Live Your Vision
How do you see yourself and does your work reflect that vision?
Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈
Turn out your pockets. Rifle through the receipts. Dig your fingernails into the lint of the hem and check for DNA. The DNA of your rivals, your lovers, your friends; your disappointment, your vengeance, your shame, and your history. Rip the lining from your inner self and lick at the stitches. Double knotted, double-crossed, double troubled. This is your fabric and the robe of the true you, worn in your secret dreams where no one knows the score.
Flip the softness of your eyelids until the reddened insides of your light are exposed to your mirror. Open your mouth wide and examine your cavities, your mouth sores, and your ragged tongue. This is the real. This is the true autonomy. You are not held in the gloss or the shine of your matinee. You are not the fake that hides the bona fide. You are not the perfection that’s sought to be broadcast in this world.
You are you. You are a rapidly decaying bag of cells and blood and bone and disease. This is how it will be. Your imperfections can be mined for gold. Your imperfections will set you free.
In your recognition of this, you become a vision. Your vision. A shrine to your genuine. Your mirror applauds and the weight of your terrible lie is lifted by angels. A lightness. A hope. An unfeigned clarity of self. It is the long bright corridor of growth of the heart. Spiritual graduation wearing an evolutionary gown. You are a victor against the great grand deceit of exposure.
What’s that now?
Is how you see yourself—right now at this moment—an accurate reflection of the human you want to be, could be, are? Is the work you’re making an imitation of expectation? Are you being a being in your true being’s gaze? A beginning or an end? A future, a past, or a now? A fraud or a fact? If someone were to imitate you where would their focus be? Would it be a physicality of motion or a cruelty of personality? Your shallow voice or your fiction-fed laugh? How will you be portrayed in the courtyard of critique?
Are you honoring your inner with your outer?
These are just questions and you can stop and reflect or move on and keep hiding. Your life can just as easily be insignificant as not.
How can you be honest with yourself about yourself and what you want? Do you even know what that is? OK, now how will you get it? Does it require you to lie about who you are or do things that do not fulfill simply to be in the center? Are these your doctored credentials? Why do you flash them to an algorithm that doesn’t care who you are or who you are debasing with your fake factual?
Fake? Phony? Liar? Is that you?
Again, questions. Move along. There is nothing to see here.
Nothing but the (bull)shit show.
We are walking around with our legs on backwards. Our eyes are transfixed upon dark pools of nothingness with hearts in lockboxes while wearing the souls of corporate latchkey kids. Faces stuck in screens of light, blinded by our ambition, taken by shysters and hucksters and making mockeries of the gift. The life. The useless mystery. We come, we go, we are unchaperoned in our descent into the darkness.
You are a brand, you are not a brand.
You matter, you don’t matter.
This is the fast track to the slow decline.
We are sick with it.
Skin sallow, eyes bloodshot, the stench of fickle insincerity permeates the textiles of our garments and stains the photographs and pixel points of our records. When you get to the end, will your pages be blank or smudged with the grease of magnificent memory meals? Will you have inked a fan letter to your life well lived? It’s not too late. It’s never too late to pick up a tool and get to work.
To be a philosopher of time. To be an archeologist of fate. We dig, we track, we scratch marks on door frames as we grow. In our insincere spurts, we are diminished. Stunted. In the ignorant betrayal of our inner truth, we lessen ourselves. We are made weak and uninteresting to alien life forms who visit, take one look and hastily exit, stealing bags of beignets as the only evidence of the triumph of our civilization. It is our pinnacle. Our zenith. Our end. The powdered sugar on our dying planet betrays our inner dough. The goo of our fakery.
It’s not too late!
Do not deny who you are. Do not deny what you want. Do not present your hustle as a poor approximation of someone else’s because you’re tired of the long way around. The quick fix is the wrong fix. Do or do not and go or do not go—whatever—but be consistent with who you are. The real of you. She thinks she’s an intellectual. She thinks she’s an influencer. She thinks she will be the next to be shot into space, a tourist on a mission to infinite mundanity. It’s all so tiresome. Less thinking, more being. Less lying to eyes, more living of the true self in often empty rooms, knowing no eyes on you is the same as all eyes on you. Don’t care about either.
Our vision of ourselves can seem small and insignificant. The work that we do can seem pointless and inane. Don’t drown in the questions. When will I, will I be famous? When will I get my moment in the sun? The sun is out to get us, and the spotlight with its too-bright gaze flares just as hot. We are surrounded by the hustle of fame and it is not the brass ring, the fat and dripping sky pie, the be-all and end-all of our life’s run on this planet. If you get there, fine—all I’m saying is don’t sacrifice the you of you in the journey.
