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.