What Was I Thinking? No. 1

on creative discipline and friendship

Hello, subscribers. I have decided to open up my Substack for those of you who are seeking advice. If you’re going through something and you think, for some reason, that I might be able to help you, email your query to jensenstumblr@gmail.com with the subject line What Was I Thinking?, and sign off with a pseudonym (or don’t, and I’ll provide one for ya). Happy trails!

Dear Jensen -

In the spring of 2023, I had this whole spiral which led to an epiphany that I should be doing more of the creative stuff that I like, regardless of whether I do it professionally or not. It was an incredible feeling, and I felt like I could listen to music again without feeling bitter or resentful that I am not a professional musician. I was painting, drawing, knitting, and had even signed up for guitar lessons.
However, within the last few months, that's gone away almost completely. I had to quit guitar lessons because I couldn't afford them, and I now get the usual anxiety and imposter syndrome that keeps me from ever wanting to even touch my guitar or my art supplies. It's more crippling than ever, and all the other stuff going on in the world is really not helping.
How do I push through this?

Sincerely,
Lost My Groove

Dear Lost My Groove -

First of all, I’m so sorry that you’ve lost your love for art. I know you must feel so frustrated at having this surfeit of feelings inside of you with no means to get them out. In the spirit of being a Virgo, I am going to give you some practical action items that will hopefully help speed up your process of falling back in love with creating.

1) Do some visual and musical time travel, and consume only art that inspired you when you were a kid. Listen to the albums that moved you from the backseat of a parent’s car. Watch the movies you played so much that you scratched the DVD or busted the VHS tape. Read the books that you dog-eared, dropped in the bathtub, brought on the bus for school trips. When you were a child, art was a mysterious and magical thing. You had no idea how it worked. And you’re older now, but you’d be surprised how much joy you can derive out of temporarily tricking yourself into thinking that it’s still got mystery and magic.

2) Switch mediums. You mentioned drawing, painting, knitting, guitar. Consider trying to write poetry or fiction. I know what you’re thinking: how could it possibly help your imposter syndrome to work in a medium in which you don’t regularly practice? To that I say, your expectations for yourself are going to be vastly lower than they would be for an area where you consider yourself at least intermediate-level. Of course you should give yourself a break with the crafts you already know and love, but maybe that’s too hard right now. Maybe it’ll be easier for you to give yourself grace with something new.

3) Have you ever done The Artist’s Way? This is not an exercise for which I can personally vouch, but I have many dear friends who have felt creatively drained/stuck/lost for whom The Artist’s Way was like a jolt of creative electricity. I would recommend dropping the cash on a used copy if you can get your hands on one. I’ve heard it changes lives.

4) Pour yourself into other hobbies that aren’t creative, especially if they’re physical. Personally, I feel like my mind opens up most effectively when I’m running or cooking, specifically cooking something that requires me to get my hands covered in dough and prevents me from touching my phone. By occupying your hands and/or body with something else, your mind can (and will) work and stimulate itself in the background.

5) Take a break—a real break. Don’t just take a pause from these creative hobbies; take a pause from the self-flagellation. Time away from these practices can be hugely beneficial to reset your mind, but only if you appreciate the break and focus on other things, whether that’s the aforementioned physical hobbies, or consuming art made by other people instead of making your own.

I hope this is helpful for you. I hope you find that spark again. It’s waiting for you whenever you’re ready.

Love,
J

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Advice needed: in the winter, when everything is lonely and pale, I feel like I only ever write about the cold. How can I bring the dimension back to my poetry when it’s frozen this way?

— permafrost poet

Dear Permafrost Poet -

What a fascinating question! How are we, unlike the metaphorical fish, supposed to write about anything but what we’re swimming in? In the winter, how are we meant to write about anything but the cold? During times of darkness, how are we meant to write about the light?

I don’t know about you, but the first truly excellent writing I ever created was about…well, me. My experiences, my relationships, my environment, my past and current perspectives. And then a few years ago, I read a fascinating interview with one of my favorite songwriters, Jason Isbell. What most impacted me was how he discussed writing a song for The Highwomen, a country supergroup featuring Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, and Amanda Shires (Shires also happens to be Isbell’s wife). I wish I could find the exact article—if someone finds it, please link me!—but I remember him discussing how a vital frontier in the writing process is learning to write wholly outside of one’s own experience. There is really only one vital skill you must develop as a writer, which is to tell the truth. How you tell that truth is up to you.

In poetry, as well as in songwriting, even when one is brushing directly up against the objective truth, we are stretching it. We are bending it; we are folding it around myth. The degree to which we distort the truth is irrelevant so long as the end result conveys something fundamental about a human experience. Sometimes, in order to tell the truth, we must dress in it fiction’s clothes.

To return to your question, winter has truths that must be communicated. There is knowledge to be gleaned from the pale loneliness. As a writer, you can tell these stories directly. But the challenge of your art is to boil these stories down to their essential truths, and then tell them under other circumstances. Brief digression: I’ve read that one of the benefits multilingualism confers is the ability to quickly discern what is most important in a text or verbal exchange in order to translate most efficiently; the more languages one speaks, the better one’s recall and reading comprehension. So too are you, as a poet, a translator of experience. It is your duty to speak the language of fact, and then to translate fact into truth. What is core and most essential to what you are trying to communicate with your verses? How much fact can you strip away, how much fiction can you use as ornament, and still keep the story true?

