Thief Of My Own Joy
On Attempting To Stop Robbing Myself To Feed Myself
This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.
I share this newsletter in one of the support/social groups for bi/queer men who are or have been married I joined not long after I began accepting my full self.
After sharing the post about coming out to my wife, one of the members1 commented:
“I would just kill to be able to write about my experience but 1) I don’t seem to be able to write as well as I used to and 2) I don’t know how much of my personal life I really want out there for anyone to read. Maybe now is the time to not care? Idk…I also would never dream of copying Ty so I will stick to writing about the music that makes me dance.”
This group is pretty amazing and another member quickly responded, saying that that member writing about music is his way of telling his story. Fully agreeing and wanting to also encourage him, I shared an excerpt from Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being.
“Whatever our perspective, so long as we share it, unaltered and undoctored, we succeed in art’s fundamental purpose. When making art, we create a mirror in which someone may see their own hidden reflection.”
I picked up Rubin’s book last spring while visiting the bookstore of a good friend for the first time. I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t really know anything about him, despite the fact that he’s one of if not the most important music producers of all time. I picked up the book because, well, I fancy myself a creative, the book’s simplistic presentation fascinated me and I’m always looking for silver bullets to “fix” my self-perceived inability to be motivated, inspired and disciplined when it comes to being creative.
It is perhaps the most spiritual book I’ve read in a long time, even compared to some actual religious books I’ve read in recent years. Rubin’s characterization of the relationship between the creative individual and the creative energy of the universe (which he calls Source) is a sacred one, one that creative individuals are privileged with which to connect.
People are notorious for hunting and pecking out tidbits from whole philosophies or manifestoes and I am no different. Like the quote above, I was drawn to fragments that emphasized the importance of sharing our art with the world. While not required, Rubin stresses that sharing our art ultimately benefits us while also potentially benefiting others.
“Sharing art is the price of making it. Exposing your vulnerability is the fee.”
People have told me they appreciate the things I write because it’s similar to things they have experienced and wish they could share with others but just can’t find the words or determination or courage to start. Obviously, hearing that is flattering. And to be brutally honest: I share my posts in that support group to fish for compliments a bit. And really, I write this newsletter for the same reason. Because I need feedback on what I publish. I need to know what folks took away from it. I need to know what they…think of me…
Now, let’s talk about another book, one frequently discussed among the late-blooming queer set.
Alan Downs’ The Velvet Rage is considered a standard text in understanding the journey many queer men take in finding and accepting their true selves, whether they have been out since they were adolescents or are coming out after being married for 20 years and with kids.
Downs’ approach breaks down to queer2 men experiencing three stages: being overwhelmed by shame because of their queer identity, compensating for that shame and, lastly, finding authenticity. He stresses not all queer men experience all three stages. Some may not even progress out of Stage 1. But for those that do, Stage 2 can be even more of a quagmire:
“...If you hold the fundamental assumption of shame that you are critically and mortally flawed, how would you cope with this? One way, as we have seen in stage one, is to avoid confronting the shame. Another way, the way of so many of us, is to compensate for shame by striving for validation from others, even if it is not earned authentically…
“...The acquisition of validation is so rewarding that we become validation junkies. The more we get, the more we crave it, the better we feel, and the harder it becomes for us to tolerate invalidation. Our houses become showplaces that elicit kudos from all who enter. Our bodies become chiseled in muscle, pleasing our bedroom guests. We work to become wealthy so that we can take regular and exotic excursions around the world that bring us excitement and worldly sophistication that is recognized and adored by other wealthy, world travelers. We write books, create the world’s most recognized art, and collect everything from stamps to the finest pedigree dogs…”
I became fascinated with the idea of making my own books in second grade, taking pieces of paper and stapling them into a booklet with a construction paper cover, writing and drawing inside them. I loved the idea of making something, even if only for myself. The earliest memory I have where I was praised for something I wrote came just a year later. It was a sci-fi ripoff of Cinderella called Cinderdroid. I wrote it as part of a class project where we wrote and illustrated our own stories and then our teacher bound them into little volumes with covers made from shelving paper.
Every newspaper article, every poem, every short story, every other piece of writing I’ve written or typed in my life since then, has grown from that praise for Cinderdroid. As a kid, I didn’t think I was particularly remarkable; couldn’t play an instrument or play sports, wasn’t popular or cool. But I could write! And that was important for school so that helped me get the good grades that I so desperately craved because they were what was expected of me.
