Getting A Little Depressed
But still moving forward creatively anyway.
“Mom, sometimes I have so many big ideas in my head that I can’t go to sleep,” said my three-year-old son as I was tucking him in to bed tonight.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like some new ideas for the robot I’m building. Things I want to draw.” His robot, from what I can tell, is a large, mixed-media art project centered around a square of wood that is taking up much of our screened-in porch. He collects little bits of things he finds and uses glue, tape, and screws to affix them to his Frankenstinian creation. It zero percent resembles a robot.
“I know what you mean,” I told him. “I feel the same way when I’m writing one of my books.”
Oh, the blessing and the curse that is a creative mind.
I never thought that of all the things I might see come alive in my children, creativity would be one of the most important to me.
A few weeks ago, I overheard my son say to himself, “All day long, my body just wants to draw!” When I pick him up from school, I have to stuff his backpack with the pile of drawings he made, some of mazes, other of treasure maps or tracings of his classmates hands or shapes or practiced letters.
He can spend hours of time occupying himself (and for those parents of toddlers, you know such activities are a godsend) with his “art cart.”
I love that he loves expressing his own creativity because it’s something so important in my life and something I try to stress the importance of to the other adults I work with in writing capacities. All that being said, I’d never wish a creative career—and all the rejection that comes with it—upon him.
Recently, I submitted one of my unpublished young adult novels to a contest that, for some reason, I had weirdly high hopes for. This manuscript I submitted I started writing—literally—over a decade ago, but I still really love it. It still means something to me. I still want people to read it even though I haven’t found a home for it yet.
Today, I learned, I would not be winning said contest, which is really no surprise at all because, of course, there can only be one winner, and therefore, odds aren’t in my favor, but still I felt a little depressed. Each time a door closes on the hopes of an exciting creative opportunity, it’s hard not to feel a bit down, a bit exhausted by the energy needed to try, try again, despite however many years you’ve gotten used to withstanding the rejection. Which is why part of me hopes my son feels content creating for himself, taping his photos up to the living room wall as he does now.
Maybe this is helicopter parenting of me, to want to shield him from the rejection that is often inevitable when pursuing a creative career, but what writer-parent could blame me?
“How do you keep going?” my husband asked me. “Sometimes failure shows up to tell us it’s time to try something new.”
To be fair, it hasn’t all been rejection. I landed my first literary agent at 23, I published a novel that won three awards, I’ve won writing grants and spots at conferences and writing residencies, but regardless, I’m in this writing thing for the long hall. Maybe I’ll have to resort to wallpapering the hallways of my home with the typed pages of my manuscript, but hopefully there will be other readers too. Because what a blessing and a joy, really, to get to share a bit of our creative minds with the world.
Much as I’m doing here each week. So, thanks for reading.
Creativity Through the Senses for this week:
See: I watched Netflix’s Pain Hustlers movie this past weekend staring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans based on a true story about a not-so-good pharma company (shocking). It ended up being pretty entertaining. I noticed during the credits the screenplay was written by Wells Tower who I remember seeing read in a small, well-known bar in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood back in 2009 for his book of short stories Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned when I was there pursuing my MFA in writing. I miss those days when attending multiple literary readings a week was the norm.
Hear: I made the horrible, horrible mistake of playing “Who Let the Dogs Out?” for my two toddlers. They are now consumed by the canine-like howls of the Baha Men and request this song be played on repeat ad naseam. What have I done?? I can’t un-hear it anymore.
Smell: We made a bonfire in the yard over the weekend, which is to say my husband spent much of Saturday trying to make a fire in the yard. He is good at many things, but making fires is not one of them (sorry, honey). His shirt stunk of smoke after standing in it for hours, blowing on leaves and fire starters and bits of balled up newspaper to no avail. “I’m not washing this shirt,” he said. I didn’t argue.
Taste: Pumpkin pie! My son, daughter, and I making an absolute mess on our kitchen floor as we mix the pumpkin and the eggs and the maple syrup and the cinnamon. They are eating more of the ingredients than are actually being mixed, and I slide my finger against the side of the mixing bowl, too, because we love this, the three of us, getting our hands dirty with the disparate powders and liquids that come together just right to make something that can feed us from the outside in.
Touch: My husband and I had a paint night again this week, where we pull out our little square canvases and acrylic paints and pretend we are visual artists for the night. I enjoy the sensual feel of my brush flicking across the canvas, dipping in the mixed colors, moving lines across the space until it forms something—albeit, vaguely—recognizable.