8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [05] Food & Shelter

The myth of the starving artist and other lies we seem to tell ourselves.

Chapter List

  • Blind Collapse

    I have a blind spot. Do you?

    I catastrophize.

    Imagine the worst possible outcome: the worst reaction from a client, the worst feedback from a reader, or the worst review from a customer. Imagine failure not just as a setback but as a liability to reputation or personal welfare. 

    It can paralyze. 

    It can freeze momentum into regression.

    I wanted to write on this blog a little more about the lies we tell ourselves, the stories we make up in our own heads, and the demons that haunt our efforts to hold us back.

    We all have them.

    One of mine is overthinking the worst of it. Those notions swirl around in my brain, often keeping me up in the middle of the night or causing me to sit and stare at the screen during those precious moments I could be writing. It snowballs into narratives that play out as conversations in my own head where I debate and explain and justify—none of it with any value to the work.

    The feedback loop would be much worse if I didn’t have strategies to cope with it: my personal counter-attack is math. Some little corner of my brain is a bookie for the odds and reminds the catastrophizing majority that the probabilities for the worst outcome are in my favour for a good result.  (That bookie, though, he takes long naps and only really wakes up when things are spiralling.)

    All that is to say: we each of us have blind spots, and acknowledging them might just be the first step in overcoming them.

  • Food Shelter

    Certainly among the most well known of the Delphic maxims of Greek philosophical origins[1] is the command to “know thyself” and in such understand one’s own limitations and role in the world.

    It is not particularly surprising then that I might choose to devote a substantial part of this blog to the idea of personal understanding and in particular getting our own heads around personal honesty.  There are, after all, a great many myths we build up around our own narratives, lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, that are just as like to be limitations we unnecessarily tangle into our heads that quickly become powerful barriers to even the simplest acts of creativity.

    To know thyself is to accept the worst of ourselves as well as the best.

    To know thyself is to face the demon as well as entertaining the muse.

    And to deny that already before me a million books and blogs and podcast have spent ink and data on these topics would be a fools errand. 

    Do I have something unique to contribute, or am I even in that fooling myself about my own role in this conversation?

    I might suggest that this is but the first myth I can tear down: we all have perspectives that may retread common ground but are seen through a set of eyes, heard through a pair of ears, sensed by our personal neurons and it is just as important to know ourselves through this effort as to simply absorb the perceptions of others. As important as the basics of life to a creative soul.

    Under the category of Food & Shelter, I’lll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.