Permission To Suck

by Effy | Dec 18, 2022 | blog

This is a repost from 2013 but I wanted to dust it off because a LOT of you are just beginning your journey or are renewing your commitment to mixed media art or art journaling, so VOILA! Read On

Hello, lovely fresh, new, green-as-grass artist/writer/sculptor/musician/poet/photographer!

So, you want to be an artist, and you’ve just started out with hope in your eyes and passion in your heart for your chosen art form. Perhaps you’ve begun a practice – sketching or painting or writing or composing. Maybe you’ve done a few things by now and when you look at your fresh, shiny ‘body of work’, your heart sinks a little bit. You may be giving yourself a stern talking-to. You may even be going all GORDON RAMSEY on yourself. (Curious what I mean by this? Do keep reading!)

Practicing any art form is hard at first. We need to develop our skills, develop muscle memory (or carve out new pathways in our brain meats). We need to begin seeing or hearing or thinking in a new way.

And hard not just in the skill-building sense, but in the hard-on-our-self-esteem sense. Doing anything we’re new at comes with a double whammy of omg, I suck at this stuff + omg, look at that <insert the flaws you perceive in your work> stuff. Neither is good for the budding artist within us, or the tender five-year-old self we all carry at the core of our adulthood.

We’ve all experienced our Hell’s Kitchen-inspired inner critics going all Gordon Ramsey on our asses over how badly we suck as we are beginning. Let me ask you this: how do you feel when you watch someone bash themselves about the head and face for sucking or getting it wrong or hating their own work?

Like crap. Because this is tender territory. Our inner five-year-olds are thinking “OH NO! IF SHE’S CRAP THEN I MUST BE CRAP, TOO!” Our budding inner artists get really, really scared to *try* because we know we’re new, and we know we’re probably going to suck, too.

We need a little Julia Child infusion. Julia Child would never swear at us for breaking an egg. She would just move the class into omelet-making with grace and humour. She would never freak out at us or swear at us for burning the filet. She’d throw her hands up and say THERE’S ALWAYS THE SALAD…

So, let’s ease off on ourselves. Let’s save the really hard stuff for when we’ve mastered the basics. Let’s remember that we are NEW. Let’s remember that we get to practice and practice doesn’t mean ‘perfect’ or even ‘passable’. It means PRACTICE.

Let’s practice with a sense of fun, of play. Let’s not yell at our budding inner artists for *trying*. Let’s not traumatize our already tender inner five year olds with smack talk. Let’s not label our early attempts as ‘failures’.

Deal?

I want you to take this in. Bookmark it. Make it a habit to watch it regularly. I’m down to once a month or so, but when I first started making art, I was watching this *at least* weekly.

Watch it daily if you need to:

Perfectionism BLOCKS Progress

When I first began I *sucked at everything*. I sucked like crazy. I couldn’t draw what I saw (and I still can’t) to save my life. I had to learn every skill I’ve got and then I had to practice. I knew I sucked, but I *was okay with it*. I was lucky enough to know that suckage is inevitable when you are a beginner.

If I’d expected to be perfect or even good out of the gate, I would have quit because perfectionism blocks progress. It sets us up to fail.

Because, listen: Perfect doesn’t exist. Even when (as in portrait making) we measure every facial feature within a nanometer of its existence, there is going to be something *off* in our final product. And guess what? THAT’S AWESOME! Because it is in the flaws that character shines through. It is in the slight crookedness of a grin or the wonkiness of one eye that our faces achieve their humanity.

Compare, for example, a mannequin to a photograph. Mannequins are perfect. They are also creepy. They are imitations of life, and they feel like imitations.

So, forget perfect. Go for progress. Progress moves us forward. Every time you practice, you are *bound to get better*. A first attempt will suck, but it is also medal-worthy, because DUDE! YOU TRIED! And you are going to keep trying until you are HAPPY with what you produce.

Trying Is Winning

Learning to create things that make us happy is an exercise in trying. We will produce a lot of crap, but it is COMPOST crap, not shit-on-the-bottom-of-our-shoe crap. It is the kind of crap from whence roses grow. Let us honour that. Making crap leads to making not so crappy leads to making things we love. Trying is winning. We’re all winners.

The Art Of The Reframe

If you start channeling Gordon Ramsey, try conjuring up Julia Child instead. To Gordon’s “WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU?” respond with “THERE’S ALWAYS THE SALAD”.

