A season of gratitude
thoughts from a life-in-progress ✨
Hi there, it’s been a bit. I’ve actually tried to start this newsletter a few times, there’s just so much I want to update you on. It’s been quite a year, these six months especially have been a lot of ups and downs. I started this newsletter talking about my ~season of rejections~ (lol) from the myriad of art opportunities I applied to. But I’ve always believed that rejections are just (the universe) course correcting me back onto the “right” path. When I trace back every major life decision, I can always trace it back to a rejection (or lots of rejections lol) that felt immense at the time. It turns out, this time is no different.
One of my biggest realizations came from asking myself why I was applying to these opportunities. And I realized I was applying because I thought that was what an ~artiste~ did (and I also think I had some weird pride that to be a legitimate artist I must make all of my income from art related activities—which in retrospect is really misguided and gatekeep-y), and once I dug deeper I was able to categorize the art opportunities into four distinct needs: money, space, mentorship/community, and access to non-monetary resources.
I realized really quickly that if I was applying to grants for income to sustain myself, then restarting client work would make much more sense. So I figured out the balance of client work and art work I was excited to go forward with, and I’m so grateful to everyone that reached out and offered words of encouragement or even pledges to this newsletter! Thank you so much for believing so deeply in where I’m trying to go.
I’m also so grateful to all the seeds I sowed in my twenties that are flowering now, including the past clients I worked with that believed in me and my work enough to re-engage with me this fall. They’ve given me the renewed financial stability and space to dream again. And for all the friends and mentors I’ve met in my career, who met up with me and got on calls with me to answer all my questions about their careers as I tried to soul-search and figure out “what next?”. (Like literally I thought maybe academia? Maybe full-time in a creative industry? Also how to art???).
They’ve given me a lot of clarity (I’m idealizing academic research a little too much, “Creative Technologist” might be more of an IC role than what I’m looking for these days, and for now I should concentrate more on building up my body of work), but more than anything they’ve (unknowingly) given me the permission to be bold. I still remember a friend saying to me, “we should start our own residency!” I had never even thought about that before, I was like, “we can do that??”
“Of course we can, it can be as simple as renting a place for a few weeks and inviting a some people.”
It flipped my whole perspective upside down, I had never thought that way. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and it finally crystallized into this sentence I jotted down one day in my journal: “instead of waiting around to be accepted into an opportunity, I’d rather go ahead and make the opportunity for myself”.
It was my 34th birthday two weeks ago. I don’t know what it is about birthdays, but it seems to really give me the audacity to dream. It’s smaller than the big dream I dreamed up on my 30th birthday (“I want to make art that hundreds of thousands of people will come see, and I want to make them with the funnest, most talented team of my own”), but it’s probably the riskiest thing I’ve decided on since I quit my full-time job to try freelancing seven years ago. At the same time, it feels like the most perfect step forward towards that big dream.
I know I’m being really vague, I’m just trying not to count my eggs before they’ve hatched. But for now, I want to share this おみくじ (fortune) I got right after I dreamed up this new dream:
It says (pardon my very rough translation lol): “A premonition that you’ll win your dream. The more that you put into it, the more your probability of success will rise. Go forward without hesitation.”
And it feels like the universe telling me I’ve found my “right” path forward.
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It’s an increasingly chaotic time, but I hope you’re able to find peace this holiday season. Wishing you a happy New Year,
Shirley
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P.S. a logistical update: I’m thinking of migrating these posts to a self-hosted blog site in the new year (I don’t like that Substack keeps these posts behind a three-step registration process), and setting up an RSS instead. I’ll still keep this newsletter, but use it more for quarterly updates—but I’d love to hear your thoughts!