While I want to avoid telling other people’s stories here, I think about this one often, maybe because it’s told in the language of music, which was my first creative language.
“Jazz pianaist Herbie Hancock describes a profound lesson he took from Miles Davis during the era that he played in the Miles Davis Quintet. Hancock recounts a particular piano improvisation one night during which he played a bad chord, just a plain wrong sound, which sent him into a shame spiral that he’d just ruined the moment in this big show. Miles Davis, Hancock remembers, listened to the “bad chord” and responded purposefully on his trumpet, altering the moment into something musically transcendent. The shift for Hancock meant that the bad chord could become right and he hadn’t ruined anything. He credits Davis in that instance for teaching him a divine lesson about self-judgement.”
– Beth Pickens, Make Your Art No Matter What
This is a lesson I’m actively learning – that worthy, beautiful, magical things come out of the mistakes and the parts of myself I’d like to abandon because I feel ashamed of the messy, compost-y bits.
The dark side is that the messy parts are the bits that are easy to use as tools for carrying out invisible, psychological self-harm, by torturing myself with the words of a negative review, or a photo that triggers my body dysmorphia, or a meeting that didn’t go well, or with blunt words that were reactionary instead of a thoughtfully considered response.
The work of composting is finding the nutrients in these pieces that are wildly uncomfortable and seem, on the surface, like places where I messed up.
Past me believed that holding myself accountable looked like sinking into the shame and making my internal world painful. I did something bad, so I have to feel bad, and I feel the worst when I believe that I am bad. I’ve heard this called shame as scaffolding, where I make it my fault, so I can fix it, which leads to putting the blame on myself for everything.
And from this deeply harmful pattern, something better has emerged. Burning out in 2019 was a flashing neon sign that the ways I was existing in the world were no longer working, and this was one of them. My body could no longer handle the burden of carrying so much shame, so much self-harm, so much self-judgement. It became the ground I had to push off from to find a different way.
The wrong notes aren’t always as wrong as they seem. Even mistakes have worth. Nature embraces this. A tree or a cactus is not worried about the anomalies, the leaves that aren’t the perfect shape, the branches that grow out at odd angles. Mutations – genetic “mistakes” – allow every creature to evolve and survive. Mistakes, fuck-ups, and failures can be the fork in the road to an even better destination.
The way to transform shame is to approve or accept it. To not chop off or cut out the part that isn’t right, but instead ask, “what is this right for?” To hear the wrong note and not stop the song, but to keep playing, to find the key or the chord where it fits. To let it be, and then turn it into part of the piece.
If fear of seeing yourself in photos is something that holds you back from being in them, talk to me. Creative portraits are a self-harm-free experience.
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