Finally Admitting I’m Not an Artist
Emotional growth and inner work is a rocky roller-coaster of personal development.
Sometimes you trudge slowly upward, building knowledge upon knowledge about naming your emotions, identifying cognitive distortions, internalizing meditative tools and learning to be adult your inner child always needed by never had.
And sometimes you plummet into painful memories you’d totally forgotten and loop-the-loop of your past traumas until you can comprehend them from all sides, finally able to move on in healthy ways.
My own emotional inner healing journey has been wacky and confusing, and I haven’t really talked about it here in any detail.
This is largely because so much of what happens inside you as you heal, it’s easy to think sometimes that you’re simply making it all up in your head or day-dreaming. But don’t buy into that; that’s a disservice to your journey and to your inner child (or children) that need your validation for growth and healing. Sometimes important growth moments only come because they’re the cumulative effect of hundreds of other moments and that came beforehand.
I had an epiphany this week.
I was reflecting upon the quote by St Francis of Assissi (I’ll quote it again here in case the image hasn’t loaded):
He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.
-St Francis of Assissi.
And as I was reflecting on it, I was curving off the pointed edges on my wife’s bedside table.
And I suppose it was the counterpoint between the crudeness of my own labor and the lofty aspirations and artistry I apply to beautifully-crafted furniture and buildings that caused me to realize: I’m just not an artist.
I’ve been redefining myself wrong for over two decades.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought of myself as creative. As a child, I loved art and music and film and stories, and I’ve always created stories and characters and lyrics, etc.
After two and a half years of learning the guitar from ages 11–14, I got good enough that I knew I could play any song I wanted with practice, and so I essentially stopped practicing.
Oh, I still played all the time. Hours every day. But I didn’t have the ambition of an artisan to devote the rest of my life to notching up my music to the elite level of auditory artwork. Instead, I began writing songs.
Guitar, songwriting, composing, singing, other instruments, other languages, other modes and styles of music from around the world and from history. I continued learning and exploring and creating, and expressing my ideas and my feelings through music, and also through my writing.
And by St Francis of Assissi’s standard/definition, I’m an artist. And I’ve thought of myself for most of my life now as a creator/creative, a musician, an artist.
But then I had this epiphany the other day.
It was the cumulative effect of years of growth and healing and learning about essentially every topic I have ever learned about.
I came to the conclusion that while there is value in the categorizations St Francis gave here, that the entire mode of thought is based on what sets apart the craftsman and the artist from the common laborer, meaning that “common laborer” is the baseline or basis here.
And even though I’m capable of common labor, that’s not my mode of being. I love artistry and good craftsmanship, and I create beautiful ideas and designs and things in my head all the time, but I’m not the guy to bring that into being. I’m the “ideas man” who tells my team what I’m envisioning and has them bring it to life for me.
And that rocked my world.
I’ve spent my life on the fringes, thinking of myself as this out-there, differently-thinking, softer, artistic type. In another life, I might have been a monk or a philosopher or a church composer.
But the common thread that I kept missing because of my love for music was that I wasn’t the brilliant performer up there dazzling people. I was the guy mashing ideas together with no desire to rehearse them to perfection and perform them again and again for the crowds.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I would have much preferred other people playing my songs, than for me to be the one doing it.
And that’s probably why I’ve gravitated away from music and more towards writing throughout my life, because I can create and compose the words, but I don’t have to get up every night and read them again and again for the people. The people either read them themselves, or they don’t.
Like I said, this epiphany has been a long time coming, slowly creeping up on me, and maybe if I’d actually looked into human design with its manifestor and generator and reflector personality types, maybe I would have had this epiphany sooner.
But the take-away is that now I understand myself a whole lot better. I see where my ambition has been hiding all these years. It was buried under the misconception of who I was.
I’m not an artist. I actually really suck at all the finer details. For lack of a better term, I’m a visionary. I’m a big-picture ideas guy who needs a whole team of people to do all that other detailed stuff.
Yes, I’m very creative. But that doesn’t make me an artist.
