. Amanda put on a Goldcap Burning Man sunrise set and a few of us started a dance party in the studio, waving our arms and moving and pulsing to the beat. I started imagining how visionary art could save the world. It felt thrilling to think about, and then a bit stressful and then overwhelming as I thought about all the ways I could mess it up. 

Before I could completely spiral into a black hole of self-doubt and anxiety, though, I remembered the simple task at hand – to finish my self-portrait. Fortunately, I only had to color in all the white parts I had built up in my underpainting. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a plan for how to do so. But fortunately, Stacey, a fellow student, had come by my desk that day and commented on the beauty of the colors of my journal cover, which I knew could serve as powerful inspiration for the piece.

I made myself sit back down at my easel. Because I was stoned, I was viscerally feeling all the tension in my body built up from the week of intense focus, and how fast my heart was beating, and how quickly my thoughts were racing. Thoughts like you can’t do this started spinning in my head, threatening to spiral me into the dark place. I tried meditating to remedy it, but it was ineffective. I needed something more aggressive. So I started chugging water and doing push ups on the floor of the studio. At this point, it was late in the night, and the room had largely cleared out. I could be as weird as I wanted to be without disturbing my neighbors. 

 I observed the painting again. I was about to color it in with oil paints, borrowed from Niko, which I had never in my life used before. With one larger brush, I tentatively plopped a bit of yellow onto one of the energy ripples, and with a smaller brush, started blending it in as Niko had instructed me. 

Oh. My. God. 

SO VIBRANT!

SO MALLEABLE! 

SO CREAMY!

“I fucking love oil painting,” I said to the mostly empty room. This was the paint of my dreams. The answer to my prayers. I started going in, spreading the yellow around the center of the ripples and on what I envisioned as the brightest parts of the song lines. Then I went in with green. Purple. Green mixed with purple. Fuck it. I started mixing colors I never even knew existed before. Started blending them all together. Dancing the whole time I was doing it. 

Time stood still and I kept painting. The last person left the studio around 5am and I kept painting. What if I added orange under the yellow, like a shadow?? Ideas and epiphanies burst into my consciousness, and without hesitation, I enacted them. This is the most epic stoner coloring book ever. 

I took breaks to chug more water and do more pushups. So much energy moving through me. 

As the sun rose, people started waking up and filtering back into the room. Picking up on and remarking on my ecstatic energy, and my painting, and flowing with it – they started dancing, started putting enthusiastic finishing touches on their works. I smiled and kept painting. Niko captured the moment on his phone. 

Amanda came in, and looked at my painting, beaming. “Yeah,” she said. 

“I think I just had my visionary artist initiation,” I replied. 

“Wanna put some casein on it?” She showed me how to use the milk-based medium over the oils, and I swept it in confident, steady strokes over the lotus and the lightning as the others started setting up chairs for our closing circle. 

I finished just as we began the circle. We each had a few minutes to present our painting to the room and share anything we wanted about it. I teared up as the others showed theirs. So much beauty, so much uniqueness in each. They were tearing up, too. When it was my turn, I literally sank to my knees and sobbed onto the floor for like a minute straight. Restraining my emotions wasn’t the vibe I was on. The floodgates opened for others, too. Even the CoSM social media guy doing video recording in the back of the room cried. 

“I feel so grateful,” I finally said. “I never thought I would be here, painting what I just painted.” 

It was true. Five years ago, when I first came to CoSM, I could only gape at the works of visionary artists like Amanda and Alex Grey and the students who studied with them. I had just started to draw and paint a tiny bit, and they were scribbles in comparison. I didn’t even dream that I’d be able to study with my painting idol at the Mecca of visionary art, let alone advance my skills as much as I have working with her over the past two years. And I never dreamed I’d be able to become a part of the visionary art community, a fraction of whom had made my week at CoSM more joyful, inspiring, and full of more growth than I had thought was possible. 

Even though I made probably less than $18k this whole year, $32k less than I had envisioned, 

and even though my band broke up, 

and even though I missed most of the shots I took trying to get new clients and customers, 

the truth is that I don’t care. It’s so much more than okay. 

