⭐️ This letter is a ~5 minute read ⭐️
A phone notes love poem I wrote to myself last week but really needed to read this week.
When I first started sharing my quilting and garment-altering practice, I felt a little awkward. I was acutely aware of what I perceived as INCONGRUOUS OUTPUT. I had this sense that my Identity™was very much wrapped up in dancing and performance making. Now this girl’s comin out of left field with the swatches and swaddles with a blustery force so what gives?
Truth be told, likely no one in my life besides me was phased by the ~randomness~ of learning to quilt and the subsequent GETTING ALL SWEPT UP IN THE TEXTILES.
But it continues to feel like a loud pivot.
I’m still mourning the loss of public performance and group-dance making experiences with the intimacy and frequency I once knew them. I often wondered throughout the pandemic if I was still a dancer if I only danced by myself on the deck with the trees and birds and wisteria vines.
The answer, I know, is a resounding and forever yes. But what about THY CAREER?! What about the Thing I will say when I’m asked innocently what I do for a living, for work, for purpose, right before my mind responds by turning into one of those wobbly air tube blobbies that advertises car washes.
Learning to quilt was an act of saying yes to what I refer to as the inner ‘oo-shiny’ consciousness. That sparkly efforting of life to get our attention, with a ‘hey look at this, consider this illogical thing.' It's a dare, asking if we are willing to bet on the uncertain glimmer from stage left, reason be damned. And my pivot towards the textiles, in many ways, saved me in the post-performance-whatever limbo I live in now. It has bread-crumbed me back to my center, and to places I couldn’t have imagined.
I did not anticipate creating a line of wearable art, or quilting to support myself financially after learning. I did not anticipate all the people I would meet. I did not anticipate how quilting and the community it offered would support my grief and my sanity when freefalling from the freaking cliff of 2021.
And yet, there are so many ways to strike down the oo-shiny attention-tinglings when they appear to us. So many reasons to fear the pivot.
You know who really knows how to pivot? FEAR.
She’s got a look, a shoe, a wig for every circumstance and can do a costume-change skippity-boop to be up in your face in 10 seconds flat. She’s like HI HELLO HERE'S A NEW WAY TO BE AFRAID OF YOUR LIFE.
The costumes fear is donning in this particular rodeo are many: fear of being seen as a beginner, fear of being inconsistent, fear of surprising other people with our weird newness, fear of bumbling and flailing around in the I'm just trying out a new identity soup, the fear of others’ potential judgments squashing our fledgling little idea sprout.
And probably many more.
This all reminds me of my Granny who was such a wild-ass creative multi-hypenate. The original renaissance woman in my pantheon of art elders. She was a housewife in the 50’s, mother of many children, and married to a beloved doctor in high society Birmingham, Alabama. She wasn’t allowed to be an artist. She worked in stealth mode, underground.
A covert operator. She was the kind of woman who would talk shit about the neighborhood ladies who lunch, chain-smoking cigarettes, up all night painting the foyer Sanguine Red just because she got a wild hair for it.
She gave herself a lot of permission to try anything she was interested in creatively–decoupaging, garment making, furniture building, needlepoint, upholstery, lamp fabrication, painting, drawing, all of it. She used to call each new interest ‘this jag I’m on’, experimenting for a spell then maybe never touching it again.
I imagine this permission came from how underground her practice was, as if the covert mode she created in was a protective sheath, imbuing her with a wild west raucousness to taste and dabble and flit in and out of anything that snagged her inner attention. Without being overly encumbered by—what if this sucks, what if this new direction makes no sense, what about my brand consistency? This might just confuse the hell out of my audience!
Recently, I heard a podcast interview with Garance Doré, and she was speaking about a friend's pre-teen daughter who was bemoaning not having figured out her “personal brand” yet. Shoot. (What’s the word for feeling deeply bewildered by something and wholly unsurprised at the same time?)
Hello to the pressure to turn your consciousness into your brand! Which in some ways I think is hella tight, but also carries the dubious shadow side of not feeling spaciously allowed ELBOW ROOM TO EXPERIMENT in the name of consistency. Room to fuck it up, to flail around in the new thing, the unexpected thing, the THIS IS ME NOW thing until it's not, because NOW THIS IS ME. And in a surprise plot twist, this incongruent thing is ALSO ME!
Aside from working in stealth mode and hiding your oo-shiny breadcrumb pivots from the public eye, I think another path is just digging down for that dang courage. Courage to be seen being different from the version other people are used to and think they know. Courage to occupy a wider spectrum of what you think is dope, especially when you know others may think that thing is maybe lame. Courage to follow the sauce and the pleasure tingle of curiosity, and not get ensnared by the bear trap of public legibility.
HERE’S TO THE JAG
TO THE ZIG ZAG
TO THE NOODLE AND DOODLE
Here’s to chopping it up skillfully and haphazardly with our awkward tools and zeal for reinvention. Here’s to going in an unpopular direction because the inner ping says so.
This is the thing I keep coming back to: I am the sense-making through line in all of my diverse interests. They go together because they all swirl up in me. All the junk up in my trunk gets to be a part of the *brand*.
We GET TO BE the unlikely connection between pasta making and block-printing, cataloging fossils and professional scrapbooking, dancing and quilting, experimental opera and natural dying. And I think our willingness to BE SEEN pivoting to taste all of our seemingly disparate YESes creates new Venn diagrams for those who witness us. Now those talents and topics live a little bit closer to one another and there's a bridge that’s been made and the bridge is you.
OK shoof there it it, sermon soap box going back in my truck with all my other junk :)
Where I'm Teaching rn
I’ve been leading a month long dramaturgy residency at an arts middle school in Atlanta.
We're studying this play about a family who flees their home during the Korean War.
Last week, the playwright, Lloyd Suh, zoomed in to our class to be interviewed by the students and he said this great thing about artists and the kind of daily resistance habit they have to cultivate to sustain their creative vitality. It's feeling very on brand with this week's newsletter topic~
You have to resist turning your art into a commodity. Artists will always be judged by the rest of the world for their output, for their creative products. Artists have to work hard to not measure their work this way. We have to understand ourselves through our process, our daily living, knowing that everything we do is a creative act, and it's about the way we live our lives, not the things we make.
(If you're in ATL, consider seeing the play, it's gonna be a goody!)
Here's a coupla boops that I finished last week and are mail-bound for some beloveds.
Scale is so funny. The second lil quilt is a little bigger than a placemat, and this one richeer ^ is about like half a door. I don't measure lol.
Happy New Moon in Aquarius, Lunar New Year, and Imbolc time to all who honor such,
❤️ Melissa