At the age of 47 and a half, I finally worked out how to be me.
What I mean by that is: I worked out the tasks I need to do, and the tasks I want to do. And I worked out that I can only do them if I treat them seriously enough to track them. The daily ones, the weekly ones, the monthly ones. When I have capacity and without self-judgement. But tracking them does help me to remember the plot.
This sounds simple. It wasn’t. This all began with a much harder question: what do I actually want to create? Which unlocked another: how am I going to make that happen? And then a long stretch of journaling to understand why I hadn’t made it happen before, given that I wanted it so much, and how to stop feeling overwhelmed by the tasks that would take me there.
The synthesis of all that work lives in my bullet journal. I track whether I’ve moved my body, made art, listened to a Ceri Hand podcast, done some reading, and enacted some form of career agency. (I also track face exercises. That’s my wild card. Don’t worry about it.)
Among my weekly intentions: go and see art. An artist date. For inspiration and research. To stay excited. It feeds something that nothing else does.
What keeps hope in play, I’ve come to realise, is the practices. My routines. The ones I set before the new month begins, so I arrive into it with some intention already in place. And if I’ve had a juicy or intense week, I’ll reflect on it, in my bullet journal, or in morning pages (not daily, but as needed). That act of reflection, small as it is, reminds me that I am moving. That things are shifting, even when they don’t feel like it.
All of this: the tracking, the reflection, the intention-setting, creates a feeling of being an agent in my own life. Not in control of everything. Not immune to the wobbles. But an agent. And I notice the blues really set in when I forget to be an agent.
And here’s the part that took longest to learn: I don’t plan or reflect when I’m wobbling. I don’t set intentions from inside the spiral. Because I don’t want a toddler driving the bus.
The toddler-time does exist. She just doesn’t make the strategic decisions.
And that’s the whole thing, this is how to be an artist outside of institutions and structures, without a framework that holds you. You build your own framework. You make it yours. You refuse the shame of arriving here late, and you forgive yourself that progress is slow.
I’m still in the thick of this. But if I’m a couple of steps ahead of you, and you want somewhere to think it through; what you want to make, what might be getting in the way, what a practice could look like for you, that’s exactly the kind of conversation I have in my mentoring work.
The first step, and the most elusive: what do you want to do? If that question has been drowned out by the noise of life for a while, it can be a strange one to sit with. But it’s your compass. When you know what you really want to do, you set your compass, and everything else starts to organise around it.
If this resonates, I’d love to hear. And if you’re interested in mentoring, you’re welcome to get in touch.
