4.5 Thoughts, Overcoming Self-Criticism and Jealousy, and the Benefits of Psychedelics
4.5 Thoughts, Overcoming Self-Criticism and Jealousy, and the Benefits of Psychedelics
Your weekly tips for creative courage
4.5 Thoughts, Overcoming Self-Criticism and Jealousy, and the Benefits of Psychedelics
If you only have 1 minute…
1 Thought For You To Finish
This week’s thought was inspired by my wonderfully talented friend, Terilyn Steverson:
We can learn so much about our creativity from our past selves. Being a teenager was an especially exciting time. When I was 15, I loved Barry-M glittery eye-shadow, and physical copies of a now-defunct graphic design magazine called Grafik. What did you love? Could you bring any of those things back into your life now?
“When I was a teenager, I loved…”
Let us know your answer in the comments!
Have a great week,
Tash 🤗
If you only have 3 minutes…
2 Thoughts from Me
“Instagram is the opium of the people. Or maybe it’s TikTok. Pick your poison.”
“Remember that your corporation does not give a fuck about you.” How to Adjust to The Real World After College.
2 Thoughts from Others
“Anything men can do, I can do bleeding.” Madeleine Trebenski, McSweeney’s.
“I’m fortunate to live in an apartment facing one of the prettiest bays in Hong Kong. I always love to be close to the sea. It inspires me; it prompts my thoughts and my recollections. The apartment was a good place to compose this memoir.” Yuan-tsung Chen, The Secret Listener.
If you only have 10 minutes…
Behold, Part #2, the latest installment of my longer piece, “How to Build Creative Courage: On Escaping The Tyranny of Comparing Yourself To Other People.”
Tackle self-criticism: Learn to fully love and accept yourself, and where you are on your journey
A couple years ago, I learned about the success of one girl who I went to highschool with: Katy Hessel. Katy is an award-winning broadcaster in the field of Art History, and creator of the Great Women Artists movement. When I went home to London for the holidays, her book was front and centre in just about every bookstore I entered. As I ruminated on this, I felt ashamed and unable to do basic tasks like buy groceries or send emails.
“I’m so far behind her, I must have been doing everything wrong this whole time,” I said to myself, letting the self-critical voices creep in. It was months before I was able to confront my feelings of inadequacy.
In July 2021, I took mushrooms with some close friends deep in the Welsh countryside. (*Eye roll* You didn’t think I was going to write a piece this long without mentioning psychedelics at least once, did you?). It was the height of the summer. The hills were lush, rolling and green. The setting sun was warm, as I lay in the grass next to a sheep field. Surrounded by all the beautiful nature, that trip was one of the first times in forever that I was able to recognize the pain of my own self-criticism. If you can read my handwriting in the picture below, I journaled things to myself like,
“I want to be here for myself more in my life. I am kind of going through a hard time. I am proud of myself. I don’t have to prove myself to me.”
The experience helped me achieve what psychologist Dr. Kristin Neff describes as mindfulness, and it’s one of the core tenets of self-compassion that she has found in her research:
“Mindfulness means being with what is in the present moment. And we need to be able to turn toward, acknowledge, validate and accept the fact that we are suffering in order to give ourselves compassion.”
Neff goes on to share that oftentimes we aren’t aware of our own suffering, especially when that suffering comes from our own harsh self-criticism. She says,
“And if we don’t notice what we’re doing to ourselves with harsh self-criticism, we can’t give ourselves the compassion we need.”
I came away that day with the profound sense that part of having creative courage means fully loving and accepting ourselves for where we are right now on our journeys. It’s very important for us to embrace that. As to where I am on my writing journey right now, I’m editing my first novel and I’m also practising writing about my sex life and creativity (lol). Essentially, I am busy finding my voice. So, more than ever, I need to be patient, loving and kind to myself. If I can meet myself where I am right now, then I can see that my next step is to find an editor and take another writing class to keep honing my craft. When we meet ourselves where we are, we can start to support ourselves in finding our next meaningful and useful steps on our journey to building our creative muscles.