To recognize the weakness in our vision of ourselves—the flaws, cracks, and ugly belly button lint or mottled skin of our ethics and influences, of how the pursuit of fame is a hollow promise—that is freedom. It shows the ability to be altered, to change channels, to flip scripts. We recognize our limitations and by doing so expand our ability to burn brighter, hit harder, and land safely. A victory against malaise.
It’s so easy to give in—much harder to commit. Witness our daily struggle to face fear, to go against the evil, or to speak up at the risk of being shouted down. It takes effort to do the best, most authentic to you work. To risk hate. To share vulnerability. To expose the inner to your outer, and other short and punchdrunk sentences.
Trust me: to have your work be misunderstood can be just as potent as being loved. You’ve just got to work out how to process it.
Finally, she gets to it. How does what we make fit in with who we are? How can we use our art to speak in a way that has meaning to others while still being true to ourselves? If you have nothing to say, say nothing. But, if you have something to say that changes nothing—only delights and nods the head of another—then I think you should get to speaking. Not every piece of work has to change the world. Sometimes its purpose is just to change a day and that’s enough. That’s the value. That’s the prize.
The more you are you, the more your work evolves. Share the real that is in your heart, with all its wrong turns and dead ends. For what is life but the constant turning of a wheel? Drive it. Turn it. Stay off bad roads. (There is no cancel culture, just cliffs we drive ourselves off and they’re usually well signposted.) It’s in your hands—your true, and fully-realized hands.
How’s my driving? Feeling carsick yet?
The truth of you is known only to you—honor it by creating work that slowly peels back your robe to show the world your soft body, cellulite and all. Work that shows who you are in the quiet. Know that your pages are not pre-written. Make a collage of your truth, if you like. Write your own path. Paint your masterpiece. Edit your own film for clarity. Reframe the objective of your greater good as you march toward the full stop at the end of a worthwhile life.
Do not hide.
Make yourself a vision with sharp edges and a no-static soundtrack. Make yourself a vision and aspire to be visionary with it. Be seen.
But.
What if your authentic self is a poison to society? What if the vision of your inner is a nightmare to the outer?
If you peel back your layers and discover a pustulant boil of raging, feverish bias; if you slough off that robe and your nakedness is ugly in a way that punches down for the thrill of cheap celebrity or notoriety; if you are emboldened by these times to create works that wink at your bigotry or racism or show the terror in your fists previously hidden behind prayer hands and share it in your art for the purpose of easy popularity with a wrong-headed crowd, let me just say this. Again.
Do not hide.
I want to see you, too. And when you show me who you are, bet your beignets I will believe it.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
Living simply today takes work. It takes work to overcome the noise that has accumulated in our heads, growing louder and more pervasive since we were young. It takes work to overcome the illusion that we will arrive at some end point where we will be better — more successful, adored, satisfied, relaxed, rich. It takes hard work to say, “This is how I am,” in a calm voice, without anxiously addressing how you should be. It takes work to shift your focus from the smudges on the window to the view outside. It requires conscious effort not to waste your life swimming furiously against the tide, toward some imaginary future that will never make you happy anyway. Even once you accept that you’re just another regular mortal and not some supernatural force who deserves to live like a king — a message encoded in the background noise of our daily lives, rich, poor, or somewhere in the insecure in-between — it’s still hard not to wish for something more exciting than calm acceptance. It’s hard not to wish for the romance of movies, the soul-bearing friendships of books, the egalitarian ideals of Martin Luther King, Jr., the miraculous talent of Mozart.
Via a 2018 Longread essay called The Miracle of the Mundane by Heather Havrilesky. In it, she “…calls for tuning out the online cacophony telling us we aren’t enough, and tuning in to the soul-affirming, quiet truth of the present moment.”
On Rotation: “Brassneck” by The Wedding Present
I couldn’t decide if this should go in Ephemera or Eyes, but once I saw the image of the horse stamping on the keyboard, well, it was obvious where it should go. Ladies and gents, I give you Outhorse Your Email. Iceland seems like it might have a good sense of humor...
Pick a horse and get it to reply to your emails while you’re out of the office.
Via Meanwhile
Honestly, this is another thing that could’ve easily been in visual, but it’s Lego so I”m putting it in here. The Starry Night Lego Set is coming available. If you’re into it, I hope you get one.
Via Design Milk
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
Mercy! I turned my black light on your writing and the whole piece turned into a Jackson Pollock painting!