STUCK

I’m making a space to talk about a messy thing I’d really rather not talk about. But I’m hoping that sharing it opens the door to making space for healing and practicing and finding some way forward.

Writing the Com*Post was supposed to give me a place to share – thoughts, feelings, words, trauma, joy, pieces of myself, my work, and what I’m paying attention to. It was intended as a way out of hiding and being invisible, to let myself and my work be seen. Underneath that though, what I really wanted was a sneaky way to market and sell my work. A way of tricking myself into doing the things I struggle to do, not tricking anyone else into buying things. 

Maybe, the real struggle is that I want marketing and selling to appear and be effortless. Or maybe it’s tied to my codependency and people pleasing – that I want to avoid the ick and the sleaze, or selling in a way that makes anyone else uncomfortable. This feels very specific to some of my family stories but also to being cultured female – the desire to not come on too strong, to always offer something up before asking for something else, to not appear to be asking for attention or sales but instead always giving and offering value first to make the ask feel more palatable.

Over the years I’ve read about other people’s successes with treating selling as a community building exercise or or thinking of marketing as making art. I love the idea of finding ways to grow, nurture, and sell to your people. These ideas resonate and I want to make them work. And yet, I cannot make my body do them. For months I have been talking about re-building the print shop and thinking about how to do it differently this time, how to share it and make it alive in real life and not just throw money into internet ads. And every week, I will do ANYTHING other than actually work on this project.

What I’m afraid you’ll hear is that I feel like a victim. That’ll you’ll interpret this as me whining about how hard it is to own a business and be an artist, even though I’d choose this path over and over again in multiple lifetimes. But what being stuck so many times over the past five years has taught me is that being stuck is never, ever about being lazy or simply not doing the work. Beneath the avoidance usually lies something painful that needs to be healed.

Even though I can very softly say hire me, here’s what I have to offer right now, I want to go deeper. I want to unearth the stories and the beliefs that make it feel impossible and uncomfortable to self-promote, to share the work in a wider way, to ask for help and support, and to allow people to pay me for my creative work. I want to be able to be clear about what I want to make and how I want to make it so that the invitation feels solid and transparent and clean. I am seeking a way to build a community that is built on a stronger foundation than the manipulation of people pleasing and doing work for free that I’ve used in the past. And I want to allow myself to experiment and fail, but only when it feels safe to try.

Maybe marketing or selling isn’t something you struggle with, but I’d be willing to bet there’s something you feel like you want to do, should have already done by now, or should be farther along on. Maybe you too have a thing that you want to put into the world or say out loud but it’s just taking longer than you’d like or you can never find the time to work on it or life always gets in the way and the time never feels quite right. 

May we all allow ourselves to put the thing that we want to say or bring into the world down for a moment when we feel stuck and remember that it will still be there when we’re ready to pick it back up. May we find the courage to feel into the heavy things we’re carrying that keep us from being able to move forward into the people we want to be, to heal the parts of ourselves that want to be seen before we can move on (and to seek help from people who are trained to do this work with us). May we find people along the way who remind us that we will always arrive exactly on time and that the world needs our art and our stories and our work.