Because in pursuing this scary new path of being an artist, I fell more and more in love with the journey of painting and singing and creatively co-creating. I discovered deeper and deeper levels of total creative flow state that exist on the other side of resistance, fear, avoidance, and frustration – a state of being that has become one of my most important reasons for living. 

And you know what? That ~$18k I made all came from my creative passions. It came from 

-My first ever painting commissions and painting sales ($500-$1000 each),

-Making a hilarious, wild and profound graphic novel series with a genius pre-teen,

-Facilitating creative expression classes for Black, brown, and Asian American youth,

-And my first ever singing job, being a professional Christmas caroler for parties, restaurants, and city events. 

I can honestly say I loved every moment of it. And that feels worth celebrating. 

That self-portrait story, you you hadn’t already guessed, is just one story of many creative challenges of my year. 

There’s the story of my first Burning Man, where we forgot the floor of our tent and had to deal with torrential rain.

There’s the story of my life as a Christmas caroler, where I had to learn 110 holiday songs and then sing for up to six hours a day through the whole month of December, almost losing my voice in the process and figuring out how to sing through it. 

And of course, each and every painting has its own story, its own unique way of speaking to me and challenging me to see more deeply, to push my comfort zone, to create what has never been created before. 

In 2024, I’m going to continue to surrender myself to the mysterious, magical flow of creativity and see where it takes me. I know I’ll continue to go to places beyond the imaginings of anything I could dream up today.

I started 2022 with a bang, getting fired from a non-profit organization for the third time.

At this point, the experience felt so repetitive as to be almost comedically predictable.

“Maybe it would be good if you didn’t jump back into a 9-5 job anytime soon,” my mom said carefully when I told her the news. You know it’s bad (good??) when your mom is suggesting you delay the act of having a normal job.

I felt shitty for a few days, and then I made a ~monumental vow~ to myself: this would be the last “normal job” I ever worked. This would be the last time I used my sacred mental and emotional energy to execute someone else’s vision that I didn’t vibe with. The last time I would do something only because I was being paid to do it. 

From now on, I would only do work that I loved. And that could only mean:

In the most theatrical and unsolicited exit from a job ever, I wrote a farewell song and emailed the recording to 100 people at my organization, announcing they fired me and that this made me finally feel ready to pursue my artistic dreams. 

And then I decided that for the next six months at least, I would exclusively dedicate myself to improving my artistic crafts. Due to my lifelong habit of extreme frugality, I had enough funds saved to keep me going for a while. (around $50k, woo for normalizing talking about how much money we have) Even though I wanted to do this more than anything, the idea still made me cringe. Is this allowed? Is this grossly privileged? Is this a gigantic waste of time?

It’s wild how deeply engrained the societal concept of “you-need-to-be-working-all-the-fucking-time-unless-you’re-in-grad-school” is. As I struggled with my shame around once more being unemployed and not looking for work, I tried reframing the narrative, telling myself I was putting myself through DIY art school.

But unfortunately, this requires a very difficult thing: working very hard.

Being focused and self-disciplined. 

Ah.

I tried to remember the last time I continually worked very hard. Probably junior year of high school. That was the last time I had a clear motive to work hard – getting into a good college – and a clear map to direct me there. Since then, the motives for hard work have been much more ambiguous: 

It turns out that when I worked for other people, a) there was always a limit to how much money I could make, no matter how hard I worked, and b) I wasn’t motivated to succeed at my job because I didn’t think my job was that important or relevant. 

But now, everything was different. My success carrying out my mission on this planet to give my gifts in service of collective healing would be largely contingent on how hard I worked. 

This felt exciting. I was super down to work hard. It felt like I had been in limbo for the past 15 years, preserving my energy, just waiting for the moment when it was time to give something my all. In those 15 years, I had explored the world, grown beautiful friendships, raised my vibration, discovered my passions, realized my true desires, and had a lifetime’s worth of epic adventures. Now, it was time for all of that to be channeled into real creative power. 

But as I tried to discipline and focus myself into writing songs and practicing singing and playing piano and painting, I soon realized I had several things blocking me from working as hard as I wanted to. 