Do Not Do

DO!

Try it and see if you don’t find yourself easing up a little bit…or a lot.

You would not expect a five-year-old to master anything out of the gate. Like a five-year-old trying something new, you have permission to suck. Sucking leads to not sucking with time, patience, practice, humour and kindness.

Sending humour and kindness to all the places that need it. 

xo
Effy

It’s Like Cutting Your Hair

by Effy | Dec 16, 2022 | blog

On December 14th, 2022 I got over myself entirely, came in here, and deleted ten years worth of posts.

I hesitated, of course, because that’s a lot of content – a lot of really *personal* content. The virtual diary of a decade in which I gained almost everything, lost almost everything, gained almost everything, lost almost everything again, and then slowly, began to gain everything back again.

The *everythings” are shifty things because the gains I made in the early aughts (as defined by me as beginning in 2012 when I began my online business in earnest) were shifty things. Therapy is like that. You gain – self-esteem, awareness, healing, perspective – but it can feel like gaining those things costs *everything*.

But the “everything” in this equation was, in fact, not everything. Not even almost. The everythings I lost were:

• Shituationships.
• A home that I hated that was never mine to begin with.
• Trauma bonds.
• Ways of being in the world that were not in alignment with who I am.
• Masking. So much masking.
• Tying myself into impossible configurations in order to try to get along.
• Fawning. So much fawning.
  

  And so on.

The posts I deleted from this space were all about that “everything that was not actually everything”. They were love letters to people who didn’t/couldn’t love me back. They were attempts at being an acceptable self that somehow might win the acceptance of those I was trauma bonded with. They were a kind of spinning out. Desperate flailing. Rewritten history. Dreaming out loud for things that weren’t actually my dreams. Making an opus out of whistling tunes. Beauty from ashes, and okay, that’s a pretty worthwhile pursuit, but not *these* ashes.

These ashes were dumpster fire ashes.

So I exported the whole thing as an .xml file (because I’m no dummy! There may be times when I’ll want to comb through them for my #autobiography *rofl*!) and then I trashed every single one.

It was a lot like cutting my own hair. Let me explain.

The first time I cut my own hair was shortly after the pandemic started. I gave myself bangs, and they looked great. I was full of hope and life and light despite everything that was going on and it was a fun blip on the “shelter in place” radar.

The second time was in October 2021 when I was *still* – and much to my chagrin because protracted grief seems to be my way and I was *sick of it* –  in deep grief over a breakup. I wet it down, brushed it all up and over the top of my head, grabbed the hank of it and snip snip snip with the kitchen shears. Yes, the very same ones I use to break down a chicken.

Done.

I didn’t even bother to make any kind of magic with it – no drying it out and tossing it on a Samhain fire. No offering it to the birds for the making of nests. Nope. I flushed it. Done. Gone.

I left it long enough that it was barely noticeable, but still. I noticed. How much lighter I felt. How much like I’d cut something more than hair – something energetic that had its hooks in me and would not let go. Something that had kept me drowning-not-waving over here in my own little storm.

The last time was a few weeks ago after months of feeling like I was growing more and more “swamp witch like” in appearance and less and less enamored with that self-designated honorific. I wanted, more and more, to be less swamp witch-like. Yes, still your favourite rusty bucket of bog water, but not so much with the straggly, grown-out locks.

I watched a bunch of TikTok videos on the art of the wolf cut in preparation for what I knew was coming, and one night, after turning over in bed and almost yanking the hair right out of my scalp because I was laying on it, that was it. I was done. I stormed into the bathroom, grabbed the good scissors I’d ordered on Amazon and kept on the shelf by the mirror, and did the thing.

Here’s where it took me:

Pardon the quality of the photo please. It’s a screen grab from Zoom.

I had some regrets the next day. Not going to lie. BUT, I’ve gotten nothing but compliments on it since I did it because instead of wearing it up and back and away from my face the way I did when I was in full swamp witch territory, I’ve been wearing it down. So instead of perpetually looking (and feeling) like some kind of school marm (not that there’s anything wrong with that – it’s just not me), I feel a little bit like a rock star. Especially with these rose-colored glasses that I love love love.

And this blog feels like that now.

I chopped off all the dead weight. I spiffed it up a bit. I tossed the whole thing right down to the design and logo down the toilet, and I will not look back. No more masking. No more pretending. No more rewriting history. No more making super novas out of candlelight.

