Artist on the Sidelines: When you finally find the time, but lose the drive
Maybe it happens during a glittery New Year’s Eve bash. Perhaps some years, Labor Day on the lake brings it to mind. Other times, it arrives on your birthday, sure as the day itself.
I’m referring to the often annual moment when we look back at the accumulation of minutiae — at the fine lines on our faces, the rearranged furniture in the living room, the list of silly nicknames we keep giving to our pets— and finally, all at once, see the overlooked details of our day-to-day, now bound together into an entity we can identify conclusively as change.
Right now, however, with millions of lives ground to a sputtering halt, we’re forced to come to terms with a bit more change than we’re used to swallowing in one sitting. Some among us- the healthcare professionals, the grocery clerks, the delivery drivers- will move through the coming months at warp speed. They will do their best and go above and beyond when they can, and hopefully, they can find a way to process and share their stories somewhere down the line. Others will adjust to working from home, either happy to finally be free of water cooler gossip or longing to dissect inane cultural moments with co-workers. Still others will come to terms with not working at all, and perhaps confront their own identity and sense of self-worth in the process. Change is knocking, and no one gets to stay a stranger.
Settled into niches all across this “Impacts of COVID-19” Venn Diagram, artists (working or otherwise) will also grapple with fluctuating senses of purpose, identity, and meaning. Although I consider myself one of the gang now, I am also recently divorced from a soul-mangling career in emergency management and public safety. Consequently, I often find myself recalling a scene from 30 Rock that reaffirms my novel place on the pandemic’s sidelines.
JACK: In a post-apocalyptic world, how would they even use you?
LIZ: Traveling bard.
JACK: Radiation canary.
Last week, I made the case that you might spend your two-week quarantine blitzing through a first draft of a screenplay. Oh, March 16th, 2020 — we were so young then. Now, Los Angeles and other cities, counties, states, and countries around the world are assessing lock downs extending at least until mid-April. And really, who among us believes that the post-Stay at Home world will look precisely like the old one with which we had grown so familiar? The odds of waking up on a late April morning, uplifted by the sense that “it was all a dream,” seem as unlikely as the soap opera storylines that birthed the trope in the first place.
Despite early hopes, we are now beyond a Grin and Bear It scenario, one that can be defeated with a burst of energy and a heavily organized relationship with our to-do lists and wayside-fallen projects. Instead, we are now well advanced into a New Normal scenario that feels decidedly abnormal and necessitates substantially more adaptability and openness. This is not a vacation. Whether you’re an artist or not, you’re probably filing for unemployment, plotting rent payments against the decreasing trajectory of checking accounts, and wondering how long a bag of rice actually lasts. You’re watching death and infection statistics bleakly ascend, worrying about grandparents and their rogue Garden Club meetings, and waiting for the next shoe to drop.
If you are an artist, you’re (probably) feeling bad about your inability to translate the panic and pain into something of immediate value. For my own part, over the course of the last week I’ve found myself deeply frustrated by old projects that have lost their urgency, and further unsettled by the prospect of starting anything relevant to current affairs. Worse than writer’s block, it’s writer’s limbo, where you’re in constant free fall and always at least six feet away from clarity and perspective.
For a week now, my inner monologue has quietly screamed, “Use this time!” and “Be productive!” and “You’re a phony if you don’t spin your temporal freedom into great art!” I’ve watched industries of all stripes and hues close up shop, and I’ve wondered what gives me any right to keep working on my projects. Slowly and stumblingly, I’ve been arriving at the conclusion that these thoughts do not serve me, and that I had best set them aside.
Or rather, I should say re-arriving. I actually learned long ago that the wake of a tragedy is far too choppy for me to piece together a cognizant narrative. Break-ups, deaths, failures; these sad events were never succeeded by a quick creative blossoming. In the short-term, trauma has often wrung from me only scattered journal entries and fragments of apocalyptic poetry, turning me into an anxious, distracted Yeats wannabe.
And yet: those journal pages, filled with scrawlings and scribbles written so near to the inspiration itself, have never been for nothing. They become a part of the story, but also live forever as their own story, illustrating events from a perspective perpetually blind to the satisfaction of knowing what comes next. They become a totem of change themselves, safeguarding fledgling thoughts and feelings that would otherwise be whisked away beyond the reach of mortal memory.
All of this is to say that you are not a failure if you don’t meet a self-imposed standard of creative productivity for next however many weeks or months. Work diligently when you can, fill your own cup always, and embrace the flux. Set aside projects that feel stuck, take up new (or old) ones, and set your own creative agenda. (Perhaps, hypothetically, you’ve been working on an essay regarding your parents’ music choices during their divorce in the 1990s, and maybe listening to that much Garth Brooks is not a priority right now. You know. Hypothetically.) Be ready for Inspiration.
Be accepting of her absence.