Overcoming the Blocks

In a cosmic stroke of fortune, an incredibly gifted facilitator and coach** I had worked with at my nonprofit reached out to me soon after I got laid off and offered me eight free spiritual and somatic coaching sessions over the course of a few months. We explored a different block in each one, and a lot of what I share below came from those sessions.

**her name is rebecca mintz and I can’t recommend her enough!

1. My Convoluted Relationship to Money

If I were to start down a path intending for it to lead to me creating income myself, rather than collecting a paycheck, I realized that I had to improve my relationship with money.

First, I had to be okay with even giving it my attention. I felt embarrassed to be thinking about it. Somehow, I felt like focusing on making money would make me a cutthroat capitalist, turning me into the very thing I was trying to change.

And then as I looked more closely, I saw myself struggling to hold up two extreme belief buckets at the same time:

This one was visceral – a panicky jumpy feeling in my stomach. The most primal fear of death. And then, layers of shame and anxiety and frustration on top of it for making my family worry about me, for not being able to provide for others, for not knowing how to be successful at making money.

This one I felt more in my mind than my whole body – a disdain of disconnected rich people, a fear that I would hoard wealth if I had any, that I would create fucked up power dynamics if I tried redistributing it, that I would spend all my time consuming instead of creating, that I’d lose my interdependence with friends and family, that I’d be unable to relate anymore to people in financial struggle.

As I felt myself holding the buckets, I realized:

And then,

As I dropped the bucket in my left hand, I said, It is a fact that I will not actually die if I run out of money. Also, I have enough to last at least a year, maybe two. Also, maybe I don’t know how to make money, but I will learn. It is safe to relax my body.

As I dropped the bucket in my right hand, I said, I know myself and am rooted enough in my values and desires that I will not let money change me negatively. I will direct money I receive towards the highest good, along with my community.

What becomes possible when I drop the buckets? Relaxation, spaciousness, creativity, and actual progress forward towards my dreams. I’ve got some grand ones – not just making a successful living as a singer/artist/facilitator but also eventually starting a school, a village, maybe even a whole city, with a beloved community. That’s gonna take some money. Green bucket was especially reassured by this and now sits contently on the floor, for now.

Dropping the red bucket was and is a harder process. For months after getting laid off, I woke up every morning with ~debilitating anxiety and panic~ in my chest. Some days, it was all I could do to sit with and soothe the feeling.

I’ve been living for so long in an intensive state of scarcity around money on my meager non-profit salaries, scrutinizing every purchase and turning down experiences that “cost too much.” But I knew that I’d have to start shifting that to invite abundance in. So I decided to spend more on things I knew would support my artistic endeavors, like buying an iPad for digital art and paying for a semester of online visionary art school. Trusting and letting energy flow rather than stockpiling it all for eternity.

I also had to let go of my comparisons, making peace with not making as much money as most people my age, and trusting that money will flow to me in time if I stay aligned with my joy and purpose.

2. My crippling self-doubt

Idk what it’s like for y’all, but my self-doubt around my creative abilities is nearly constant, and it restricts everything in my body. It shows up as fear in my fingers when I try to play piano, blockage in my throat when I try to sing. It makes my lines wobbly when I try to paint. It’s amazing to me that after positive affirmation of my talents from probably hundreds of people over the years, I could still feel like I’m not good enough to create a life I love doing what I want. Who am I to do that?

The self-doubt looked like a dense grey cloud in front of me, cutting off my vision and blocking my channels.

The cloud had a message for me.

The cloud was trying to protect me, I knew. Don’t take risks, play it safe. Take the path of least resistance.

The cloud had fear-based advice for me. The cloud was probably mixed up in some deep Asian intergenerational trauma shit. The cloud meant well, but being a cloud, couldn’t see the whole context I was in.

And then I thought about my three year old self.

She was lightness and movement. Constant dancing and singing in my living room, constant creativity. Watching her, I felt sad. I wished that I grew up in a world where I could still feel like that so effortlessly. I grieved that I lost that connection for such a long time and am just starting to get it back now.  Not just grieving it for myself, but for everyone.

