I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
The key task this week: Detach from family drama and accept the limitations of everyone involved (including myself).
But besides that, I have lots of fun art and writing tasks to do.
For the Tuesday Book Club this week, I might pull from James Hollis’ book Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. As a teaser, consider what he wrote, on the family:
As cultures evolved, the family became the one stable unit in a world of change, hostile invastion, depredations of nature, and constant search for food and shelter. That stable unit further evolved as a critical carrier of culture, that is, a vehicle to sustain the tribal mythology, social role functions and the linkage to both tribal and transcendent values. But family was always more, and remains more, whether fratured and intact, whether localized or far-flung. It was and remains an archetypal force field in which all of us participate, long after we physically leave family in the first, easier, departure at the end of adolescence. Leaving family psychologically remains a separate, more critical, sometimes impossible task for the second half of life. [emphasis mine]
I haven’t left psychologically or even geographically. I’m living a ten-minute drive from my father and his girlfriend, and about 30 minutes from my mom. I’ve recently enmeshed in a family drama ostensibly of my own making (though actually tying back to long ago history). I’m ready to secede.
Hollis writes:
We have to ask of family, “Does each person receive affirmation and support in being different, or is the price of being in the family conformity, the subversion of the agenda for individual growth that each of us brings into this world?”
And:
[Every] family has the right to ask the full participation of each member in the life of the family. Yet all marriage and family therapists know that family interactions are typically arrayed around its most damaged member.
I’d imagine that given the family drama that has been taking place over the past few weeks, my parents and sisters would point to me as the most damaged member. That’s not how I see it, and my realization of what’s going on and has gone on is helping me to view my family with more clarity and distance. Considering that each of my parents and sisters has limitations (as do I) and then releasing them to their lives as I focus on mine is already helping me feel better and more accepting of the situation.
Hollis writes:
Of every family we must ask, “How well did the soul flourish here; how much life was lost through the failure of modeling a larger life, granting permission to follow one’s course, or was constricted by the glass ceiling of family fears and limitations?”
I can’t find any previous writing of mine about this, but one major motivation I have for focusing on art and writing right now rather than returning to corporate technology work is to model a larger life for my children. I want to show them—and myself— that it’s possible to succeed with creative work.
Yesterday, I attended an inspiring and practical workshop about getting organized and exhibiting as an artist. I got lots of ideas for how to take steps in the short, medium, and long term to succeed as an artist. I got a view into what it looks like when you’ve been building an art business for ten years. I’m at year one, and that helped me see that this is a path I can succeed on.
This week I’m going to work on a new artwork and a new essay, and publish my latest flash memoir story for Things Men Gave Me along with its painting pairing Kat Wore the Crown. I love the painting so much. I based it on a photo of my cat Jessica. It captures her queenly seriousness, along with her beautiful dilute tortie fur. When I adopted her from Denver Dumb Friends League (now Humane Colorado), I told my daughter, “I can’t wait to paint her!”
I love where the TMGM project is taking my art, and my writing.
I decided last week my essays were too ponderous so I started writing flash nonfiction: 750 words or less of just the most important details, with a quick build up of tension and then resolution.
I used ChatGPT to help me transform the three existing essays into flash pieces and I think it did an okay job. I’ll go back and fix them up soon, but I wanted to establish the new approach before moving forward with more.
Perhaps for Wednesday Writing this week, I’ll explore tips for writing flash fiction (and nonfiction memoir, which is what I’m writing).
I have an idea for the new painting I’m going to start this week, but not sure whether I’ll go that direction or another. I love conceptualizing and starting new paintings but then the next phase kind of sucks. That’s when I’m figuring out the composition and the color scheme, then blocking in shapes. The painting always looks terrible and crude at this point. It’s hard to engage with it when it doesn’t know where it’s going or what are its particular elements of distinction.
A few more iterations and I can’t stop painting because it’s looking so good, going somewhere really exciting. I keep going upstairs again and again to my studio, squeezing out blobs of paint onto a styrofoam plate, getting a fresh cup of water, then adding layers and shapes and scratches and lines with different sizes of rectangular dry brushes. Pretty soon all my brushes are wet. And I have to stop. My painting style doesn’t work well if my brushes aren’t dry. I need dry ones to keep going.
I suppose I could buy more brushes?
I have a few other art tasks to do as well. I love that my weeks are filled with work related to making and communicating about art (as well as a lot of writing too).
Ray made me a beautiful floater frame for the painting of mine that’s going into the This Is Colorado show. I need to clean up and glaze the painting, frame it, and wire it.
I also will work on promoting an upcoming Heritage Guild workshop—put together a press release and event descriptions, submit to relevant online promotion venues, and put out a couple social media postings.