Emotional pain
Sharing the load
“The cost of being an individual is emotional pain”
- Murakami
The problem with standing out is everyone else will do their best to try to make you fit in. You will feel this as emotional pain. This pain will drive prod you like cattle into mediocrity and status quo.
Often this pain is unnamed and just feels like a jolt from out of the blue. Maybe the first step is to name the pain.
I’ve named some of mine.
Shame of the Struggling Artist Label: if a surgeon or a doctor has to miss a family dinner because of work, people will say oh, he’s very busy, doing important work, but if an artist is working, the feeling is ‘why can’t you stop playing with your paint and go for dinner’. Maybe that’s not even true, but sometimes that’s what it feels like, maybe it’s just a lifetime of similar remarks.
The longing of undiscovered talent: the feeling that if only you had the opportunity your talent will get a chance to shine. You try to get discovered to no avail. Nothing seems to work, the more you try the more rejections you get, and that stings too, maybe obscurity is all you can hope for.
The regret of missed opportunity: I started to late, I’m too busy to draw/write, I should be doing something ‘productive’ something that pays well. I’ll just have to watch from the sidelines. But maybe someday….
The Lack of education: I didn’t get the proper education, I don’t even know what I’m doing, how will I ever compete with people who had the right training.
These are some of the shapes of my pain. Maybe their names are Shame, Longing, Regret and Lack.
It’s not pleasant to think of these feelings of emotional pain, but they are there whether we think of them or not, maybe by brining them into the light we can start to change our relationship to these pains.
TEN MINUTE ARTIST PROMPT
Name your pain (and draw it as a cute creature)
I mentioned a few of my pains: Shame, Longing, Regret and Lack. What are some of yours? Check out
Andy J. Pizza
’s feelings chart for inspiration
Let’s compare, share your drawings in the chat.
I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how to deal with all the pain, but I’m thinking just by sharing it we can distribute some of the load from each other.
Feeling brave?
Share your pain in the comment section below and if you found this prompt valuable, why not pass it along to an artist friend, peer, or student who might appreciate these insights too?
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Some of all of those, but also overwhelm. There is so much I want to do, so much I need to do, so little time and so little recognition by those close to me that this is something I need to do. So I drew this. All those trees still to go! And there's another instance. I couldn't simply add the pic to the post so have to use more time to find the right way to post it.