Wanting so badly to be connected to my three year old self, but feeling blocked by the cloud, I tried listening to what she had to tell me.

It’s safe to be creative, it’s safe to be playful. She was so carefree.

And then I invited my wise higher self (they/she) to join me. I connected vertically with them, grounding in dignity, expanding upwards in source wisdom. What message did she have for me?

You are brilliant, so go shine – as I sat with these words resounding in my consciousness, I felt something in front of me dissolve. The self-doubt cloud. And amazingly, I could suddenly see more clearly. Colors and light in my bedroom more defined. I could see my spiritual coach on the computer screen just as she was without any of my projections. Seeing the way I do when I’m drawing something. Seeing without fear.

I recalled all the times I felt grounded in my power like this, connected and full of energy. When I’m dancing at a rave. When I’m holding space for someone going through something challenging. When I’m guiding meditation. And more and more, when I’m painting and singing. The more I do it, the more powerful I feel.

I wanted to do things from this place, slow and stabilized and confident instead of panicked and rushed and tight. I visualized myself walking in the sunshine towards the horizon of my beautiful vision with slow and joyful steps. Instead of struggling, I walked easily, taking my time. Changing the weather.

3. My resistance to structure

Midway through the year, I decided to make a website declaring myself as a singer, visual artist, writer, and facilitator of meditation and creative expression for kids. It was pretty remarkable how much this simple project helped me feel legit, like oh, this is for real now. I gotta dot com.

As parents started hitting me up and I began to schedule sessions in my calendar, I started to feel the presence of the Box as a heavy weight on my chest.

The Box is the artificial, rectangular order and structure of society that moves us away from our organic nature and towards “the machine”. It’s your time getting split into back-to-back boxes on Google Calendar. It’s your conversations getting scripted into meeting agendas and your socializing getting quantified into Likes on a smartphone. It’s flat and boring and sucks all the fun and creativity and spontaneity out of life. In my humble opinion.

I hated the Box! I hated structure.

Structure can help you, my wise higher self said.

I knew they were right. A big part of why I was struggling to practice all the music and art I wanted to was because I had virtually no structure in my life – just long stretches of open time that ran for days on end. I had no deadlines, no concrete goals. I was suspicious of those and avoided them, hoping to “just flow”. But I was drifting on the open sea, and kept getting distracted by whatever happened to be right in front of me – parties, Instagram, texting. I could always practice tomorrow, right?

“What kind of structure do you think could help you?” my coach asked.

I spontaneously grabbed the painting I had recently finished of the seven chakras, or energy centers of the body.

“It’s dynamic, and cosmic,” I said, looking at the art. “Playful, divine order, structure that supports flow.” I smiled.

One of the many lessons I’d been learning on my painting journey was that sketching out a structural foundation for my art, making it precise and measured and intentional while taking inspiration from the sacred geometry and mathematics of the universe, actually helped me focus and create more freely on top of it, colors and new lines and shapes emerging organically, the perfect union of structure and flow.

“You know how to create the structure you want,” said my coach. I nodded and cried. Grief. For so long, I had been trapped in other people’s structures that I didn’t want to be in. The box of the classroom, the box of the office. I lost myself, being so dictated by those structures. For the first time since I was 3, I was free of them.

I could structure my life any way I wanted to.

As I felt my grief – and my utter gratitude – and cried, I felt the Box weighing on my chest dissolve.

Creating my own structure has been so fun, and empowering, from getting to pick unique daily rituals like morning breathwork and evening journaling, to getting to make to-do lists comprised entirely of things that I want to do because they support my dreams (or help me exist in modern society like insurance-paying, no getting around that).

4. My historical failures

After an initial flurry of email and phone interest in 1-1 sessions from parents who saw two Facebook posts my original student’s mom wrote, I ended up only picking up one new client, which paid my rent but not much else. This made me conclude I was a failure at life.

And then I was like:

And then a memory from second grade arose. We had all just made paintings of a Navajo woman looking off into the sunset, and our teacher put everyone’s up on the wall.

“Which one is yours, Kelly?” a kid asked me.

