Boredom and Fear
I struggle with fear and boredom. I fear unknown places and unknown people as well as rejection, especially in my art. But I also get easily bored, and I thirst for adventure. Fear and boredom are old friends of mine and have been playing this weird dance with me, one keeping me safe, the other keeping me exploring. Fear kept me away from acknowledging what art meant to me for too long. But the pandemic forced me to confront the truth. Here it is.
Boredom and Fear. It could be a Jane Austen’s book title. All her female characters are bored to death because they’re expected to do nothing (or embroider, or practice the piano, or serve tea, same thing) while seating gracefully on a plush chair. They’re also scared to death for their future because their only option to have a decent life is to marry, and they have hardly any way to decide who they will marry. I can relate.
Not that I can serve tea from a teapot without spilling most of it, embroider to save my life or even play “twinkle twinkle little star” on the piano. Besides, I already got married. But I can relate because my life is a constant struggle between boredom and fear.
As a child, I remember a terrible fear of public transports and getting lost. My parents made me take the train by myself when I was 12 to go to a summer camp, and I can still taste my fear at being left alone to find my way. No cell phones at the time, no safety line. I am still amazed and somewhat grateful but also mad at my parents’ willingness to take a chance on a twelve-year-old not to screw this up. Until then, being the fourth one of my siblings, I had never had to think about where I was going or what I was doing. Everything was organized for me, which is nice at first but a terrible handicap in the long run.
Fortunately, my fear was accompanied by a strong longing for adventure. I loved Jules Verne’s books as a kid, I wanted to travel to the moon, the center of the earth, discover mysterious islands and go around the world in 80 days. I found my life boring and I was losing myself in books. When I got older, I was taking long solitary walks to the harbor and along the rocky shores of Marseilles, where I lived. I was looking at the boats, wondering where they were going and longing to leave with them. Dreaming about boats and adventure, I seriously considered - for five minutes - being a stowaway to achieve my goal. But I was too scared. A fear imprinted in me since I was a child that I was never able to shake enough to do something crazy. I sometimes wonder what I would have achieved without fear. But fear is also good at keeping you alive. Fear can be healthy.
But I was still bored, and books were not real enough. I found a different way to discover adventure. I started scuba diving, which meant that I got to travel on boats and discover new worlds underwater, but all these activities were organized by people who knew what they were doing, and I felt safe. I traveled to scuba-dive with other members from my diving club to Egypt, Djibouti and the Maldives. I applied for teaching jobs in Australia and New Zealand and somehow got a job at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. I spent 3 years there. I joined the tramping club (= hiking club) so I could live amazing adventures in beautiful landscapes without taking responsibility for my own safety. I did some traveling by myself, and I am still amazed at my willingness to rent a car for a week and just go explore. New Zealand has lots of great youth hostels and my car didn’t break down so it all worked out. Then I moved to America, another place to discover.
It might sound like I got over my fear of traveling, but I never did. I suck at orientation. I am scared but still traveling (no necessarily far, but discovering new places), because if I don’t, I get bored.
So I prepare a lot. I hate surprises and don’t do well with improvisation. I need to have plans and backup plans if anything goes wrong. If something does, I work on addressing the problem, and in a way it calms me down: what I feared happened, so I just try to fix it instead of dreading it.
Getting older, if anything, things have gotten worse in some ways. Since I chose a partner who is better at directions than I am (not exactly hard) and good at fixing stuff, including cars, I trust him to take care of any problems we might encounter and therefore I am not stressed out when he is around. The problem is that I lost practice at managing my fears, so when my husband doesn’t want or can’t come with me, I am even more helpless than I used to be.
Another thing I fear is people. It took me a long time to admit that I am shy. I just didn’t realize it, because when I meet new people, I can small talk easily and find common ground. But I am terrible at making friends with the new people I meet because I don’t want to bother them or look too eager, and am never sure if they’re interested. But they might be the one who feel rejected, as I need a lot of time to myself and don’t want to hang out all the time.
On the third step of my personal podium of anxiety is my fear of rejection, coupled with an unhealthy thirst for approval. I knew it was unhealthy even as a teenager. For example, I couldn’t help imagining what my future biographers would write about my boring life after I would become rich and famous. It made it seem a little more interesting. I nicknamed my biographers Harpo and Groucho!
I fear rejection not so much for myself but for my art (but since your art is an expression of yourself, maybe it’s the same thing). I love writing, taking pictures and making ceramics but I am scared by people’s opinion on my my art and wounded if it’s not positive.
Getting older, I have gotten better at saying: “this is what I created, it’s important to me”. I used to pretend that this was no big deal and shrugged my shoulder while hoping someone would say “this is amazing!” Some people did, not necessarily honestly, but most were indifferent. I am schooling myself not to care what the reaction is. The important thing is to get your work out there, for anyone to see. Not what people think of it.
For a long time, traveling and exploring was my main focus (adventure!) and my art was secondary. But having kids (a new level of fear I won’t even get into) and having lived in the same place for 15 years made adventure and traveling harder to achieve. I used art as a substitute to fill my life with meaning but never realized how important it really was until the pandemic forced me to take a break from it and I went into withdrawal. That’s when I realized what art meant to me. Before, I feared to sound arrogant if I claimed: “I am an artist”. It seems stupid now. You don’t choose to be an artist. You are one if you create art.
The pandemic allowed us to think outside the box of what we thought possible. It made me wonder “what if I put all my efforts into my art, without apologizing or minimizing it, treating it like a real job, what would be the result?” I quit my job and for more than a year I was able to put all my eggs in my art basket (and I do love making ceramic eggs, so that’s a fitting expression), developing and trying to sell my ceramics. It’s been amazing. My business is not doing well but my art is doing great. I have gotten so much better and I can’t seem to run out of ideas I want to try or refine.
Unfortunately, I am starting another job soon. A “real” job as someone who doesn’t know anything about art would say, because MONEY. But it will be part-time, and I strongly intend to spend the rest of my life working on my art. There is no time limit to this endeavor. It doesn’t matter if it’s successful or not. For the first time ever, it seems, I am completely confident that it is what I am meant to do. That what I am doing is worthwhile. I still have lots of insecurities and fears, but I have too much to do to get bored.
It took me that long to get there because I feared failure. If I put all my efforts into one goal, and I didn’t achieve it, then it meant that my goal was not worthwhile. It’s just recently that I started seeing clearly that the goal doesn’t matter. What matters is to create. I can do everything I can to get my art appreciated, but at the end of the day I am not creating for other people. The failure is to restrain yourself, to let the fear prevent you from doing what you want. And unlike my other fears, there is no danger to this. Despite my best efforts, I still get lost regularly but I cannot fail at art because all you have to do to succeed is create something you want to create. I’m not saying that everything I make is wonderful, or that I am the best artist out there, but what is important is the process. That’s what being an artist is about. The rest (appreciation, fame, money) means that you can create more easily, bigger and better. It sounds nice but -thankfully- is not a pre-requisite to be an artist.
Ilustration: the scream by Edward Munch