Talk About Needing to Take Your Own Advice

I am sitting here, once again amazed at the way the brain works. Or doesn’t work. Get this:

I’ve been thinking about the stuff I make:  the written stuff, and the stitched stuff. I’ve been thinking about how much I enjoy these two things and about how much easier it is for me to sit down and write than it is for me to sit down and stitch. Why is that, I wondered? Oh, sure:  it makes sense to me that it’s way easier for me to sit down and write something that has a deadline, that’s an assignment from an editor or something I’ve told someone else I’ll do. That’s easy for me to do:  I like to be productive, and I like to know that what I’m doing Has A Purpose.

But it’s also easier for me to sit down and write posts here, on the blog, than it is for me to sit down and stitch. Why is that? I figured out that, when I’m blogging, I think of it as something productive:  one of my editors suggested, long ago, that a blog is a good way to promote your books. You know, get the word out there, talk about the book, whatever. It sounded OK to me—easy enough to do, not too confusing, not too time-consuming (snort).

Of course, if you’ve read very much of these posts at all, you know that it’s morphed way out of being a marketing tool. I mean, if the things I post are supposed to be marketing, then I’m in some great big fuzzy trouble, for sure.

But somehow my brain remembers the original intent of the blog and finds comfort in that and so allows me to sit down in the middle of the day and write a long meandering post about, well, about pretty much anything.

Stitching, on the other hand? To my brain, sitting down with stitching in the middle of the day is EXACTLY like lying in bed with a trashy novel and a bag of Doritos.

“What are you DOING?!” it screams, pointing out all the work I need to be doing, all the stuff that’s probably not absolutely perfect and so could use at least another once-over, all the things I’ve meant to get around to but, so far, have not.

The only way it’s ever going to think the stitching I do is Something Worthwhile is if I sell it. Sure, I’ve sold stuff in the past.  But I decided long ago that I was no longer going to make things with the intention of selling them, as that has never, ever worked for me. If I sit down to make something to sell, my head is full of rules and restrictions, and I don’t want to spend 20 hours beading anything, and I don’t want to experiment.

In short, it doesn’t work for me.

If, on the other hand, I sit down to make something with the plan that I will never, ever sell it, ever—then my brain has a fit. It will allow me to do this only:

1) first thing in the morning, while I’m sitting in bed drinking coffee

2) late in the afternoon when I’m sitting outside having a frappacinno with my husband

3) on road trips.

The only thing that seems to work for me is to make everything as if it’s going to be The Perfect Thing for Me, the thing I’ll want to keep forever, to have on the wall or to wear or whatever. And go from there and make it and then, at some point in the future, after I’ve had it for a while and have maybe gotten tired of it, then think about offering it for sale.

This is incredibly silly. Plus my brain isn’t so fooled as I would hope.

I have spent the last couple of days reading over Creative Time & Space, the book that comes out this autumn. I have read Every. Single. Word. of this book. It is about the importance of creating, about how you have the right to create.

Duh.

The book is full of excellent advice from a bunch of really talented and creative people. Yet here I am, stuck in the same spot as everyone else. I read the book and go, “Yeah, yeah. That’s a GREAT idea!” and I think of how that’s going to work so well.

But I hadn’t, until today, made the connection between what I wrote in the book and what I do in my own life. Oh, sure—I do well with some of it. I spend my days making stuff—out of words, mostly. But there’s still a part of me that’s been resistant, unwilling to let go of the things I’ve internalized about what’s good and valuable and what’s not—what’s purely self-indulgent lazy slacker-ness.

But I’m working on this. Right this minute. Hence my adding some new stuff to Etsy, stuff I didn’t plan to sell. I’m going to push myself more, make blank spaces on the walls that demand to be filled up and then DO THAT. In the middle of the day. At night. All day long, if I want.

And here’s another thing:  when this book comes out, I’m going to tell people not to read it just once. Or twice. No:  three times seems to be the magic number. I read the whole thing, cover to cover, three times. And it seems I’m finally starting to Get It. I hope everyone else is a much faster learner than I am. If it had taken me this long to learn to ride a bike, I’d still have training wheels.

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