It was a treat to ruminate on this question. While I can’t tell you exactly what steps to take, I hope these musings will spur more contemplation for you, and more poems.

Love,
J

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Hey Jensen! 

(Know that i am stupidly excited about this, like more than is reasonable I think. I look up to you like crazy!!) 

I’m feeling like some of the people I used to consider my closest friends are becoming distant, and I don’t know how to cope. We are sophomores in college, and we live in the same suite. Somehow though, I don’t see them very much at all, despite trying to. The issue is, I don’t think it’s intentional, and though I’ve told them I want to be reached out to more and I make more efforts to see them, we haven’t actually solved it. In fact, tonight was a concert I’ve been working towards for months, that I told them about and got tickets for them for, and they didn’t come. Again, I don’t think they're trying to be mean, I think I’m just not an important fixture in their lives anymore, and if I’m being honest, trying to connect to them and the feeling that they’re “supposed to be my closest friends” is the important fixture in my life, maybe not them either? At first I was just grieving the relationships I feel like I’ve lost, but now I’ve hit a point where being sad or mad really isn’t doing anything, and I don’t know how to think about this, or let them go, or if I should try to get them back, or if I’m being dramatic and this is just college friendship seasons. I’ve become closer with other friends in their absence, but I don’t feel like I have a core best friend situation anymore, and least core best friends for whom I am also one of their best friends. What do I do with this quasi-loneliness? I’m not alone, but I don’t have a “best friend from school” like I used to, and like how everyone else does. How do I avoid getting wrapped up in shame, and how do I take the pressure off having this best friend group? Is it really so bad to want that kind of community? And if I do want it, what do I do about not having it? 

Yours,
Not quite alone

Dear Not Quite Alone -

It can be devastating to forge a true connection with someone and then to realize that connection has faded sooner than you thought it would. It can be demoralizing and even embarrassing to make progressively more effort to keep that connection alive, only to realize that if you stopped reaching out, you’d never hear from them again. It hurts. I’m going to guess that because you listen to my music, you are an especially deep feeler. And whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, the close relationships you form feel especially vital to your growth, your happiness, even your survival. What I’m trying to say is, if feeling these people you care about slip through your fingers feels like fight or flight, you’re not alone. I’ve experienced the same thing.

Let’s tackle this one problem at a time. As far as what to do with your loneliness, there are two parts to this solution. Part one is to channel it, ideally into some kind of creative and physical outlet. If you’re more of an art consumer and curator than you are a creator, make playlists and use journal prompts that enable you to really flush all the feeling out. Take notice of where it’s sitting in your body, and breathe into those areas. (These are the things I do with my therapist, who realized a long time ago that I will assess and categorize my feelings at the exclusion of actually dealing with them, so she forces me to focus on what a feeling actually is. BTW, if it’s in your head, it’s a thought. If it’s in your body, it’s a feeling. Isn’t that something?!) Part two is to talk to people. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that somewhere in the world there are people who love you and want to hear from you, even if they aren’t in your immediate vicinity. Maybe it’s family, maybe it’s friends from high school or summer camp, maybe they’re Twitter OOMFs—whoever they are, reach out to them and let them know you need a boost. Of course I will encourage you to try to seek out new friendships at school, to cultivate existing ones to a deeper closeness, but you need a hit of that close-friend energy right now, and you might have to get on FaceTime to get it.

I also want to address what you said about “everyone else” having a best friend at school—they most definitely do not. I’ll level with you; I had a pretty easy time making friends in college, because my program was incredibly small and we did everything together. But I would hazard a guess that a huge percentage of college students, at your school and other schools, don’t feel like they have a soulmate best friend on campus. To address your question about how to stop getting wrapped up in shame: for starters, I’m still working on it. But you need to remember that you are far from the only person experiencing this.

You also asked if it’s “bad” to crave this kind of community. Of course it isn’t. If you take nothing else away from consuming my writing, take this: wanting to be close to other people is never wrong or bad. Society has conditioned you into being ashamed of your big feelings. They make it seem as if you’re not supposed to want anything, or to try hard for anything—as if you’re supposed to view everything with nicotine-laced apathy and then have it fall into your lap as a reward for being the Coolest Person With The Fewest Needs. If that is not you, cast off your shackles. You are allowed to want this. Do you hear me? You are allowed to want love. You are allowed to want friends who are there for you, who prioritize you, who always think the hang is better when you’re in it. That is not a bad thing to want. That is beautiful and that is normal and you are good and you are righteous.

I think you’re already on the right track in terms of having that kind of community by reinvesting in other friendships. I was thinking about this today, actually: we get panicked about being lonely because we don’t know how long it will last. But in all likelihood, the loneliness is a season just like everything is a season. When you’re in the shower, you procrastinate getting out because you don’t want to be cold. But you know that a few minutes after you dry off and put your clothes on, you won’t be cold and wet anymore. You’ve continued pursuing these friendships that aren’t pouring back into you because you’re afraid of being cold and mysteriously damp. But the water pressure in that thing isn’t working anymore. Get out of the shower, dry off, and trust that someone is coming to fix it. You will be warm and humming to yourself again soon.

(Was that a helpful analogy at all?)

Anyway, I’m sending you all my love. This question hit especially hard for me. I’m 27 and perhaps thee Stallion of anxious folk singers and I still spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to convince people that I am worthy of their time. So let’s do this together. Let’s pour back into the people who already love us, and let’s go find new people to love. Please report back with your progress, and I’ll report back with mine.

Love,
J