the undisciplined artist: an introduction
why am i doing this?
A couple days ago, I saw my therapist. My session went how they usually go: I rambled about something for approximately ninety seconds, my therapist latched on to one word, and I spent the next forty minutes rethinking my life.
That day, the session started something like this: “I feel like I need to force myself to create the things I know I want to create.”
The idea of force coupled with creativity seemed incongruent, so the question then became: “What is actually causing me to not create the things I want to create?”
I made a list:
Fear that what I make will not be good.
Fear that, even if I make something, no one will look at it.
Fear that I will not go about making things the “right way.”
The appropriate response, I decided, wasn’t to “force” myself to do anything but to acquire a touch of discipline and practice creating in order to mitigate some of that fear.
In light of my desire to practice writing, I started the undisciplined artist. I consider myself undisciplined on two fronts: undisciplined as lacking discipline and undisciplined as lacking a discipline.
undisciplined as lacking discipline.
discipline (noun.) an activity that one engages in regularly to train or improve oneself.
I have historically considered myself as deficient in self-discipline. I tend to rely on extrinsic factors (like deadlines) to get things done. I am a serial procrastinator with a penchant for requesting extensions. I often need to pep talk myself into a number of basic things like getting out of bed before 9:00, going to the gym, and cooking meals at home.
But if I dig a little deeper, there are seeds of discipline in my past. There is the time I learned how to jump rope at age 6 by throwing the rope down and saying, “I never want to jump rope again,” before returning to try again moments later. There is also the time I canvassed 2,000 houses in a weekend during high school to unseat a congressman. There are examples of when I have practiced things for my own edification that I overlook in order to resign myself to an identity as an undisciplined person.
I am hoping this Substack is a place where I can challenge that. Where I can document my practice and practice documenting. A digital “lab notebook” of sorts, as my collaborator Anjelika Deogirikar Grossman might say.
undisciplined as lacking a discipline.
discipline (noun.) an area or division of an activity or profession.
I see my creative practice as akin to eating at a buffet. Growing up, I trained in classical music and dance (though I did not often practice). I played the clarinet in a concert band for seven years. I wrote angsty poems in middle school, learned to harmonize to pop songs in the car after getting my license, and made an experimental queer film in college. I have sampled a little bit of everything, often doing so “just because.”
It was only more recently when I started taking this artist thing seriously — when I bought handmade watercolors from Case for Making, when I took a class at MOCA Arlington, when I responded to my first call for submission. If you ask me what I do now, I will tell you I am a mixed media artist who makes art about identity and belonging.
But the reality is that I have also always wanted to be a writer (of essays, of stories, of books, of songs).
And so, I hope this Substack is a place for me to cross between disciplines and try out different ways of writing. I plan to publish some essays and reviews, as well as document the creative process for some of my mixed media visual art pieces. I might even write a story or two.
join me?
I did my first Tarot reading for myself yesterday — a card pull for the past, present, and future of my creative practice. For my present, I drew The Chariot, a card associated with choice, with determining a path forward.
Will you join me for the adventure?
Excited to follow and be part of our journey hasini ❤️