Sign of Life
Nighttime hospital view of St. Paul’s two most important hills: the Cathedral and the Capitol
I distinctly remember a conversation I had with my sister a couple years ago in which we shared what our public tells were for, essentially, having our creative practice on track. For her, it was sharing new illustrations, which she’d lamented not being able to do more regularly due to a busy work schedule. For me, it was posting on this blog. I remember saying: “if you don’t see a Wild Minds post for months, that means I have completely lost control of my time and schedule.”
Well, hello friends, it has been nine months since my last post. I have a lot of good reasons for this, namely:
In late summer, I got swept up in (read: wildly distracted by) an election adventure that felt closer to home than usual because my spouse works for Governor Walz here in Minnesota.
In the fall, I was hospitalized with severe pneumonia, which doctors repeatedly insisted they’d only ever seen in people “in their eighties” and which took many weeks for me to fully recover from (thank you to the pre-vaccines Covid I had in 2020 that probably made this possible).
Just six weeks ago, my mom suffered a hemorrhagic stroke, or a brain bleed, which jolted me into full-time caregiving mode in hospitals and to help with her transition home (alongside the help of my sister and other relatives). Now, very slowly, I’m letting my own life seep back into the cracks of who I am right now while I’m still focused on supporting her recovery.
It’s not that I fell off the writing bandwagon during all this (although the writing life is not really a “bandwagon,” is it? more like a single-person-musician cart?). I was very honored to be accepted to a preschool TV writing mentorship group that lasted through the fall and winter (in which I wrote a shiny new spec script for my portfolio); I co-directed a freakin’ short film with my friend Megen Musegades (it’s a bonkers horror story about smartphone addiction that we co-wrote last year and shot in five days in the week after the election, while I was still coughing from my battered pneumonia lung); I researched and wrote a new kids podcast episode (coming soon!); I won a pitch competition with my VEGAN PLEASE series; I’ve applied to grants and fellowships and residencies galore, hoping to plant the seeds for future good-creative-work-circumstances.
But I still never posted on this blog (not to mention I am also behind on at least 80 other things), defined by my own self as the small regular thing I do to express my presence in the world as a writer. I’m sure you can see why. I was clearly busy, I’ve been sick a lot of the time (I’m recovering from another cold as I type this), plus the stakes of writing posts on my personal website are very small potatoes compared to the “real” work I’ve been prioritizing energy for—and that’s totally reasonable.
Hospital room life (and better messaging)
But as summer turned to fall turned to winter, my brain nagged me: you still haven’t posted on your dumb little blog! (I know, it’s kind of a mean brain, we’re working on it.)
In response to this nagging voice, a block started to form, and the block came in sentiments like this: But hardly anyone sees this blog. I don’t have anything interesting to say. Nobody reads anything anymore anyway. We all get too many emails. Everyone has a newsletter or a podcast or a series or a thing. It’s just too much. We are living in the apocalypse; why would I add any more noise to the internet? How outrageous it is to write about creativity when people are being deported, abandoned, murdered, and besides, lots of people who are wayyyy smarter and more talented and better than me have written wayyyy more valuable insights about creativity anyway!!!!!!
But the nagging voice kept firing back: BUT WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO POST ON YOUR DUMB LITTLE BLOG?!?!?!
I’m not here to tell you how I blasted past these voices in order to draft this post. They’re right here with me as I write. They’re not wrong, either, maybe just a little rude in tone. Sometimes this is the writing life: we and our little chaotic voices just have to write together until we all quiet down a bit, because this is just a healthier way to be in the world.
*
One of my mom’s painting attempts after her stroke.
In case you wonder where I get my go-getter-to-a-fault energy from, my stroke-recovering mom presented an artist talk to over two hundred people on Zoom the other day. My sister and I were kind of nervous about her taking on something like this so soon, but we understood it’s important to healing and well-being to do things that make you feel like yourself.
I had planned to be at my mom’s side during the talk, but I was knocked out with a cold because my immune system has been beaten to nonexistence. Instead, my sister went to my mom’s and I joined the Zoom call from my bed with hot tea and boxes of Kleenex. I hoped it would be a positive experience for my mom and not something that would result in stress and frustration, as her brain is still in a period of re-adjustment.
As she began her Zoom talk, my mom said she was going to share her screen. Oh no, I thought. What if she can’t figure it out? But she did, after taking the brief processing time she needed to click the right things with those hundreds of peoples’ eyes on her. I felt proud in the way I imagine parents must feel when their four-year-old does something on their own for the first time.
When my mom shared her screen, she brought her viewers into her artistic struggles of her past month. She shared pictures of herself trying to paint in the hospital for the first time after her stroke. She shared pictures of paintings she had tried to do that made no sense, paintings she created even when she couldn’t see the differences in the colors she was using or understand how to make a shape.
I started crying. I didn’t know she was going to share those hard moments with over two hundred people. I didn’t know she was going to tell everyone about the night she sobbed in her art studio, only a few weeks ago, because she was trying to paint with oils for the first time and she felt like everything she knew about how to paint was lost. She talked to her rapt Zoom audience about how unmooring this felt, to lose who she was. She talked about how she kept going anyway. Because it’s the practice of creating that we need. If a good painting comes out of that practice, that’s only a bonus. If the painting doesn’t turn out well, you can still cross it off your list and take heart knowing you did what you were meant to do that day.
One of my mom’s painting attempts after her stroke. This one is a painting of her wheelchair in the hospital.
Because it’s more valuable when it doesn’t turn out. “You always learn more from your bad paintings than your good paintings,” she said with a laugh, “because bad paintings give you a problem that you need to figure out how to solve, and that makes you a better artist.”
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I’m writing this post not because I have anything brilliant to say about creativity (although, I think my mom does), but because writing this post helps me feel like me. And every time I try to put words together to communicate with a reader, even you, even here, in this not-super-literary-way, I learn.
Does the world seem like it’s falling apart out there? 100%. But if we don’t do the tough little vulnerable alone-time things that help us feel like who we are, the negative forces already win. At least don't give up that battle, you know?
So, even though I started typing this with a timer set and no plan, with this blog post, I have:
checked in with myself by checking in with you
re-committed to this regular writing-in-public practice, as small and awkward as it is
intentionally cleared a little space for my normal to exist in
And let me tell you, it’s nice to enjoy the serenity of silence where those nagging voices had taken up residence for too long.
So, what’s your nagging voice saying? What can you do to help quiet it? Is it trying a drawing? Starting yoga? Finally cleaning that basement? Actually writing pages for that novel you’ve been wanting to write? Making a new outline for your screenplay? Practicing piano for twenty minutes even though it’s hard?
I hope you can give yourself the gift of that serenity today, this week, this month — however that looks for you, even if it means gently getting started again after a long time away. Even if means starting for the first time, ever. Even if it means just taking the deepest inhale you’ve taken all day, an inhale you might not have given yourself otherwise. Because Easter Sunday feels like a good day for new beginnings, yeah? (At the very least, a good day for a new spring color palette and the promise of a warmer season on its way.)
If you’ve read all the way to here, thank you for sharing your time with me in the midst of all this chaos. It doesn’t have to block us. We’re going to keep on going through it, okay? One moment at a time.
In lieu of my usual “share three things” at the end of this post, I’m just going to leave this Severance meme here for posterity’s sake.
Xoxo,
Lillie