Candlelight is better. There’s no exploding, and it’s mine, and I can tend it, and it lasts.

xo
Effy

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Surfacing

by Effy | Dec 14, 2022 | blog

Hello, Interwebs. It’s been a while, yes? I am not here to apologize for that, though.

I’m here to declare that I am surfacing. Let me explain.

If you’ve followed me on the socials or taken classes with me for any length of time, you’re aware that the last few years have not been kind to me. I’m not going to go into detail here because I’ve already written more than enough about that but the very abridged, listicle form of this looks something like:

• The end of my marriage and all that entailed (five years of push pull, continued emotional abuse, and protracted grief)
• The death of my father
• The diagnosis of one of my children with a devastating mental illness
• An ill-advised move that led, after a soul crushing six months of living with an unmedicated schizophrenic, to my taking refuge in a friend’s basement until I found a place to land
• A move from one city to another in the middle of a global pandemic
• The “shedding years” wherein I realized that many of my most cherished relationships were actually shituationships*
• Being diagnosed with C-PTSD & narcissistic abuse syndrome
• An absolutely devastating break up
• Lack of support around said break up that led to my shedding yet more shituationships
• The worst and most long lasting depression I’ve ever experienced which led to a terrible case of executive dysfunction
• Tax troubles due to the executive dysfunction (which are currently being sorted out)
• The death a beloved friend, which happened after a massive rupture in our relationship so I didn’t get to say goodbye
• Isolation due to the depression
• Jan 6th, the war in Ukraine, the continuing pandemic
• COVID hit me in April of 2022 and the brain fog continues
• A troubled relationship with alcohol (ongoing)
• More shedding of shituationships
• Hitting the motherlode (literally) in therapy

There were good things, too. They can be abridged like so:

• Continued to keep my body and soul together
• Refined and redefined my little empire so it served me better
• Created and taught Moonshine for going on six years
• Developed Journal52, Journal Jam, Prayers To The Moon, and multiple year long programs for Patreon
• Built my Patreon up to triple digits (I hover there around 180 patrons!)
• Dedicated myself to a creative spiritual practice that helped sustained me
• Stayed in therapy despite it being one of the most searingly painful endeavors of my life
• Called out one of my abusers and held him to account for what he’d done
• Ruptured repairs with my children
• Retired Book Of Days in favor of programs that better suit my mystical nature

And in and amongst all of that, I managed, somehow, to keep all my commitments to the collaboratives I contracted to teach in AND was on time 98% with the programs I run for my network of Wilderlovelies.

In other words, I’m still here.

I called this post “surfacing” because it perfectly expresses how it feels to be me right now at this point in my life. I haven’t quite broken the surface yet, but I can see that gorgeous, wavering circle of light above me. I am still tired, still suffering with what I think might be long COVID (heart palpitations, fatigue, brain fog, weird brain zaps), still forever trying to claw my house back out of the chaos that it became while I was in the throes of depression. I’m still unsure where I’m going. I’m still anxious a lot of the time. I’m still afraid a lot of the time.

But I don’t wake up crying anymore. I don’t have to fight the ideation demon, if you know what I mean. I don’t lose it over spilled coffee or forgetting the laundry ’till it mildews (an all too frequent occurrence) or a typo or broken link in one of my offerings. I don’t feel like I’m going to vibrate myself right out of my skin every second of every day. I want to live.

I want to live. And that’s progress. So I’ll take it.

I’m telling you this for a few reasons.

The first is that I want you to know that the person you see on the socials is fighting battles they may share parts of, but you really *cannot know* what is truly going on behind the screen.

The second is that, once again, your presence has kept me anchored to the planet in ways I can’t even begin to express.

The third is that I want to emerge. I want to come out of hiding. I want to surface.

So I’m surfacing.

Stay tuned…

xo
Effy

*shituationships are my word for engagements with other humans that feel like relationships but turn out to be transactional or toxic in some way. I don’t deny my part in these engagements and trust me when I tell you that I work on forgiving myself for how I failed myself and others *every single day* but I have come to recognize that the fawn trauma response that has been my default for most of my life thanks to extreme child sexual, physical, and emotional abuse led to relationships in which I was easy to bully, abuse, use, disregard, and discard. You are welcome to adopt it if the word serves you.