#51: you are not your work
personal glory is like cigarette addiction - Jennifer Egan, Candy House
Above is an audio recording of me reading this post for those who prefer listening. Thank you for being here!
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
Khalil Gibran
The most rebellious children tend to be the ones that were raised by the most strict parents.
Some parents try to live out their past patterns and mistakes by correcting them in their own children. They cling to their kids and want so badly for their children not to have to go through the hurt that they did. The intentions are often good but they come from a place of fear and attachment.
We can do this with our creative and professional endeavors too. We get so identified with what we create and do for work that we start parenting those creations like helicopter moms. We fixate and try to control every last detail. We even get wrapped up in their social lives sometimes, meaning we care deeply about how “cool” our brain children appear to other people. This is funny to observe in parents who are obviously deriving their sense of worth and esteem through things like who their kid goes to prom with. But we tend not to look at our creative endeavors in the same way.
We allow or even celebrate when people’s entire identities revolve around the things they create. Which stifles the growth of creative projects (or children). Because when a parent takes on too much of their child’s life as their identity, the kid doesn’t have the freedom and space to try on different forms. They lose out on the opportunity to find their fit amidst an audience of people who will like them for who they are, not for who their parents egoically thought they should become.
We excuse this every time we celebrate people whose entire personalities stem from what they do for work. Of course, it’s good to be passionate. Especially if you are a creative person or an entrepreneur. Your work should feel like an extension of you. But you shouldn’t suffocate it.
I wrote last week about how the most resonant work tends to be that which you create for yourself, first and foremost. An extension of the idea that the most personal is the most universal. And that the things that end up being the most “of service” to others, are those that were created out of your own desire and necessity. Now, I am making the case that once your work is put out into the world, it’s no longer for you. It came through you, but you don’t own it. And I don’t think those two schools of thought necessarily contradict themselves.
The work that comes through you still can be work that you create for yourself. But although it is with you, you don’t own it. Much like a child. I’m probably speaking out of turn having not had kids myself but I do think people have kids because they want them. They do it for themselves. Much like we create art for ourselves. But once the kid is born or the project is sent off into the world, it’s no longer ours to own. We can’t control it. We can do our best to protect it and give it the resources needed to grow, but we can’t dictate who or what they become.
There can be a lot of personal glory in acts of creativity. We want to be good at things. And it feels excellent to finally appreciate your own form of creative expression, especially if it took you a minute to find. But that can sometimes lead to an overidentification.
Which, if left unchecked, can lead to overcontrol and tightness.
We have to be good parents to our artwork. To our creative endeavors. To our jobs/careers. To our friendships. To love. And it’s not always easy to let go.
Ultimately, this quote is a lesson about non-attachment.
Even the things that come through you that you are immensely proud of are not yours to cling to. Which is a beautiful and challenging thing. They get to go on and have a life of their own.
There’s a lot more breathing room for creativity with this approach.
There’s a quote from Candy House by Jennifer Egan that I can’t stop thinking about.
The need for personal glory is like cigarette addiction: a habit that feels life-sustaining even as it kills you. (Jennifer Egan, Candy House, 210)
Over-identification with our creative pursuits is like a cigarette addiction. It feels good. It feels buzzy and energizing and exciting. Again, this is not to place shame on being proud of yourself, your work, your kids, things that you have played a role in creating. But instead to draw attention to when it starts to become your personality. Your identity. Your lifeline.
I am not what I create. The things that I create are an expression of me. But they are not me. And they definitely are not me when they are made in vain. Or in an attempt to be perceived in any type of way. Another quote from Candy House…
Childish attention seeking is usually satisfied at the expense of real power. An enemy of the state could not have connived a better way to defang and distract us. Now our notorious narcissism is our camouflage. (Jennifer Egan, Candy House, 211)
We see this everywhere. It is so easy to get wrapped up in self-image these days. To think way too much about how we appear online. About what people might infer about us when looking at our social profiles or any other identity footprint. But that attachment to self-image is ironically what makes us blend in instead of stand out.
In comparing and wondering and judging our own image, we tend to become more like those around us. Just like overly controlling parents try to shoehorn their kids into becoming like the others so they can evade the isolation they themselves felt as children.
Real power comes from giving yourself the freedom within your creative process to tell autobiographical stories in any form. To share your deeply personal experiences with the world. But then there’s a relaxation that must happen when releasing said projects outwardly. A giving over of control. An internal trust that your brain kids have been imparted with the DNA that feels true to you and the form that they take on in an external society is no longer yours to control. It also has nothing to do with you anymore. The way people receive your art and your children is out of your grasp. The more we stand firm in this place of creative empowerment, the less likely we are to fall victim to the camouflage of notorious narcissism.
