If the self is not part of the whole

Love as fertile practice for creative vulnerability

During my years of writing publicly I have rarely written about love. The inability to succinctly capture what is love and how to love frustrates me, so I shy away from the effort. I like to let my love life remain a wordless mystery outside of my private journals.

But today is a special day! It is my ten year anniversary with my partner E, also my husband of two years, so I wanted to share a little something about love and what it's taught me about the vulnerability of sharing—a lesson that is also at the heart of creative practice.

This topic also gives me a reason to use our wedding photos!

In one of my early journals from high school, I wrote: "I don't know how to love, therefore I can't be loved."

I grew up believing that love meant sacrifice, looking toward my parents who had sacrificed so much of their own desires for their children's sake. Therefore I too must give myself wholly to another being in order to gain entry into the arena of love. For several of my early relationships I followed this template, erasing my own needs and turning the jurisdiction over to whoever I was dating at the time, letting their happiness or discontent become my own.

Solitude has always been my safe haven, but I had a habit of abandoning my need for alone time when in a relationship. I struggled to believe that I could take up space and consider it an act of love and not selfishness. This self-abandonment led to a slow dissipation of myself, the leakages showing themselves through unpredictable waves of emotions and passive aggression. The only thing I was creating during this time were angsty diary entries trying to figure out where I was going wrong in love.

My relationship with E started in this way. I was unable to let my guard down and act silly and assert my own needs. I barely knew what I needed, and only wanted to orient toward what he needed. Slowly, through many patient years of being together, I began to trust in his secure presence, learning to feel more confident in myself in a relational context.

I grew more comfortable asking for alone time (maybe too comfortable, E might add). I practiced sharing mundane things from my life without being asked. I made playful animal noises in lieu of speaking, which became our own private language. E accepted my musings for what they are without preaching at me or blowing off my ideas.

I keep learning and forgetting that part of loving is being myself and sharing myself. Love involves some amount of sacrifice, but it also needs joy and connection. What I now realize is that if the self is not part of the loving whole, then true intimacy cannot ever flourish. The whole thing is merely a performance. This is just as true with art as it is in love.

Experimenting with more hand lettering. Your hands are part of your self!

What does love have to do with creativity? Everything, really.

Love and creativity are lifelong practices. Both teach how to be present and to pay attention, the two greatest tools to hone for a good, happy life. And what is creative practice if not a relationship between creativity and self?

"Why would your creativity not love you? It came to you, didn’t it? It drew itself near. It worked itself into you, asking for your attention and your devotion. It filled you with the desire to make and do interesting things. Creativity wanted a relationship with you."

- Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert

Creativity loves me, so I can love it back. One of the best ways I have learned to love is to divulge the weird things and to honor this as an act of intimacy.

Bringing my hyper-specific interests and strange ideas to my art gives my creativity more material to work with as it cooks up ideas to present to me at random hours (usually in the shower, when I'm far away from a notebook and have to keep repeating the idea as I towel off).

The more delight I can bring to my work, the more I enjoy the arduous process of revising or finishing it. The best icing on the cake is when someone sees themselves in a little weird thing I put in my art. That’s the kind of feeling that masterfully copying a photograph cannot replicate.

The greatest lesson from my first ten years of partnership is the importance of vulnerability. Of course, there’s still so much more to learn. The next ten years might bring more focus to compromise (the more stable, mutually generative cousin of sacrifice) and consistent rituals as our courtship years fade further into memory.

But at the root of love’s lifelong path is the intimate decision to reveal oneself for the other to see. And so it is with one’s art. Will you let your creativity witness you as you are?

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If this post resonated with you, you may like my zine Love Your Inner Artist—available for free download or as a physical copy.

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Take care during this feral August, and I’ll see you next week.