By the way, I’m sure this kind of realization can be reached just as easily without mushrooms through something like meditation. But unfortunately, I hardly meditate. In case you need it, I’ve also shared my non-medically-approved opinions as to how I have safe psychedelic trips.
There is no formula for success. Focus on paving your own way.
It has taken a huge weight off my shoulders to ground myself in where I am on my own creative journey. But the fact remains: I barely have more than 1,000 followers on Instagram. How am I going to become a prolific, successful author and blogger in the modern day without 100,000 followers? My lack of a significant social media presence has caused me anxiety for years.
The answer to this came to me only very recently. A couple weeks ago, I randomly met Joe Greer in a café in Mexico City. Joe is an esteemed, self-taught photographer who has amassed more than 650k followers on Instagram. Over the weekend, I read his memoir and landscape photography book, “The Lay of The Land”. In it, Joe’s perspective on the early days of Instagram spurred a huge revelation for me. He writes,
“In November of 2011, a little over a year after arriving in Spokane, I did another new thing: I discovered this app called Instagram.” “The day after Christmas, when we were out with friends hiking Snoqualmie Falls, I got a notification: Instagram had made me a suggested user.” “Within two weeks, I gained 55,000 new followers.”
When I read this, I basically fell off my chair. It’s now early 2023 and having this kind of organic growth in your social media following is impossible, unless you are an extra famous celebrity joining the platform for the first time. Joe had the incredible drive of being a passionate, hard-working and skilled photographer, and yet he also had the luck of being in the right place at the right time. In contrast, now over 10 years later, anyone who posts regularly on Instagram to promote their business or creative work can tell you that the platform is saturated. It’s terrible for reaching new audiences, let alone our existing ones.
From this insight, I learnt that there is a limit to how much we should even be trying to learn from other people’s success. As Derek Thompson reminds us in his stellar book, “Hitmakers”,
“No matter what anybody tells you, a formula for success does not and cannot exist” because “Formulas are [only] useful when the underlying values don’t change.”
Joe’s configuration of success was unique to him. It makes no sense for me to compare myself to people like him who were early adopters of a social media platform, or who got a book deal from a viral tweet, or whose parents are famous and well-connected. Instead, each of us has to focus on what we can control, and work to engineer our own unique configuration of success and the creative outcomes that matter to us. For example, for me I’ve found that posting on LinkedIn is actually far more effective at reaching new audiences than posting on Instagram. So, rather than trying to copy Joe Greer on Instagram, I should focus on my configuration for acquiring my audience on LinkedIn.
When we realize that there is no formula for creative success, we can start to focus more on the tools and opportunities that we have at our disposal. We can start to make the most of our existing connections who could mentor us, the creative classes we could be taking or the corner of our living room we could be turning into our first tiny art studio. When we start from what we have now, we can build on that and focus on getting better over time.
As the serenity prayer says, “Higher power, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
The Road to Jealousy is Paved with Our Deepest Desires
There is one way that I have found other people’s successes to be useful to me: they are signposts for what I really want. Reflecting on why I am jealous of Suleika Jaouad, Katy Hessel and Chloe Gong, I realized a couple of important things. I want to get my novel published. I want to become a New York Times best-selling author. And I want to be able to pay my bills solely from my creative projects.
Leaning into accepting myself and focusing on what I can control, I have begun to see these women’s achievements as empowering markers of the way forward on my own creative journey. For example, Chloe Gong has published multiple novels. Even though she has a great literary agent, and I got rejected from 60 literary agents last year and didn’t even get a single request for my full manuscript, Chloe has shown me that it can be done. So, operating from a place of what I can control, I can use her achievements as a reminder of what I really want, and then I can look for avenues for how I can accomplish it based on what’s available to me, like self-publishing or creating my own eBook.
When we feel jealous of people, looking below the surface of these feelings can provide us with great signposts of where we want to go in our own creative journeys. They remind us that it can be done and can even empower us to acknowledge our deepest creative desires. As long as we can avoid wallowing in jealousy, these realizations can propel us forwards.
To be continued….
Thank you again to Alan Jinich and Joe Stonor for help with editing :)
I so appreciate your transparency, Tash. When you put your truth out there, I feel more accepting of my own truth. Thank you.