We’ve been raised in a system that puts celebrities and fame on a pedestal. One that judges the quality of art by the identity of the person who created it. But real change, real power comes from combined selfless effort. It comes from our ability to let go of the self in acts of creation and focus on our connection to the message alone. To pull once again from Candy House,
The power of individual magnetism is nothing against the power of combined selfless effort. (Jennifer Egan, Candy House, 211)
The more selfless we are in letting go of our need to control and nitpick our creative projects, the more opportunities they have to find their fit, to make an impact. That’s not to say it’ll always be easy. It’s hard to watch your kids struggle. But the connections that they find with the right people at the right time as a very result of having been granted the freedom to play around and not fit in for a period of time, is well worth any ounce of ego pain or shame that you experienced in the interim.
I almost got to the end of this without bringing up David Whyte but it just didn’t feel right to not put this in here. In his book, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, he talks about being met with silence when he first announced himself to the world as a poet. Which often happens to creative people and projects. A breakthrough necessitates a break with convention. A break with what we already know and accept to be good. So, if you are working on something novel, there’s a good chance it will take a minute to find its resonance. As the steward of your creative endeavors, it is important then to not become attached to its imprint.
I heard Dr. Melissa Schilling speak recently about her new book Quirky, in which she describes the characteristics that comprise a “breakthrough innovator.” In looking at Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs, she finds that each of them shared in their ability to wade through the silence or discontentment they received on the backside of announcing themselves to the world. They had such conviction for what they were doing that even if their inventions were not met immediately with glory, they were able to persist because they believed deeply in whatever it was that they were creating. But not all of them were able to evade the personal glory trap.
A lot of people on that list are also extremely problematic individuals and not ones whose lives I’d want to emulate. Many of them became overidentified with their creations at the expense of the success of their personal and private lives, and sometimes their professional ones too. So that’s the lesson here.
To believe so firmly in what you are doing because of how it feels when you do it that you don’t get lost in overidentification with the outcomes. If, of course, you want to live a contented life.
I was reading back through my journal entries as I near my 25th birthday and found this:
People are effective not when they have goals but when they are on a fucking mission. I want to be on a fucking mission.
That still rings true today. Except with more clarity around what it looks like to be on a mission for personal glory versus to be on a mission for combined selfless effort.
You can just be on a fucking mission to live a really good life. To notice more. To get outside of your own head and into your body such that you actually have the clarity and presence of mind to notice what’s going on around you.
The best parents are the ones who are present enough to notice what their kid is drawn to and provide as much surface area for them to play with that thing as possible.
People often mistake mindfulness with being more aware of themselves. That’s not the point. The point is to learn how to continuously get out of your own way, to stop identifying so much with the thoughts bouncing around the upper rings of this meat suit, and to start being able to be a clearer witness to the things going on around you.
In silent companionship with life in the Galapagos, I had come to the conclusion that our personal identity, which we think is based upon our beliefs and opinions, is actually more of a function of our ability to pay attention to the world around us. (David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, 75)
In order to create, we must notice. In order to notice, we must put aside our personal glory. If notorious narcissism has become our camouflage, then we make a difference by putting aside our ego and letting our brain kids become whoever they want to be in the world.
I’ll leave you with the full version of this poem by Khalil Gibran.
On Children by Khalil Gibran
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
That’s all for today. Thanks for getting Caught Up in Char’s Web this week! And I’ll catch you here soon.
With love,
Charlotte
Art Curation by Xandra Beverlin
Thank you to my brilliant curator and friend, Xandra Beverlin, for tying this whole newsletter together with her recommendations of George Condo and Pipilotti Rist this week! She blows my mind with the artists and images she pulls to match the theme of each newsletter. Here were her notes this week:
So I think the first one that really strikes me when I think about “notorious narcissism” and camouflage are artists that really mutate, elongate, and question the physical form - distortion of the human figure and flattening the space behind, especially with portraiture. We saw this with Mannerism centuries ago but then I think we also see this strange form of it now with artists like Philip Guston, John Currin, but most notably for this newsletter, George Condo.
I think he really captures this eerie vulnerability that I think some of what you’re getting at with obsession with self-image taps into
Its quite revealing
They are so ugly but so fascinating to me
I do also think that when you are speaking about how your creative pursuits flow through you but don’t define you, it made me keep going back to site-specific art and installations - because of the very ephemeral nature of them. That lack of permanence for these immersive (and usually very striking, avant-garde ways of defining a space) really drives home the non-attachment thing and I do genuinely believe that these types of works enable more creativity than paint on canvas (sometimes)
Someone perfect for this is Pipilotti Rist
She is so wacky but also a genius! You should just go through her whole hauser page
like that pairing and it feels like it captures the sentiment of what you’re trying to say here without being too on the nose and me giving you the work of an artist who is just obsessed with themselves (many! Lol)
Also I feel like they’re so imaginative and it goes back into that “sheltering your childlike imagination” type thing that came to mind when you’re saying you should be a good parent to your creativity
Char’s Web Song of the Week
(thank you, Chris Hall, for the rec!)
All past issues of Char’s Web are available for reading here. A few samples below…
#1: A first of many.
#43: the slobs I peeled off the street
#49: we have to be orderly on the instant
#50: the soundtrack of “Up”
This one really resonated with me,. 💋