experimental studies podcast

Feb 28

Here is a little snippet of something I just shared inside of a home for creating a few moments ago.

I’m not at all surprised to find that recording myself, then listening to my voice back for hours on end, is a entirely strange and unusual-feeling experience, but it’s also something I’ve been curious to try, and maybe even watch myself improve in as I release more episodes — or give up altogether, either way, it will be an adventure!

All future (x1 monthly) episodes, will be shared inside of a home for creating.

Transcript (unedited) 🖇️

Welcome to the Experimental Studies of Making and Sharing Art, a private podcast series on the many ways in which we choose to make, relate to, and bring our art into the world. While today I'm going to be focusing on the topic of writing for oneself, originally, I wanted to talk about the why behind this particular podcast. But after more than a few very anxious and frustrated attempts at recording, I decided to give myself permission to focus on just one thing at a time, the thing that's right in front of me rather than everything all at once, and trusting that if it ever feels important enough to absolutely come back to the why, or that maybe in time the why will reveal itself.

And I want to give myself permission to make mistakes and to have this first episode, and probably many more to come, be an experiment. As I came up with the idea for this podcast, I knew that I wanted it to be a place that I could go to talk about the things, the projects, the experiments, the ideas that are circling around in my mind all of the time, and to not be overly critical of how I talk about them.

I jotted down a few of my fears, and some of them that I am relating to the topic of today's episode, which is writing, specifically writing for oneself, and one of my fears in that is being misunderstood, and that is also true in this. I am afraid of being misunderstood, and I am afraid that one thing I say will change the trajectory of something, and that I will forever define myself as that one misunderstanding.

And the funny thing is, I get to choose how I want to relate to and feel about all of my interests and projects, and the things that I consider to make up a big part of who I am and why I am the way I am, and none of that is up for debate. And yet I can put so much weight on others' opinions and even just ideas of what I think others might think of me, which I don't actually know. But maybe part of why I wanted to start this podcast inside of a private space is because I feel more safe here.

I feel able to be more of myself all the time, and I would like to be more of myself all the time everywhere else. But I'm riding that fine line between discipline and being gentle with myself. There are things that I want to do in this life, and they require me to be more outward, and yet so much of my support is coming from the practices that are more inward. And so in order to get to where I'm going, I'm asking myself to be devoted to both the discipline with myself to keep an anchor, keep myself tied to my writing and the other practices that are so important to me, as well as gentle with myself when I don't show up for them, when I'm afraid and don't know how to move into sharing or move into being more visible.

Art is so wonderful when you yourself are just feeling really good about what you're doing, and it's also really lonely when you don't feel good about what you're doing, or you might feel a little stuck or stagnant in a part of the process. And it's in the sharing and in the community aspect of that that I have found the most support in getting me to feel a little bit stronger in myself, and to believe in myself and to trust myself a little bit more. Often that is because I am seeing those around me doing that. I am seeing those around me trust in themselves, and that in itself is what helps me to take those steps forward.

And so there is the alone aspect of our creative experiments. And there are, there is the togetherness aspect that ties all of our art together that in a way that can potentially make a difference far beyond what we thought was possible. Because ultimately, we don't get to decide how others feel about our art. That is why some art just doesn't grab hold of me, while others I can't stop thinking about. And I think with writing, for me, which is a practice that has been in and out of my life for many, many years, it is maybe the one that I feel all of these things the most with. It's the one that I feel the most resistance towards and also the most freedom within. It's the one I'm most scared of. And it's the one that I also need the most to feel the most like myself. So when I was taking notes this morning, I didn't want to overcomplicate something that actually was quite simple because I know my own relationship to writing.

It is an ongoing experiment for me because I have never found a singular rhythm or way of approaching writing that is consistent to my entire life. There have been years where I don't write anything personal at all. And there have been years where I write for myself every single day in my notebook and I don't share a single thing.

And there have been years and seasons of feeling encouraged to share, feeling rewarded in sharing, and feeling totally defeated in sharing. And all of those things are important because all of those things keep me anchored to this practice that has shaped me in really profound ways. Writing was something that I came to in time. It wasn't something that came naturally to me. I didn't just grab a pen and write stories and fill notebooks when I was younger. I didn't feel confident in writing because I didn't feel confident in school. And the two, to me, are very closely tied together.

And it wasn't until I left school, I graduated, and I entered into the world and I began exploring different ways to express myself. A freedom that I didn't feel I could access while in school just because I felt very limited in how I could be myself in that environment. And so it wasn't until I left that space and began to create my own spaces that I even started to play around with the idea of writing at all. It wasn't even on my radar because of the pressure that I put on myself to follow all of the rules that I thought you needed to follow in order to write well.

Eventually my grandpa started to give me lessons via email where we would break down writing concepts and go over the basics in a more approachable and attainable way. And he used to be an English teacher. So for him, this felt natural. And I also had the benefit of him knowing me as a person and knowing my challenges and limitations. And so he could very graciously meet me where I am at or where I was at. And in doing so, we were able to rekindle my relationship with writing. And this was in my early 20s. And from there, I was able to explore different ways of writing and sharing kind of off the bat right afterI began to feel like, "Oh, this is something I want to relate to." I began sharing very publicly about my own personal life, my very personal experiences with illness, and I did that for a long time, and that was my first experience with writing and sharing publicly.

