Your Art Will Save Your Life by Beth Pickens

Author:Beth Pickens
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936932306
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2017-12-27T05:00:00+00:00

Do You Hear Yourself?

How do you talk to yourself? Are you aware of the things you say silently and out loud to yourself throughout the course of a day? Don’t despair if you have no idea; many people are not aware. Our brains chatter all day long at us, telling us things, casting judgments, asking questions, giving warnings, and flashing ideas. Often, this chatter communicates fixed ideas about ourselves, our choices, and our futures.

Your brain can do incredible things, genius things, but one thing it cannot do is reflect you and your work accurately back to you. Whatever you call it—inner critic, mind, inner voice—every artist I encounter has ongoing interior chatter that tends to get pretty cruel and self-defeating. These voices say things like, “You’ll never really be an artist,” “You’re wasting your time,” “You should get a real job,” “People won’t like your work,” “They’re only saying positive things because they like me and want to be polite,” creating endless, fear-based chatter. Truly, every artist I know has some version of this fearful inner voice that sounds eerily like the mom from Carrie.

This vitriolic internal monologue has real consequences in your life. Saying cruel things to yourself nonstop for years will produce feelings and behaviors that make it very hard to grow your practice and career outward. If we said these cruel things to another person, we might be accused of verbal abuse, but saying them to ourselves seems somehow “true” or “honest.” Stopping seems impossible. Yet it is completely possible to change these internal, verbal habits. The space that opens up can be inhabited by your art.

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