Not everything I wrote was well-received. Plenty of short stories and poems were laughed at by friends I showed them to or panned by teachers, or by professors in college. I could never count the number of articles I wrote that were bleeding in red pen by the time they came back to me, and not just for conventional errors or typos. I stopped sending out fiction to agencies and publications after my twelfth or so rejection letter. Each of those admonishments became a dusty box in my mind, reminders of my ineptitude and mediocrity that I constantly stumbled over, their embarrassing contents spilling out.
But then I found photography! I had a series of point-and-shoots growing up and I loved finding and capturing images that seemed to distill moments and emotions. Then my summer reporting internship required me to take photos for some of my stories. I specifically remember a photo I took for a gimmicky story about how an academic challenged whether my state had more lakes than Minnesota, the “land of thousand lakes,” because of the sheer volume of pasture ponds or stock tanks there were. The photo was of one such pond I passed on my way to the newsroom each morning and the publisher praised me for its composition.
My parents gifted me my first digital single-lens reflex (SLR) camera the Christmas after I graduated and I started pushing to take photos when I could at my first newspaper job. I went out and took lots of nature and landscape shots because I was living in the Pacific Northwest and everywhere is beautiful. And I dabbled in street photography (well, as much as you can dabble in street photography in a town of 20,000 people) and self-portraiture and more abstract imagery. I managed to get a few photos into online publications, a few small shows at coffee shops and at a short-lived arts center.
But then I began hearing crickets for photos I submitted for publication and contests. My second newspaper rarely needed my photography skills given its (at first) decently-sized and talented photo desk. Then I moved out of journalism entirely and was starting a family and who wants to look at photos of domestic life such as kids refusing to eat their dinner or playing in a tent in the backyard?
Just more boxes to stumble over. Just more reason to avoid filling more boxes to begin with.
“When you believe the work before you is the single piece that will forever define you, it’s difficult to let it go. The urge for perfection is overwhelming. It’s too much. We are frozen, and sometimes end up convincing ourselves that discarding the entire work is the only way to move forward.”
— Rubin
The scanned photographic negative above is what happens when you are creatively paralyzed for years, leave things lying around and you neglect your cat’s litter box for just a little too long3.
I don’t remember specifically why I didn’t immediately scan that negative and the others from 2021 when I developed them years ago. Probably had something to do with being too stressed and pressed for time due to work, family, whatever, so I left it in a small pile of other things next to my desk in my home office, a convenient location for my cat to communicate their annoyance with me.
Finally, I recently acquired a new-to-me-but-barely-used souped up Mac mini Pro and, having finished scanning my three-year backlog of negatives, I finally converted them to positives.
Aside from my cat’s contribution, there were clearly photos where the chemistry or temperature wasn’t ideal when I developed them—I develop all my own film—so they either were damaged at the outset or became damaged as protective aspects of the developing process faded. If I had managed to get them scanned sooner, that would have likely allowed me to at least have better scans.
Even with modern computer applications I found myself frustrated at some of the results. So many images just looked so washed out or I couldn’t get the colors right or I didn’t properly clear the dust from negatives before scanning them…
“Why am I shooting film anyway?!” I yelled inside my head. “Why am I even still shooting?!! I’m not even making anything anymore. No one’s even going to see them.”
“Concerns about releasing a work into the world may be rooted in deeper anxieties. It could be fear of being judged, misunderstood, ignored, or disliked. Will more ideas come? Will they ever be this good again?
“Will anyone even care?
“Part of the process of letting go is releasing any thoughts of how you or your piece will be received. When making art, the audience comes last. Let’s not consider how a piece will be received or our release strategy until the work is finished and we love it.”
— Rubin
Several weeks back
shared a wonderful little zine they made about whether you should monetize your passion. While the whole thing is thought-provoking, this page stuck with me.
Photography is/was causing me pain. My anxiety is triggered by the backlog of negatives to scan, the scanned photos that hadn’t been edited, the projects I had let fall by the wayside. My depression rears its head whenever I don’t have a camera on hand when I see something, anything, I want to capture. “Perhaps,” I thought, “I need to take a break from it.”