“The best one,” I said.

Melody Jones laughed incredulously. “That’s real humble of you,” she said. “Just declaring yours as the best one.”

Well, it was. That was obvious to my seven year old brain – it was way better than all the other kids’, more clearly rendered, more complexly designed, more precisely painted.

Back then, as a big fish in a small pond, I had the best scores in all the academic subjects, too. My self-worth was undisputed. This continued through middle school. The teachers even voted me the Outstanding Girl of my grade (whatever that is supposed to mean).

But then, when the pool grew significantly larger in high school, I quickly became not the best at art anymore. I even became one of the worst at some things: AP Chemistry, basketball, even when I tried valiantly to become better at them. I took thousands of shots at the basketball hoop, but still missed like 85% of them, looking real dumb at practices and games in the process.

Looking back, that was really the time when I gave up on trying to be really good at anything. Basketball was my proof – effort would only end in embarrassment and disappointment. There was a clear ceiling to my improvement, and it wasn’t very high. So I stopped doing art. I stopped singing.

It took a lot of encouragement from friends and also a solid amount of healing psychedelics (hehe) to realize that in fact I could get much better at art and music with practice, and most importantly, it wasn’t about any end goal of “being good” (let alone “the best”), but rather, the joy of doing it, the power of moving others with it, and the thrill of witnessing myself improving slowly but surely because I loved the process itself which was why I was able to get better at it.

If I was gonna be an entrepreneurial artist and pave my own path, I was gonna have to take some shots. Probably a ton of shots.

Who cared if I missed some of them? It would still be fun.

Bringing It All Together

A few weeks ago, my yoga center asked if I’d like to sell my paintings and live paint at their holiday flea market. “Sure,” I said casually as I screamed internally. The market was in a week and a half and I had no paintings to sell. Plus the fact that I had never even exhibited or sold my art to or painted in front of strangers before.

But, I thought, it was a shot I wanted to take.

For the next ten days, I entered a vortex of extreme focus and Golden fluid acrylic paint. I took a painting workshop and finished this piece, putting in maybe 30 hours.

Then I painted this one. I hated it at first, feeling the self-doubt cloud creep in, then persevered through it, attuning to what the piece wanted to be.

I made three trips to the art store for supplies, got business cards made, ordered a tablecloth and a tarp and a display setup. I felt my money-scarcity self writhing in discomfort, but I did it anyway.

With three days to go, I started a new piece, and finished it the evening before the market.

Immediately after, I sketched out a design for the live painting. Then at 10:30 PM, I sped-painted a little square piece and finished at 1AM.

The entire time, I felt extreme stress and tension in my body, but also exhilaration and the most focus I’ve ever experienced.

The next day, I set up my canvases and cards and flyers and easel… and only sold one print and two stickers the whole day. The low foot traffic and fact that I had priced my art really high, like $500-$1200 high (an exercise in valuing myself!), probably helped account for that.

Old me would have deemed it a failure. But now I saw it as a priceless experience: of working through my fears, challenging and pushing myself, and taking a small but significant step toward my dreams.

As we mark the first day of 2023, instead of chastising myself for the lack of external markers of my success, I am celebrating myself for the inner work I’ve undergone to create the joyful and deeply purposeful life I want. For anyone else who is out here doing the same – I see you. This shit ain’t easy. You might have to work through roughly 300 of your subconscious fears and traumas in the process. But it’s worth it. We got this. And the sun is shining.

I haven’t written anything on this blog for the past six months, despite the fact that I declared to everyone in my last post I’d be writing a ton now that I’m unemployed yet again.

I’m going to create! I had announced. I’m going to unapologetically live my best artist life and write every single day and share it with the world!

I did write a lot after posting that. I’ve written thousands and thousands of words these past six months about everything from my solo adventures at the Venice Beach drum circle and psychedelic trance parties in Berlin to tangential esoteric musings on my relationships with nature and with social media and with my friends. I’ve taken writing classes, read books on writing, experimented with writing styles, and have spent more hours than I can count holed up in the corner of the Hollywood-hip late night coffee shop by my house, typing away on my laptop alongside all my fellow patrons working on their movie screenplays and music tracks and stand-up routines. Because I can’t shake the feeling, the deep knowing, inside of me, that I’m supposed to be doing this. That writing about my life and my thoughts and my dreams will somehow help. Help others in ways that I can’t yet see or comprehend.

