letters to my wild and beautiful creative self

“I am, myself, three selves at least.” – Mary Oliver, Of Power and Time

image from Nettie Kunde on pinterest

In her essay, Of Power and Time, Mary Oliver describes the three selves that she has found: the inner child, the attentive/social self, and the wild and beautiful creative self. In the last year, and the last six months since my mother passed, I have been focusing on my inner child. I have been nurturing her, tending to her sweetness, soothing her tears, playing her games, protecting her, and, above all, loving her fiercely in the way she should have been loved.

The second self, the attentive and social self, though, is the one I know most. Oliver describes this self as “the smiler and the doorkeeper.” This is the self that “winds the clock, that steers through the dailiness of life.” The organizer, the manager, the performer, the everything is fine-er, and the masker.

“What this self hears night and day, what it loves beyond all other songs, is the endless springing forward of the clock.” – Mary Oliver, Of Power and Time

I have been locked into the second self since I was a little girl. School became a place to hide from my family and a key to leaving my situation, and I recognized this early on. My entire goal in late elementary school to high school was all about: how can I secure my chances that I will be able to leave this place?

And she made it possible. I joined every club I could, did well in school, graduated fourth in my class (granted, there were only 20 kids in my class), and with an associate’s degree from a nearby university. And when I was 18, I was able to leave.

But she never stopped being on. In college, her primary goal was to make sure I took as many courses as possible, had as many internships as possible, and worked as many hours as I could fit in, so I had a job as soon as possible after graduation.

My attentive/social self is exhausted. She’s been running the show and trying to make me “good.” She’s the one who makes sure I am smiley and cheery, even when things inside me are crumbling. She makes sure I’m likable, flexible, and “chill” – even though the attentive/social self is the opposite of chill. She’s the one who published an anthology of authors while grieving the entire time. As Miss Swift said, “I cry a lot, but I am so productive, it’s an art.”

I owe so much to this self. She is the reason I have security, safety, and skills. She’s the reason I don’t live in an abusive home. I owe her my life. And also, there is more to me than her.

“Lights, camera, bitch, smile even when you wanna die.” – Taylor Swift, I Can Do It With a Broken Heart

I’ve been feeling it for a while, too. The second self that was once saving my life has been draining me of my life, more and more. It’s gotten to the point where the socializing of talking to the baristas (which I love) at my local (and favorite) coffee shop leaves me feeling depleted. I have poured all of my energy into that self, and now I have none left. I have been tending to my inner child, yes, but that was the attentive self who made sure that happened.

When my mother passed, I thought I was doing a “good” job dealing with that grief* – whatever that means. I think I did a great job for something I had no tools to handle, with no mentor, and with limited time to deal with it (I got married six weeks later), and I tried to do the speed dating equivalent of healing… Speed healing?

Unsurprisingly, speed healing is not a real thing and doesn’t last. It was probably what I needed to do to get through that period, but I mistakenly thought I was done. Or rather, I knew healing was not a destination, but I thought I was done with the hard part. And, unfortunately, I think I am entering a period of deep dealing. I am no longer juggling a million things, attending a variety of events and planning for special occasions. I don’t really have a busy month until October (and, please Goddess, I want it to stay that way).

I no longer need the attentive/social self to push me, to help me compartmentalize as drastically as I was before. I no longer need to have a trauma drive pushing me to endlessly produce and achieve outside my normal work obligations. I have a safe group of lovely friends around me who don’t need me to mask in order to love me – though internalizing that and acting accordingly is another story.

“Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.” – Mary Oliver, Of Power and Time

My inner child is loved and tended to, my attentive self has gone above and beyond, but she’s starting to short-circuit. Have you seen The Good Place episode where Janet starts to malfunction because she’s taken on too much? My Janet (which is what I will now call my attentive self) has been on for 27 years, and she’s unable to take on any more. In fact, she’s not able to carry the things she’s carrying now.

“One must be ready at all hours, and always, that the ideas in their shimmering forms, in spite of all our conscious discipline, will come when they will, and on the swift upheaval of their wings-disorderly; reckless; as unmanageable, sometimes, as passion.” – Mary Oliver, Of Power and Time

I have been resisting the call of this life and world and self. She’s always been there, waiting for me. And, finally, without meaning to, I’ve invited her in.

Creative work requires loyalty. Oliver wrote, “Of this there can be no question-creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this-who does not swallow this-is lost.” The attentive self never let me see this third self fully. I think she feared that I would follow this self and leave her behind.

Oliver’s idea of the three selves is similar to Internal Family Systems, or IFS. This therapeutic tool “conceives of every human being as a system of protective and wounded inner parts led by a core Self.” My attentive/social part has been a huge protector part. One of the protector parts in IFS is called a “manager.” The manager is a healthy part to have and can assist us with things like meals, sleeping, working, deadlines, cleaning our homes, knowing how to talk to others, making assessments of situations, and generally just getting shit done. However, when our managers are dysfunctional, we may start to feel anxiety, dread, controlling, and manipulative. They turn into a micro-manager.

Or, they burn out and start dropping the ball on things like emails to reply to or MVD appointments to go to (I may or may not be speaking from personal experience on this…), or teeth to brush, etc. Maybe then everything feels like a potential danger.

I imagine that the creative self is not like this. If the attentive self is Monica from Friends, the creative self feels a bit more like Phoebe.

my creative self reassuring my attentive self that she can rest now

“There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether. It is a world where the third self is governor.” – Mary Oliver, Of Power and Time

If the description from Oliver above is true, then creative people act outside the societal rules and norms. They live in rhythm with the earth’s seasons, with the moon, and with their own inner clocks. Creative people listen to the ether around them. Elizabeth Gilbert, in her stunning book, Big Magic, wrote that “ideas are alive, that ideas do seek the most available human collaborator, that ideas do have a conscious will, that ideas do move from soul to soul, that ideas will always try to seek the swiftest and most efficient conduit to the earth (just as lightning does).” I fully believe this, and this is probably why creative people are so strange to other people.

If I were to embrace this third self, I think I would be nourishing my other two selves. If I lead a non-traditional life, if I let my whimsy guide me (and Mary Oliver did say that we should never stop being whimsical, remember?), if I allow my Pisces dreamer lover girl spirit walk the realms and gather ideas and see art in every single thing it sees, then I will be showing my inner child, who has witnessed so much abuse and restriction and fear, what it’s like to live. Doing this will also allow my sweet, absolutely frazzled, and fried attentive self the chance to finally rest.

I think my creative self knows how to take care of me, too. She knows when I need to rest and slow down. She knows when I need the warm glow of laughter around a restaurant table with my community. She knows what book to pick up. She knows how to be an advocate, a nasty woman, and to resist.

She knows how to guide me to wildness.

My Creative Self Ss:

• Easy going

• Open

• Cozy

• Still with a moving mind

• Present

• A Feminist

• Empathetic

• Neurodivergent

• Self-attentive

• Reflective

• True to herself

• Strange

• Weird

• Divine

• Silly

• Loving

• Passionate

• Warm

“A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life.” – Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

She enjoys:

• Baking

• Art

• Reading

• Learning

• Philosophy

• Dance

• Writing

“There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it neither power nor time.” – Mary Oliver, Of Power and Time

*one of the main jobs of the attentive/social self is to make sure I am “good” and “pretty” and “nice” and “demure” and palatable.

Thank you for reading, my love.

Happy creating.

Happy being.

xoxo

Visit my YouTube Channel!