There are these moments in life where you look back for something you have made, when you have got back from imaginative yarn piles to your everyday laundry piles, and you wonder that: “Oh, was that really me who made that?” When you get to the other side of a creative project. “And was that really necessary, you just blurted it all out didn’t you?” And then you just try to own it, even though you have to exhale a few times, go to Pinterest and pin to your “Teatime quotes” something encouraging in style: “Whatever, I am fabulous anyway.” Or perhaps something more robust: “You either walk inside your story or you hustle for your worthiness”. Or perhaps even more robust you lean on Theodore Roosevelts famous “(Wo)man in the arena” –speech. The last two are from and through Brené Brown and the Man in the Arena quote goes like this:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”
There is also a thought I just found and would like to share as well, words by Professor Sandra Jovchelovitch. She shared this thought to her old student, Monica Lewinsky who was struggling with her ghosts of the past. When you are suppressed or against power, that is when you raise against it and start creating an alternative story. I wonder if this is what has successfully been going on with #metoo campaign as well.
What I have also understood from my own experience and following Amanda Palmer’s thoughts about creativity is that it works the following way: You gather information and you build a mental map and then you connect the dots in a new and personal way – take the things you know and use them as I did in the previous texts. You tap into some masculine energy with the help of music and start singing along, writing. And then you apologize for your computer keyboard afterwards for treating it with such a force and so unlovingly:-).
Perhaps it is so that I have tried to ask myself for years already, how to belong in some other way than through pleasing others. How to belong in my own authentic way. And that ship has been in some really deep waters so turning the things to a different direction takes time :-) and there are all sorts of hiccups on the way, winds blowing the other direction etc.
Perhaps through these texts it has also been the idealist in me, the language and communication teacher in me (and I am not sure if this is the good teacher or the bad teacher), but someone who has been guiding students through difficult emotions for years so that learning can occur. And hopefully after the course they feel a bit more confident to use their skills, to use their voice.
And especially it is the grief and an enormous pain in me, the lack of connection I’ve had in my life. Perhaps I just have sailed so far from my origins. So this is people how we should treat each other in a perfect world :-) expressed through my creativity and here summoned up the previous three texts this week. Others would use different words:
-We respect each other’s emotional homes and boundaries. Those are self-made, beautiful and fragile inside each and one of us and there may be a redesigning or at least some kind of an interior design project going on there all the time – with new thoughts, new educations, new careers, all kind of self-development. We all seek, we all try to measure up. (text: Home)
-We carry our own emotions without putting them on anyone else’s shoulders, we carry our emotional piles of yarn. And during our lives we make balls of yarn out of them, we learn all the time about ourselves using others as mirrors. If we are not happy with our pattern of life, we hopefully find the courage to start all over again. (Rug Maker)
-We let each one tell their story without presuming and try to understand the complexity of the patterns of life. We respect the humanity. (Ps. to Rug Maker)
And I hope the anger and the grief in me was now put in some good use. And all the ends are mentally weaved in. “ The Curious Case of a Rug Maker” is finished following the title of Benjamin Button.
Pirjo ;-)
Ps. There is a cultural context in these texts behind, Finland has for long been a country of shame culture. Related to this the other Nordics talk about “Law of Jante”. Back in November I once got a huge shame attack on a bus, a shame that shouldn’t even have been mine to carry, and I really had to exhale. Had I just managed to think then and there that: “If I lose my marbles here and now I just dive after them and hope to gather at least most of them before the bus arrives to Porvoo”, I had found my way into laughter and out of that shame of being just a human. The point here is that I have been wondering if it is just so that we haven’t had enough of that in Finland yet, due to historical reasons as well? Laughter. And we need more people who dare.