So why haven’t I released any of it?

You know, the usual. Indecision. Self-doubt. Perfectionism. Fear of judgment. Fear of commitment. Fear of failure. The same stuff that’s held me back my entire life from pursuing my dreams.

What if you post things that make people think you’re naive and silly and a bad person? 

What if you spend all this time writing things and no one reads any of it?  

What if you spend all this time writing things and you find out you’re actually terrible at it? 

What if you end up broke and a failure because you were doing this when other people were doing real-people things like becoming doctors and lawyers?

The day before New Year’s Eve, my uncle died. Suddenly. He had a heart attack in the shower. That was like, a week ago.

A lot of people are very familiar with death. Not me. Until this point, death was still something that happened to other people’s family and friends. It was an abstraction. A far-away concept.

I guess in a way, it still is. When my mom called late at night to break the news, my body sort of shut down. “I’m so sorry to hear that,” I said vaguely to her. I should feel sad right now, I thought. But I can’t feel anything at all. And then: maybe it’s better that I can’t feel anything. Maybe the numbness will keep the sadness away. 

Death is so abrupt. Like one moment your beloved uncle is cooking some epic pad see ew for you and the next he’s a pile of ashes in a little vase. One moment he’s this person texting you juicy Game of Thrones theories and the next he’s being referred to in the past tense.

Was. My uncle was. Stupid past tense. The morning after my mom told me he was dead, I sat down by myself and considered all the things my uncle used to be. My uncle was incredibly smart. And incredibly funny. And generous. And he geeked out over all the same things I did. Like when he took me to see Wicked at the Pantages and we both had tears streaming down our faces during the part where Elphaba and Glinda sing “For Good” and when we blazed at my house after my parents went to bed and listened to the seventh Harry Potter book audio tape and broke into hysterics over the epicness of Jim Dale’s British narrator voice.

And then, remembering all the things he was and knowing that he wasn’t those anymore, that he wasn’t anything anymore, I started crying a lot. Ugly tears. Body-wrenching sobs.

And I realized that feelings aren’t things you can pick and choose from. If you want to be alive, you have to accept the pain with the joy. And there’s something beautiful about that, about the fact that you’re feeling so much. That you’re so alive. So I kept sitting with the pain and kept crying and kept contemplating what my uncle’s death meant to me.

He was apparently a super talented writer. His sister, my aunt, would often say he was the most naturally gifted writer she had ever met, which meant a lot coming from a professional writer for the LA Times. He would shrug and say the characters in his stories had a life of their own. They were talking to each other in his mind and he was just transcribing what they were saying. Really? I would say to the two of them, leaning across the table in my eagerness. Dude, I want to read your stuff!

My uncle wrote a lot, just like me. But I never got to read a single word he put to the page. I don’t want to let anyone see the things I’ve written, he would say to me. Just the thought of it gives me anxiety. 

He had a lot of self-doubt and perfectionism and fear of judgment and fear of failure. Just like me. But he was starting to overcome it – a few months ago, my aunt proposed that she and he and my other aunt all write a novel together and their faith in him helped him agree to it. Their loving support gave him new motivation and bravery to create. Gave him all this new energy and inspiration and then – boom. No more time. No more chances.

The way his life ended is what’s so jarring to me. It wasn’t this fairytale ending at all. It wasn’t the kind of situation where you could say well, at least he lived a full, happy life. You couldn’t say that. Because he never got to create the kind of life he really wanted to live. He was too paralyzed by fear, by some other mental obstacles and trauma he would sometimes hint at but never did tell anyone about.

It’s so jarring because we’re so similar, the two of us. All of this artistic potential and all of this fear getting in the way of it. The only difference is that his fear went on for three decades longer than mine. On and on and on, carving patterns of paralysis deeper and deeper into his psyche until his time ran out.

