A boss of mine once yelled at me in a moment of heated aggression, “Your learning by doing is not working out!” I laughed and said, “Yeah, I hear you man, but it’s all I got!”
I’d like not to care about what you think wearing my Golden Goose sneakers and black Alexander Wang dress. But truth is, I do care.
In this series of blogs, I brought up dating because it’s super awkward, hope because it can lie, subtext because it rules us like our unchecked egos and a rap because of all of the above. They’re part of the striptease of revealing yourself (as an artist) regardless of how many layers come off.
This is learning by doing.
Part of art is that it needs to be experienced by someone else in order to close the circle of the exchange. Of course the journey and the doing are vital but if I write a book and no one reads it, what’s the point of the book? Without a reader there’s no relating. Without feedback, regardless of the feedback’s flavor, you have no clue where you stand in relation to what you’ve created and that’s where the juicy stuff is.
That’s also where I used to stop. Imagine, I let one professor’s negative feedback shelf years of poetry, because I gave a fuck. But here’s the deal, precisely because it takes an other person, things will be unpredictable, maybe even messy. You’ll push a boundary, cross a line, expose a limit. And possibly, if you’re lucky, even trigger his and hers matching shit.
Don’t let the way other people may react stop you from acting, otherwise you’re cheating yourself of half the experience.
People will not like it. People will like it. And I want you to think about this, at least it helps me press publish, most people will not even notice or care because we’re all too worried about our own shit. We’re not even looking at yours!
So grow a pair! Keep doing it and for fucks sake, keep sharing it.
(Anatomical Heart Image from a Vintage Science Book circa 1884, The Graphics Fairy)
I love your brain Sophie.
thank you for that!