Then
shared five things he learned from cartoonist Lynda Barry while chatting with her in her classroom at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Part of that conversation had them talking about how software and technology have become so central to design that it can potentially derail creativity. But I focused in on a specific kernel of the discussion:“It’s very important for a designer or artist to know how to use their tools because it allows them to make the things they want to make. A carpenter needs to know how to use a saw and a drummer needs to know how to keep a beat. But what happens when those tools become more important than what they help produce?”
Has my adherence to film become too restrictive? Am I too focused on process to the detriment of practice? Maybe I need to revisit digital, free myself from the hangups of film. They actually do make quality affordable full-frame mirrorless cameras now, even ones that will take my current digital lenses.
, another photographer here on Substack, was encouraging of that direction in a conversation.“Go ahead buy that digital, don't fetishize film if it's limiting you in some way. I find shooting film is a great detox to "perfect" and causes you to use digital gear in a very different way...
“…Also don't look at it as "reverting" or either/or you can do both, one will inform the other. I never used my 8x10 film camera for EVERYTHING…”
And yet, I hesitate. Am I confident it wouldn’t just be me throwing money at a problem to move back to digital? Would I love the photos I create, the time spent making them? Would I really shoot more? Would others even want to see my photos?
Would others…even want to see…my photos…
There it is.
Downs, writing in The Velvet Rage, says a queer man attempting to progress from compensating for the shame he feels for his identity to embracing that identity will eventually come to an inflection point. What began as a crisis of identity—acknowledging one’s own queerness—becomes a crisis of meaning. And that crisis can either be resolved or foreclosed:
“Foreclosure in the crisis in meaning almost always sounds like something like this: ‘I’ll find contentment if I just try harder at what I’ve been doing.’ More men. More sex. More workouts. More parties. More high achievement. More money. More Botox. More, bigger, better.”
I’ll do just about anything if approval and praise are the currency of exchange. Those glittering riches led me to play school sports, become an Eagle Scout, (very briefly) join the Marine Corps, become Catholic.
And when those things did not satisfy me, I let my need for approval, for praise, for love, seep into those things that had brought me joy and, as a result, it began to surreptitiously pluck it out.
Writing, rather than an escape, became a job, a chore, a never-ending competition to cover the pages of newsprint and web domains, fill up binder after binder with news clips and reams of paper with short stories, poems, essays, letters and attempted novels. Now those binders and reams of paper sit in dusty boxes, tucked away in my garage or basement.
Then, photography became less about seeing beauty and more about the drive to build a portfolio, sharing photos online to garner “likes,” fishing for compliments from family and friends, considering how to make money through my hobby. Now those images sit in folders on an external hard drive, itself gathering dust.
I used both creative outlets to satisfy something they can’t. To get my fix, I stole from those things that once gave me joy. But it’s never been enough—will never be enough.
“By conventional definition, the purpose of art is to create physical and digital artifacts. To fill shelves with pottery, books, and records.
“Though artists generally aren’t aware of it, that end work is a by-product of a greater desire. We aren’t creating to produce or sell materials. The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. A longing to transcend. What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond our understanding. Art is our portal to the unseen world.”
— Rubin
I do not know a life without creating just as much I do not know a life without seeking validation. My need for validation has driven most everything I’ve done in my life. I don’t just want people to like me—I need them to like me, I need them to want me.
How do I start liking myself? How do I start wanting myself? How do I start feeling like I don’t need something no one can give me?
Going back to Mitchell, another post of his talked about how he also hadn’t been making art much in recent years. He got married, moved, had kids. But he’s getting back into creating again and he wrote the first draft of an artist’s manifesto to guide that.
I don’t know if I’m prepared to write my own artist’s manifesto. I think that requires me to have a better handle on my process and practice, which is severely lacking. So instead, I’ll make one final reference to Rubin’s book, a statement that represents the purest intention of why I should create things, be they stories or poems or photographs or novels or photobooks or newsletters or anything, that will allow me to resolve my shame rather than perpetuate it, that will prevent me from being a thief of my own joy.
“In the end, you are the only one who has to love it. This work is for you.”
Coming in next week’s newsletter…
I began writing about my queerness in my journal in code years ago because I was ashamed of who I was. If I’m not ashamed anymore to be queer, why am I still doing it?
Regrettably, Downs is dismissive of bisexuality in his book, despite recently updating the text and research showing it is, you know, an actual orientation. I am substituting the word “queer” for when he refers to “gay”)
Not for years, though, promise.