My uncle liked my writing a lot. He thought my blog was hilarious. He even used the word brilliant. That’s one of the last things he said to me, in fact. It’s brilliant. He never showed me his work, but he never failed to give me the highest praise for mine. He told me again and again how bright my light was. But he couldn’t see his own.

It’s pretty stupid, that the two of us would be so stymied by something as ridiculous as self-doubt.

Because when I examine the insecurity, I can see so clearly that it’s just a pretend thing our minds have made up. It has no actual basis in reality. There’s no real point to the fear. It’s very likely we’re our own worst critics of our work, and even if others judged us, how would that judgment actually hurt the quality of our lives? Even if we failed to produce anything anyone liked, so what? At least we tried. At least we followed our hearts. At least we lived as fully as we possibly could. Isn’t that the whole point?

I’ve been working through artistic self-doubt all year, and I’m proud of how far I’ve come. I’ve stopped caring about what I look like when I dance, I’ve started to say that I’m a singer instead of just saying that I “like to sing”, and I’ve even turned my hair into a canvas for countless new braided updos. I’m even drawing and painting again, a passion I hadn’t engaged since like, eighth grade. And every time I cast aside the fear and dive into artistic expression, I feel exhilarated. Joyful. Alive. We’re all artists, you know. It’s just that most of us have convinced ourselves we’re not because we don’t get paid to create. So we consume instead. We consume Netflix and our Facebook newsfeeds and restaurant food, stuff other people get paid to create for us, but how nourishing is it for our souls?

The day after Christmas, as my uncle was preparing a Thai dinner for our whole family, I decided I’d make a cocktail to go along with it. I threw mezcal into a shaker with grapefruit juice and wondered aloud if cayenne pepper would be a good addition, if lime would be nice to include.

He asked me, in incredulity, if I was just making up the drink as I went.

“Yup,” I said.

“And you’re gonna serve it to eight people without any idea how it’s going to turn out?”

“Umm. Yeah.”

“Damn. I have to make a dish at least four times by myself before I feel like it’s good enough to feed to anyone else.”

My mom chimed in at that moment, saying that her chef friend told her that there were no mistakes in cooking, because “cooking is art, and there are no mistakes in art.”

I winked at him and told him I was engaging in experimental art. He laughed. And then a few days later, he died.

And then the night after that, after all the crying happened, I sat in a circle with fifty people at a meditation retreat in Big Bear. We discussed how we could each live a more fulfilled and awakened life in 2019, and what gets in the way of that. “I could pay more attention to the quality of each moment of my day,” I said, to head nods. “I could get off Instagram and stop wasting my time with mindless consumption.” I paused. “And I could stop worrying about what people think of me. I could stop listening to the voice of fear in my head and finally commit to creating the things I want to create and get them into the world.”

We then wrote down our mental blocks on little pieces of paper and threw them into a fire to free ourselves of them once and for all. I wrote down self-doubt, fear of failure, and fear of struggle. And then I burned them. For both of us.

As the clock counted down the minutes to the New Year, all fifty of us set intentions for 2019, lighting a candle at the altar as we each spoke ours into existence.

I will give my gifts to serve the healing of our planet. 

That’s my intention this year. In 2019, I intend to give my gifts as fully and freely as I know how to. To inspire hope, to spark creativity, to cultivate love, to connect people to each other and themselves and the Earth again, all for the purpose of contributing to the healing of a world that’s growing more and more chaotic by the day.

It’s hard. It’s hard to survive as an adult in this world that we’ve inherited, let alone thrive in it. It’s harder than I ever imagined it would be. It’s lonely and exhausting and paralyzing and scary. But we’re not alone. We’re all in this life together. And we can help each other to be brave, to move through the fear and the despair to find the light inside us that will enable us to create, from our hearts, the more beautiful world we truly want to live in.

Writing is one of the ways I choose to do this. Even though it’s scary, even though I have no idea if anyone will like it. It’s what my heart wants me to do. It’s what my uncle would want me to do, too. So I’m finally breaking my six-month blog hiatus with this first offering of 2019. Unpolished and imperfect, but it’s okay. This one’s for you, Chuck.