Wiping the tears away

Visualize things in whatever way helps you to accomplish what you want. (Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20)

My eyes are puffy this morning. You can always tell when I’ve had a good cry.

Yesterday, I had to say goodbye to someone small and precious to me. (Dammit, I’m gonna start crying again while I’m writing this!). Nobody died, but the grief is real. The grief has layers. It is a grief river that intersects with other grief tributaries on its way to the grief sea.

Sure, I could let myself rest. Sure, I don’t have to write.

I want to, though. I want to create. I don’t necessarily want to show up on camera, mind you. But I find it soothing to continue my writing practice in times of difficulty.

My willingness to keep writing even when it’s hard has helped me to maintain consistency over the years. Naturally, it’s good to have a buffer so that I don’t have to publish on days that I am under the weather. But I’ve created some of my favorite pieces after wiping the tears away and seeing what I can come up with.

Along the way, I’ve become less precious about my own creative process. I’ve found a way to honor my emotions without being ruled by them. And I’ve discovered that grief and emotional pain can be catalysts to unearth deeper things I didn’t even know I was feeling or contemplating.

This isn’t a how-to. I don’t mean to suggest that if you feel like crap, you should pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get going. But I want to point out that it’s okay to make our art or do our work anytime we want to, even when we feel like crap. And sometimes, it can make us feel better.

There are times when the writing itself taps into a well of emotion that I hadn’t been aware of. I emerge from those sessions feeling wrung out, but I appreciate the catharsis.

There are other times when my mentality is more like, “Shh, it’s okay. You can be sad or mad or frustrated later, but now it’s time to work.” And then I write or do whatever the work is, and am glad to be able to summon that feeling of normalcy for a time. It’s a helpful switch to be able to flip. And if the thing I was upset about was trivial, the negative feelings might be completely gone by the time I’ve accomplished something creative.

I find it hardest to settle down and do the work when something exciting is happening or has just happened. Maybe I’m less used to those emotions, or less used to having them intersect with my creative process. It’s a lot trickier to quiet my mind under those circumstances, and I’m still trying to get the hang of it.

That said, perhaps the consistent thread here is that I’m finally in the habit of treating creative work like actual work — not a special occasion treat, not a dessert, not a luxury, not an “if I’m feeling up to it” challenge. I present the invitation to myself to do the work whether I’m ready or not, whether I want to or not; after years of that, I am used to it, and I take myself up on the offer.

There’s no magic, of course — just boring old practice in a variety of situations. That’s what you do when you’re trying to train a puppy to sit, by the way: You do it not only in your kitchen, but in the living room, in the driveway, on the street, in the park, at an outdoor festival, at the beach, in a moving vehicle. Before a treat, after a treat, during a walk, after rolling over, before rolling over. The puppy learns not to associate sitting with a specific environment, sequence of activities, or emotional state, but with the simple command of “sit.”

That’s me. I’m the puppy, doing what I ask myself to do, day after day. It works. And even if I was reluctant at first, in the end I’m glad.