“What's your dream?” Simon asks a stranger on the street in an Instagram Reel.1
Lately, I’ve been letting myself get sucked into Reels—research, I tell myself, for my still-to-come social media strategy.
I imagine many of the people Simon approaches don’t know what their dream is, and I wonder how I would respond. Last year it might have been “To make it in the art world.” But in this moment? I struggle with a low hum of doubt about what I’m doing.
In the Reel, a blonde woman about my age wearing athletic wear answers, “My dream...is to be rich,” she laughs. “And how do you get rich?” he poses back to her. “By following your dream.” She humors him as he attempts to unveil a more authentic passion for her. “What would you do even if you weren't paid for it?”
What I do, even though I’m not paid
I’ve always been drawn to art, but struggled to justify why it mattered.2 I quit my job last year to see if I could give art a real go. In the process, I’ve been surprised to have reached some big milestones—my first few sales, group exhibitions, a solo show.
Not sure what to do next, I threw myself at everything in the last few months. I said yes to anything that might unlock something in my art or in me.
A group of friends started a new art collective, Your Dear Friends. We produced a show, “Erosion,” in May. For the show, I got back into pottery. I created a ceramic water fountain sculpture.3 I made my largest painting to date — a 5.5ft x 14ft tall acrylic on wallpaper piece.4 I painted live at an event another friend hosted at a bar.5 I spoke at a community art event about my art journey.6 I participated in online webinars about how to make my art gallery-ready. I came out to countless gallery openings. I attended Fidget Camp, a weeklong creative technology day camp for adults where I learned about silicone mold making and knotting and OpenSCAD and shitposting IRL and more.
If my calendar were an art genre, it would be maximalism. Jenny says that the nature of my being is “busyness”—not to be confused with “business,” which still evades me (dear universe, please tell me how to turn my art into something sustainable 🙏🏻).
“For our other friends, the plot is clear,” Jenny points out, “for you…it’s trickier.” While others are driven by their need for financial security, belonging, or fun, my actions don’t seem to have a clean thread driving them. It’s dubious why I’m pursuing so many things, many of which I seem to care little about.
The blonde woman in the Reel tells Simon that she would run everyday if she wasn’t paid to do it. She started running when she was 11. “Something happened when you were 11 that made you do that, what was it?” Up until this moment, she has been listening and playing along. But this question makes her pause, “that’s deep,” with a subtle shake of her head. “Whatever happened to you when you were 11, that’s where your purpose is.” Simon explains, “pain is where purpose lives.”
Pain
My first week of 3rd grade, we had to write 2 truths and a lie as an icebreaker. On my index card I wrote, “I hate myself.” The problem was, it wasn’t the lie.
To be clear, I am quite happy now. However, throughout my childhood and into college, I would get caught up in existential angst and nihilism. Not only was I generally agitated both by a chaotic home life and socially-isolated school life on an concrete level, but on the abstract, I would contemplate whether my perception was real at all and how I would know if it were or weren’t. I would oscillate between the physical (surface reality and stewed self-hatred) and the metaphysical (wondering if anything existed or mattered).
My freshman year of college, I noticed this cycle of falling into nihilism and decided to find a way to break it. Knowing that I wouldn’t have the balls to act on nihilistic tendencies, I decided I should distract myself away from these thoughts. My solution was to throw myself into as many activities as possible to preoccupy my mind away from thinking about how nothing mattered. So the next semester, I participated in every interest club: video, Film-viewing, game creation, house booth, Chinese culture, Taiwanese students. It worked. I pretty much never fell into the infinite abyss of nihilism again (though it didn’t stop other types of depression, but that’s for another time).
Purpose
I liken the path of figuring out how to make it in the art world similar to being a startup founder. Both require a certain level of conviction in order to get through the troughs of sorrow and doubt. So I ask Anthony, a solo startup founder, how he is able to continue in the face of “staring into the abyss, eating glass, and smiling.” I found it interesting that core to his conviction was a belief in God and the monomyth. As long as he could point to where he was in the Hero’s Journey, he knew he was on the path.
So what is the plot in my hero’s journey?
Anthony thinks that the journey has to be something you confront that is deeply personal and specific to you. What are the obstacles you’ve been blind to and have been consciously or unconsciously avoiding all your life? What’s been your “Refusal of the Call?”
Perhaps a delusion that I have is that I am honest about my shortcomings (see? I’m honest even about my level of honesty). I think that for any challenge, I am the first to say yes, even if it hurts. My immediate internal response when Josefa asks me “what makes you vulnerable?” is that I’m not very vulnerable. Vulnerability means the possibility of getting hurt. Getting hurt is just a pain-derived state of mind. States of mind are manageable. In the abstract, I’d like to think of pain as a gift from the universe to help one transform. One need only cultivate the mind to find the gift in every experience.
In reality, one point of vulnerability I’ve been avoiding is that childhood trauma. My life now is filled with love and community and joy, so that period of my life looks like something from a nightmare fabricated by my unconscious mind. But if the pain was never there, then why am I so busy?
missing the plot
Sometimes the busy cycles compound until I declare bankruptcy and disappear for a while. I attended the Inner River Art Residency in July hoping to finally rest after all this running around. And I rested. I was hoping that the time and space would allow something to emerge that’s been hiding inside.
Instead of a space for contemplation, I found the experience to be a distraction. In fact, all this running around the past few months felt like a distraction. I still had a fine experience and if you’re curious to hear more about it, I will be talking about the work that I made while I was there on Sunday September 14 2-5pm at the Nook.7
A distraction away from what? A lifetime’s work of facing myself.
I wish I had a clean plot line. I wish I could say “I was depressed as a kid and then I started drawing. Making art lifted me out of depression.” While it’s true I started drawing at a young age, it’s not so simple.
A more accurate arc might be:
“I viewed the world through a nihilistic perspective, but decided break through and stop thinking about it by keeping myself busy. I’ve successfully broken off from this cycle of dysphoria, but part of me is still left unseen. Art is the way that that part of me is still able to surface safely.”
Of course any story is just that: a story. And this idea of stories being stories is what I want to show with my art. Art where opposing interpretations can emerge and coexist as complementary expressions of a deeper truth. Pushing is pulling, the obstacle is the way, holding on is letting go.
I think I’m ok with this story for now. Maybe tomorrow I’ll write a new plot.
RSVP on Partiful: https://partiful.com/e/snQkXLnnAmdVL6FxpTLt .