Wearing a Hat of Jerktude

Here we are on Day 17 of Reverb14 already!  I’ll let our fabulous guide Kat McNally explain the prompt:

“Apologies for the slightly controversial subject line! I stole it with love (and kind permission) from my friend Summer Pierre’s absolutely brilliant comic of the same title. 

I love the way she realises how hard she has been on her ideas, and how little room she has given them to play, make mistakes and evolve.

How can you stop being an a**hole, get out of your own way and make room for more of your magic to happen in 2015?”

 Yesterday I received something in the mail which I didn’t get around to opening until I was almost ready for bed.  I had had a wonderful day.  In the morning I received some wonderful guidance that was expressed in a most humorous way as an image that I know will be delighting me for ages.  I had a most excellent and uplifting conversation with friends in the evening, and in between my day was filled with lovely bits and bobs.  An altogether good day.

And the piece of mail turned out to be swoon-worthy wonderful.  An artist book that was so deliciously beautiful visually and so magnificent in its story that I fell instantly in love.

And then something happened.  I felt a bit of what one my friends calls compare and despair.  The book is exactly the kind of thing I want to produce and send widely into the world.  Well not exactly, of course – but my version is equally fabulous and thrilling.  But suddenly in seeing this example, my version suddenly seemed less possible, and a whole lot less everything.

And that my friends is how I was an asshat to myself.  (BTW, asshat is my preferred term – no offense meant to the fabulous Summer or to Kat.  But asshat makes me laugh, while still conveying the correct level of jerktude.)

There are so many levels of wrongness to what I did to myself.  I’m not talking about jealousy – I honestly celebrate the author for her brilliant creation.  But how did I leap from celebrating true wonderfulness to deciding that there was no other possibility for me except abject failure?  What brain pathway got short-circuited and why did my heart jump on the bandwagon?

I think this is a way too common experience – not just for me, but for so many creatives.  And it’s heart-breaking and unnecessary and I absolutely want to do my part to stop it.  I want to declare loud and clear we’re all unique, we’re all gifted, and the only exhortation we need pay any attention to is making sure we’re shining our light clearly and broadcasting our energy signature loudly and doing it in ways that delight us.  That’s it.  Period.  Your apples are not more fabulous than my oranges, and my pomegranates are not more magical than your rutabagas.

And I want to remember that always.  And if I have a moment of forgetting, like I did last night, I want to recover the truth quickly.  And I most certainly want to keep producing whatever it is my heart wants to express and I want you to do the same.  The world needs all of us, in all our fabulous unique magnificence.  Bring it on 2015 – let’s do this!

And then perhaps the hat I will be wearing will something fabulous like this peacock headdress on this Balinese puppet.

What about you?  Been getting in your own way?  How can you do that differently in 2015?  What kind of hat would you like to be wearing?  Do tell – you know I love to hear.