Sometimes you will suck

Get over yourself, chuckles.

Do we all know this but never admit it to ourselves? Or do we mope around the studio or the laptop thinking “I suck I suck I suck...?”

Don’t give the suck energy, you boob! Make something anyway. Something sucky. Write something shitty and dull. Paint something awful and derivative. Compose some cliché vapid music with awful lyrics. Work on your vanilla, unoriginal blog post. Take fershit pictures outside.

Do your work anyway.

First of all, what will you do instead? Scroll on your phone? Watch Trump videos predicting his downfall only to find out he’s still out there and farting? Eat? Sleep? Read Substack notes about how total strangers want to read your stuff if you are below the cutoff number of followers?

Will any of that stuff get you to where you want to go?

Will you feel better about yourself after throwing the day away? Throwing your time to work away? You’re already feeling bad because you suck, and now you’re going to feel worse because you suck AND you’re avoidant? That’s a move you want to make?

Go work. Try not to sit there and stare at whatever it is blankly, willing yourself to make something happen, to feel better. You know you can’t think yourself into feeling better, right? If you could, you wouldn’t be feeling that you suck.

If you could think yourself into something, wouldn’t you be rich and having loads of sex?

Work. Make make make. If you’re afraid of wrecking a thing you’ve been working on, maybe pick out something smaller, or invent a low-risk project. Instead of painting the 10’x10’ abstract, maybe do a few ink wash self-portraits. Paint that sucky li’l face. Or, if the 10x10 has been sitting for months, have at it. Work that sits there unworked on is soul-eating. Maybe doing something sucky to it is what that damn painting/song/novel needs. It needs its ass kicked by your sucky foot.

On days when I have no ideas and I suck, I put down blobs of watercolors and then draw whatever the blob suggests with a dip pen. I dig the baboon.

Write down story ideas. Go through old notebooks. Take a song that you like, rewrite the lyrics, and then write new chords for it. Do SOMETHING.

But don’t use the word “suck” while you’re doing this. Suck is a self-fulfilling prophecy. What you think is probably going to be what you get, so shush up the judgment in general when you’re making things. Just make them. Don’t tell your brain how to think about things. Try to get your self-judgment out of the studio.

A couple of things might happen as you work. You might make things that suck. But you will have tried, so you don’t suck. You had a bad day and you still showed up and worked. That’s admirable, isn’t it?

The second thing that could happen is you make something that’s good and that you like. Suddenly, things don’t suck, and that is totally because you did the thing that was hard to do. You got over yourself.

I’ll be the first to admit that what I’m telling you to do is incredibly difficult. I can’t always do it myself. There are days when being an artist is a torture. Mindset is a huge obstacle, and getting control over it is a bitch and a half. Bad days will definitely happen. But if you can steer the Titanic of your will past the iceburg of the cowardly part of you and make the work you want to make, you’ll start getting a grasp on that mindset, and you’ll start proving to yourself that you can show up and work like a professional.

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I’m writing about creativity every Wednesday, illustrated with a typically ridiculous painting. Or maybe more often. I actually revised this one because a bunch of the writing sucked. So I fixed it.

But do you know what was really important? That I got it out on Wednesday, misspellings or not. That is a whole other thing to write about.

Open the Doors are meant to be short and actionable. You can actually do stuff in mentioned in this post. It’s concrete.

I hate platitudinous advice, don’t you?

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