What Will Transpire?

I haven’t been here for a while. It’s not that I haven’t written or drawn anything. I have a lot of possible content. But that’s the thing, the idea of positioning my thoughts and feelings as “content” stops me from completing an essay or finishing a piece of art.

My whole career centered around creating and positioning content…even when we didn’t call it content (back in the printing press, pre-Internet and social media, snail-mail days.) Because it was my job to create and communicate on behalf of organizations and/or their leaders, most of what I generated was not mine, not really. It was, as I said before, positioning, which is basically a 2-D performance with an intention to influence. Some might call it manipulation. Sometimes that’s what it felt like, although not always. There were times when I was fully aligned with the intention of the messages and content I was developing. But that didn’t make it mine.

You see, my top core value, the value that drives me and has since I was very young, is authenticity. To me that means being true to my own experience, being honest and transparent about my own truth, and encouraging and allowing the same from others. It’s interesting how threatening, and maybe confusing, that can be to others. My authenticity has not been appreciated, valued, or validated in many places. The truth of my true self, the truth of my truth, made people uncomfortable.

So I learned to perform and please. To position and perfect. To tell the stories and share the things my “audience” could handle and wanted to hear. I got so good at it that it became my career. I performed, positioned, perfected, and pleased for decades. But underneath it all was a simmering pot of resentment that if I ever showed who I really was, if I ever was true to myself, I would be rejected or worse.

And that happened a lot, actually. Because the truth is that my truth was too big to stay down. It came out one way or another, squeezing past the curtain and taking the stage in a way that completely annihilated the performance I was trying to pull off. When that happened, it never ended well, because I was being paid to perform, to create content.

But I was never meant for that. I was meant to tell my truth and see and honor and support the truth of others. I started drawing and writing again from that place, out of a need to process my feelings and struggles. But then I started to get feedback, good feedback. People started to say that what I was creating was helping them. YAY! It was my hope that by sharing what I was experiencing, in the way I was experiencing it, that other people might see themselves and fell okay experiencing their lives as they were.

Except that as a seasoned performer, the feedback tripped a switch in me. I started to feel compelled to turn my art and writing into content and deliver what I thought you would want to hear instead of what was completely true for me.

Which is why the pause. I literally have dozens of unfinished posts and sketches that I couldn’t complete, because they were performative and it felt like, well, work to try to churn them out. They weren’t coming from a place of authenticity, and I got stuck trying to force them to be something. So I stopped trying.

And here we are. This post took me no time to write. The words flowed freely because I allowed myself to tell my truth. Honestly, I thought I was going to write something else when I pulled out the laptop. I had a whole other idea. But this is what came out when I stopped thinking about what you might need to hear and instead focused on the truth of the situation for myself. 

If it helps, I’m glad. If it doesn’t, that’s okay. You do you. I’ll be over here remembering that I can be me.