Sometimes, just by chance, you are listening to something, like a routine podcast on your podcast feed, and something is explained in a meaningful way. Recently, for me, it happened when Chani Nichols was describing to Debbie Millman the paradox she felt of needing to write and the intense self-doubt it unleashed. (See here). About 37 minutes into the podcast, Debbie Millman had asked: “I understand that when you first started writing you would literally be doubled over in shame and pain and self-doubt, but it also felt like something you had to do. Where did that pain come from?” Nichols answers the following:
I think that (…) when there’s a lot of neglect or you feel invisibilized by family or culture that when you bring yourself into form by writing something or acting something or building something or making something that other people can see and that you’re giving it out to them, there’s a way all of a sudden for me, I become more real. I’m defining myself by writing these things and putting them out. For me being somebody that was so low on the priority list of the adults in my life, it just brings up the feeling of having been left and denied and betrayed and abandoned. And so it’s this weird thing, it’s like I’m actively trying to heal this and bring myself into form and bring myself into the world and yet my experience of being forgotten and invisibilized becomes more pronounced as I do that. So it is [an] experience that comes in tandem; there’s like this “yay, I put something out” and a feeling of releasing of creative spirit from myself or creative energy into the world and yet all of my survival mechanisms, “stay small, stay quiet, stay invisible so that you don’t get harassed or something bad doesn’t happen,” like there’s so much chaos in the world and my life that I just had to keep everything as small and still as possible. So it’s just all that – and trauma response I think of being more present in the world.
I’m also fascinated by the story of Robert Walser on This American Life. He was content with this simple motto: “to be small and to stay small.” (See here).
Indirectly, it relates to this little scene that Emily Carr relates in her autobiography Growing Pains. She writes:
We discussed Georgia O’Keefe’s work. I told of how I had met her in the gallery of Mr. Steiglitz.
I said, “Some of the things I think beautiful, but she herself does not seem happy when she speaks of her week.”
Miss Dreier made an impatient gesture.
“Georgia O’Keefe wants to be the greatest painter. Everyone can’t be that, but all can contribute. Does the bird in the woods care if he is the best singer? He sings because he is happy. It is the altogether-happiness which makes one grand, great chorus.”