I kind of just threw myself into the deep end, and I am grateful for it because it taught me a lot about what works for me and what doesn't. And as it turns out, that wasn't sustainable, but I did take away so much from that experience. And it was an understanding that at a certain point, I stopped writing for myself, and I began writing for everyone else. And that is where I lost touch again with myself through writing, with why I wanted to write in the first place, which was to express myself and to feel an anchor, like I had an anchor to something. If something terrible was happening in my life, I had an anchor that kept me tied to what was most important, what I knew to be true about myself and about the people around me.

And it was, and continues to be, the practice that keeps all of my other practices together, that helps me make sense of all of them. Without writing, I wouldn't be able to move between my different interests with such ease and confidence and trust in myself. And so when I felt that disconnect with my writing practice again, I did have to step away. And that was one of those seasons that I didn't write. And I got a steady job, and I felt secure and safe. And I did need to rest and recover from my more public-facing time.

I'm so glad that I did do that because, in fact, the whole time I was thinking about it, I was anchored to it in a way. I just needed to come at it from a different angle again to see if I could find that trust in myself to write for myself before I shared it with anyone else, where I felt pressure to share before I was ready. And again, there is this fine line between pushing yourself just a little bit and also being gentle with yourself when you don't feel ready for something.

For me, it ended up being more of, okay, I don't think this is how I want to share my work or where I want to share my work. And it was less about sharing in itself as a whole and more about how I wanted to share and where I wanted to share from and who I wanted to share to. I have loved a lot of the pieces that I have written over the years intermittently between writing all the time and not writing at all or just writing in my journal. And I feel really proud of those pieces. Like I've written some things that I haven't gone back and read, but now that I'm thinking about, about it, maybe that would be something I could do to remind myself that it is something that I understand. In my own way and in my own approach to writing, it makes sense to me. And I think about the flow and the sound and the feeling of the words coming off of my tongue and the way I read every piece of mine aloud what feels like hundreds of times before I hit publish.

At first I, I felt frustrated by that process because it took up a lot of time, but a lot of those pieces I was putting in so much of myself in them and they were very personal. And I figured out a way to write about my life and myself and the things I experienced in both fiction and nonfiction that both related to but didn't unveil the parts of my life I wanted to keep private. And it felt like a superpower that I could do that and that I could still reach people and connect with them.

It’s something that at this moment I'm really afraid of because I have some veryVery big life things happening that I am not talking about and that I'm not ready to talk about, but I want to write. And so how do I approach writing while I'm going through the hardest experience I've ever gone through? How do I keep that part of myself to myself, honoring that part of myself that wants to not put everything out there? And I know I have felt that way for a while, but it takes an experience like this one that I am purposefully holding very close. And maybe it's partly because I am really afraid of what other people will think, and I'm even more afraid of being misunderstood in my experience because, because it is so personal. I feel like there are non-negotiables for me and that I would grow frustrated if I, if I received unsolicited advice or even kind words that just I wasn't ready for. It all feels too raw and too real, and I'm also just very much in it. I'm-- It's the present moment for, for me. It's what is happening right now. And I, I guess am realizing that that is not the way I choose to write, and that's okay. And I see a lot of people write in that way where they're able to write about the really hard things in their own lives while they're in it, and that that is supportive to them. And I think I wanted it to be supportive for me, but it is not. And yet I still want to write, and so I'm feeling this push and pull, and I'm not sure exactly what to do about it.

So I'm exploring different ways that I can write, and part of that is figuring out ways that I can trust myself, trust my skills as a writer to write how I need to write right now, and to have that be enough. To not try and make it more than it needs to be if that is not what I am ready for, and to also give myself permission to never write about it if that is not what I am ever ready for, and that it doesn't mean I'm not a writer if I don't write about all of the parts of myself. And it doesn't mean that I can't admire those that do write more personal things more often.

It just means that I have to become more comfortable with how I am choosing to relate to my writing right now, and that I'm finding to be a greater challenge than I anticipated. And I have some motivations for why I want to write that are bigger than myself and that I think will help me in understanding that I know how to write like me. I am the only one that knows how to write like I know how to write, just like you are the only one who knows how to write like you. And I can just do that.

I don't have to wait for the moment that I am done grieving and no longer hold everything so close, because I don't know if that will ever happen. And yet I really want to just write because it is one of the few things that makes sense for me, creatively speaking, and it's a way for me to express myself and document my life and feel supported and move through my own seasons and discomforts and collect data and explore my internal landscape and reflect and devote myself to it. And that is, that is the whole point for me is to... Here is a way that I relate to the world and it is very important and I need to find a way through the self-judgment and overthinking of being misunderstood and embracing what I know to be true for myself, and that writing for myself doesn't mean that I don't share. It's more that writing for myself helps me determine how I want to share, and that it doesn't have to look the same as what I am looking at through the newsletters that I read and the articles that I read. It doesn't have to look the same, and I hope it doesn't because I like discovering different and new ways of doing things, and I would hope that maybe this could be an example of that, even if only for my younger self who is having a hard time understanding these big feelings.

So I think that is where I will end it for now. And I don't know what I'm going to talk about next month, but I am going to share one of these episodes once monthly, these experimental studies of our creative practices, of the art we make and share and what that all means, at least for me, and we'll see where it goes. Thank you so much for listening to this episode.

I surprised myself by somehow managing to enjoy the process of recording just a little bit more than expected, and am so grateful that you decided to join me for it. While I've been a little bit quiet on the sharing front recently, you can always find more of my work on my website at chloealmeda.com, as well as other ways in which we can work together. Until next month, take care.