Dear FWAF,

For me, the moment just before taking creative action is dense with longing, vulnerability, excitement, fantasy, and often self-loathing—not unlike a flirtation. But finally taking action creates a confrontation with my true self (truly a terrifying proposition!), and it is through those kinds of confrontations that I actually develop my character. 

But the other thing that develops my character is my relationships. So, I am going to tell you to take the leap, but before you do, I’m going to encourage you to assess the support you have in these flirtations

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I had an immensely matter-of-fact acupuncturist when I lived in Chicago; she was my first-ever practitioner and her affect surprised me because I imagined she would be woo and airy, not no-nonsense. She, oddly, had developed a specialty of working with women theatre artists (I’d been referred to her by a mentor). I once asked her, in a moment of artistic meltdown: “How will I know when I can make art again?” In response, she told me a story about how she really struggles with driving: she hates it and gets completely overwhelmed. In this story, she had to drive stick shift in the middle of a busy city. She spent the whole time yelling at her husband that she couldn’t do it, that she was too scared, that it was unfair. But then suddenly, he said, “But you’re doing it,” and she realized that while she had been kicking and screaming, the thing she was afraid of was just…happening.

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Since I was a teenager, I’ve been obsessed with a passage from Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement. It’s one of the oldest books on my bookshelf, surviving a Marie Kondo era (thank God), and this passage is still marked with faint pencil:

Briony, our thirteen-year-old heroine, sits and stares at her hand. I’d encourage you to pick up your hand and try this along with her.

Using her bending finger, Briony is attempting to understand what part of her takes action and how. She has a sense that a fundamental truth exists in the space between not-doing and doing. “The secret of herself,” the “part of her that was really in charge,” can be found in the instant just before her finger moves. She then tests her hypothesis (continue following her lead!).

In this moment, it seems to me that Briony is testing the power of parts of herself—her will or desire—but they fall short; she’s missing “the part of her that’s really in charge.”

In this passage, Briony attempts to find what lies between doing and not doing: “the real self,” the soul, “the secret of herself,” “the part of her that’s really in charge.” The moment hovering before flexing my finger, before daring, hovers just shy of me. To stay there too long feels like self-abandonment. I become myself, again and again, by taking action. This feels particularly true, I think, for art and love. 

My obsession with this passage is similar to my obsession with T.S. Eliot’s “Do I dare?” (which I wrote about here): to dare is to “[force] the moment to its crisis,” as opposed to rotting in "decisions and revisions which a minute can reverse.” Yoda’s “Do or do not. There is no try,” makes a similar argument, as does, I admit, the Nike slogan “Just do it.” 

I’ve found various practices over the years for “hacking” this process of “forcing the moment to its crisis.” Viewpoints, an approach to theatrical composition created by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, trains performers in impulse and “Kinesthetic Response:” You move through a room with an ensemble and, through specific exercises, you study the sensation in your body when you are compelled to move or stop. More recently, my somatic therapist plays the game “Yes, No, Maybe,” where they ask me questions like “Do you like strawberries?” Yes. “Do you like skiing?” Maybe. “Do you like the smell of garbage?” No. “Do you want to go on a date with this guy?” Yes. The immediacy of those questions gets beneath pretending, beneath the “decisions and revisions which a minute can reverse,” and toward “the secret of myself.”

The last hack, perhaps, is the backflip (which I wrote about here): you can do some practice, but ultimately, the only way to do a backflip is to do one. 

***

It may sound like I’m telling you to “take the cold plunge”—and I am—but I urge you to do it with ample and loving support. The encounter with “the secret of yourself” is confronting and destabilizing. I spent a year dilly-dallying and fretting and standing on the precipice of writing this newsletter weekly. I had several false starts and attempts that I ungracefully dropped. In that period of daring, I did confront my true self, but I didn’t have adequate support, so it was quite painful: it turns out that my “real self” is (among many other things) rife with self-doubt and punishing workaholism. What finally allowed me to begin this newsletter with relative ease was a writing class¹ and a writing group: an incredibly strong container, twice a week, where I was making the work with supportive people. In those containers, others could hold my true self, keeping me from self-destruction. 

I resonate with your “creative flirtations”: they can be intoxicating. A few years ago, an art crush texted me about working on a project the same day I had a meet-cute with a boy at a coffee shop. I wanted to fuck him with a newfound erotic energy that confounded explanation: a friend said I was entering my thirty-something “sexual prime”? (Alas, the boy ended up being a bozo). 

But there was no hormonal explanation for the (much deeper) erotic (but not necessarily sexual) urge I felt towards the art crush. She sent me a voice memo, and I delayed listening to it because my anxious attachment had me all freaked out. I dropped everything to work on the project one afternoon. I sent her an effusive, totally not-chill text. Like a girl on the first date envisioning her wedding dress and nursery (to make a needlessly heteronormative image), I fantasized about us fusing resources, building a life together, making a masterpiece, hitting it big. I wanted to fling myself at her with no slowness, hesitancy, measured politesse—but I was also terrified, “peeking over the edge,” as you said. Nowadays, these fireworks have subsided: She and I are consistent art friends, supporting the slow, trudging work of each other’s practices, helping each other take the day-by-day daring actions necessary to have a life in the arts. She is part of the support system that allows me to confront “the secret of myself” again and again as I make my work. 

Do you have enough support is a different question than whether you’re ready. I’d suggest that you play the Yes/No/maybe question about your support system for your creative projects. Are these creative flirtations sturdy enough to hold you through the difficulty of really encountering yourself in the process?

If your whole-body response is “Yes,” then it’s time: You have done all the work of gentle cultivation. If your response is “No” or “Maybe,” then you get to inventory your support system. Could your group of “creative flirtations” support you better if you had some hard conversations? If you created some formal structure (a weekly or monthly meeting perhaps)? Or do you need support outside of these flirtations; sometimes a bunch of people at the same moment of challenge need support from someone on the other side. Do you need more mentorship from people who have taken the plunge more often (or more dramatically) than you have yet?

On the other side of this leap—whether you take it now or later, with this group or another, with your current support or more—is a new relationship to yourself. My somatic therapist calls this “increased capacity.” In my recent T.S. Eliot essay, I wrote about how Elise Granata calls this “agency.” Each time I dare, I become more myself. But it doesn’t happen alone.