A few weeks ago, I scheduled this post to go out this Tuesday, the 24th. But I pulled it at the last minute because I didn’t want to send something out there without acknowledging the violence and grief I have been reading about in the news—the deaths of Keenan Anderson and Tyre Nichols in police custody and the mass shootings that have taken place in California this week, especially the Lunar New Year massacre in Monterey Park. And those are just the well-publicized incidents among the other deaths from police brutality and mass shootings that have happened in the last 27 days.
There is another part of me that wants me to shut up about this, to stay in my lane. I truly don’t have anything to add to the conversation except to help normalize grief. The one thing I will say is that both the murders of Black and brown people at traffic stops and mass shootings have their root in how little care we take for one another. A traffic stop should be about community safety, but all too often it’s used as an instrument of terror and control. And what we’re finding from research about mass shooters is that the most effective way to prevent these shootings is to help angry and radicalized people through crisis.
This week at my temple, at the start of the Lunar New Year, we are reflecting on the precepts, or the ethical guidelines of Buddhism. Here is a prayer I offer based on the five most essential of the precepts.
May we abstain from doing harm and instead care for one another. May we reject greed and theft and instead care for one another. May we refrain from lies and disinformation and instead care for one another. May we end gender violence and sexual abuse and instead care for one another. May we transform our relationship with mind-clouding substances and so care for one another.
Dear reader,
Judging by the amount of books, newsletters, and other content out there about cultivating a creative process and keeping a creative habit going, it’s a struggle that a lot of people have. Yet I always feel that everyone is out there making amazing things and I’m the only person struggling to see creative projects through from beginning to finish.
Right now, my challenge is writing. Last year, I started a book project with a lot of energy and purpose but dropped it after a few months when all the thoughts of “What am I doing?” “Nobody will read this.” “Who am I to even talk about this?” came up. But I’ve learned a thing or two about cultivating creative skills over the years and this newsletter is a pep talk to myself—and maybe to you, too.
As a child with an essential tremor and some slight fine motor skill impairment, I never learned any of the hands-on stuff that kids, especially girls, are supposed to learn. I never learned to braid hair or bracelets, I never made art beyond what was mandated in class. I grew up with an image of myself as a person who is unable to make beautiful things by hand.
Then I learned to knit. For Christmas 7 years ago, my friend mailed me a ball of yarn two needles with a note that said “I don’t have time to teach you how to knit. YouTube that shit.” At this time I was 30 years old and I’d just finished writing a dissertation and bailing on academia. I was ready to try something different. At that time, I had also been meditating for a few years and had a little more emotional elasticity than I’d had growing up. I was now able to give myself the grace that I couldn’t when I was a child failing to learn how to braid. After four hours of watching YouTube videos, l successfully cast on my first stitches. After that, the knit stitch itself wasn’t as hard to learn.
Knitting is one of those things you can only learn by doing a lot. For weeks after casting on those stitches, I sat long hours teaching myself how to knit. For much of that time, my brow was furrowed and my shoulders were hunched as I tried not to drop my work or make mistakes. Because I didn’t know how to undo a mistake, or even recognize one as I was making it, any time I messed something up I had to rip my work out entirely and start over. Once I got a couple of inches of fabric on my needles, it seemed like if I messed anything up I would never be able to recreate what I’d done.
That was not true, of course. Since then I have ripped back entire sleeves or half-sweaters when needed, knowing with confidence that I would be able to reproduce my work. (This process is called “frogging” by knitters because you ripit, ripit, ripit.) But I’ll never forget being hunched over in concentration, scared that I couldn’t replicate a couple of inches of knitting. As you might imagine, my knitting began to go a lot more smoothly once I began to relax.*
Since then, I have noticed that same process in the beginning stages of learning any other skill or craft. It’s a stinginess that’s based on fear of never regaining the product of one’s own creativity. It’s a clinging to the thing I just made because, what if I’m not able to top it? What if this is the best it will ever be? I successfully went through this stage with bookbinding and so I bind books. I failed to get through this stage with drawing, and so I don’t draw.
But then there’s writing, a tricky one for me because I have been a writer for a long time. At the age of 10 or 11, I wrote my first thing that was really just for myself: a piece of self-insert Star Wars fan fiction on a cheap notepad. At 12, I got really, really in to writing poetry and wrote hundreds of poems over the next five years. After that, college essays took over and I realized how much I loved writing about literature and went on to pursue the aforementioned PhD.
Yet it’s strange because after that, I left academia but haven’t written much since and I haven’t published anything—not one single thing in my whole life. I imagine that my 12 year old self would be shocked to know this. Most literary journals won’t publish anything that has been previously published, even on a personal blog or (presumably) an email newsletter. This year I’ve been submitting poems for publication and getting rejected across the board, which I don’t take personally because rejection is just a matter of course for writers. But I’m noticing that I have been clinging to and resubmitting the same few poems and I have been holding off on writing essays because…I’m afraid that I won’t be able to write anything better.
There are a lot of other beliefs wrapped up in my hesitancy to write. Fear that I don’t have anything original to say, that nobody will care about what I have to say, that I’m not worthy enough as a person to put my work before someone else’s eyes. But through all this I must promise myself one thing, which I know from experience: writing only makes more writing. There is more where this came from.
And that’s why I am returning here, to this practice of sending out goofy little letters to a small group of strangers who feel like friends. I hope you’re pushing forward with your own creative project in spite of your doubts. I hope you’re returning to your creative practice that nourishes you even when it’s time consuming or you’re not sure if you’re getting any better at it. You are.
Emily
* I would also soon discover that in knitting, like most things in life, it’s more important to learn how to see mistakes and correct them than it is to never make mistakes in the first place. And even more important than that is being able to discern which mistakes you can live with and which you can’t.