The Fear

Lately, I have been wanting to expand my experience of existing, which has included expanding my reach as an artist, interlocutor, or whatever the hell I am anyhow.

What this has meant, lately, has been blogging a lot, painting a lot, organizing a lot, and plotting certain scary actions I've not done before very well.

Mainly, i will go out and call people, email people, etc, to get them excited about my art, or Jim's photos, or the Marshall Arts process in general. I began gathering a list of prospects - mostly people I knew personally or knew through acquaintances, either people interested in arts or at least interested in the fact I COULd make art. IT seems risky, but I was willing to eat my pride and fear or whatever it is and take the plunge, fueled by a real feeling of energy abut the whole thing. Feelings, rationalizatins, justifications, research backed by data, affirmations, even astrological formations all seemed to point towards my great Art Outbound Outreach.

Then I choked.

1. The few outreaches met with utter silence. Even friendly supportive people I had counted on before ignored me utterly
2. Reading into generalized sales processes showed me my methodology was bunk
3. further analysis showed I did not have all my ducks in a row or my strategy mapped out - or even really my message
4. I began having Serious Doubts about some of the folks on my list - does this person REALLY want to talk to me? I mean, really? Do I really want to talk to them? Didn't we have some sort of disagreement that one time? When was this person so interested in art that I can justify thrusting this upon them? etc - in other words, all the things that telemarketers WILL NOT ask themselves before calling everyone and annoying them. Save that telemarketers get PAID for their efforts. I would here be trying to be my OWN telemarketer. I don't know about that!!!!!

So here I am, choked, stuck, flaking out on a sort-of committment I'd made to myself - and Jim as well, in a way. And I'm mostly OK with that, except that other things have begun slipping as well. Staying up late fiddling on FB again. Eating crap again. Running out on all sort of other minor but important committments. And a general sense of discouraged flatness that did NOT exist when i had first made the personal committment.

Susan Johnstone over at "the Hearts Voice" has many interesting things to say about this process:

When you understand that your resistance is the very raw material that will become the new you, you can approach it with compassion and curiosity instead of battling to just make it go away.

and listening in on a joint e-lecture she gave once ("your resistance is the map of where you are now.. thus will take you where you're going if you listen") really has helped me come to terms with a lot of what, in life, feels like living in a jail cell with jabbering monkeys, broken bicycles and haphazard fancies as your only companions. I am able to, for example, say to myself "the Fear won out this time, but some day I will win" - when I sit there with the phone in hand AND DO NOTHING, the way I'd stand at the edge of the pool for 10 minutes DOING NOTHING when everyone around me was diving off, back in the day.

And i probably could bluff my way past the fear to a certain extent - were it not for the real-life doubts it has placed in my mind. As Susan also says:

That’s right! There is NO information in your obstacles or resistance about whether you’re going toward the wrong thing.

Your blocks and obstacles CAN tell you lots about:

• the route you’re taking
• the strategy you’re using
• whether the timing is right
• your beliefs and fears
• the inner work you still need to do
• and more

But they tell you nothing about the rightness or wrongness of your goal.

And those are, specifically, my sticking points and things I can't just ignore: my route, my strategy, my timing, and the way you can NEVER really see others for what their own experiences are but always through the lens of what YOU are, projecting onto them.

Part of me's like I almost DON"T CARE whether it's the right move or NOT. Because when I move on this, something will SHIFT and MOVE - something in the world which was stuck before and did not exist will now EXIST and that, at least, has to be better than the big numbing now, the big numb dumb stuck NOW. A rolodex full of pissed off people and annoyed relatives seems like a small price to pay for having put it out there that HEY!!!!!! I'M OUT HERE MAKING THIS STUFF!!! AND IT MATTERS!!!!! AND I WON'T LET YOU IGNORE IT!!!!

As well, I am sorry to have let myself down the way I'd be sorry to let down my mother, or a friend, or husband, or anyone who at all depended on me. I would be unsurprised if any of those whom I'd let down were to then turn around and let ME down - hence, I am sorry and not surprised that "I" no longer "trust" myself and am "unable to commit" to larger goals, etc. and slipping to unproductive habits. Thus I feel, in a way, that in order to reclaim this broken 'trust', I NEED to do the bastard - contact every last person on that list, come what may.

I don't feel particularly BETTER or BRAVER after having posted this, but, at least, I have publicly committed to this path - and put out there a warning to all those who will hear from me soon.

Hey, how YOU doin'????????