for the last week or so, when i’m not in the living room pacing aimlessly, or in the kitchen eating up all the almond butter, i’ve been working. what i’ve been working on is an online exhibition in response to the stress and anxiety that has been permeating throughout this moment. while working on this online exhibition in response to stress and anxiety, it has been a struggle not to feel stressed and anxious.
we were planning to release the exhibition next week, but yesterday i made the call to push it. considering the mission of the exhibition to inspire calm, it just didn’t seem to make sense to stick with the original deadline at the expense of putting pressure on a bunch of people throughout the weekend for a haphazard launch.
but since then, there has been a stone sitting in my stomach as my imagination carries me through all the possible consequences of not working on a deadline of ASAP. in this fictitious journey, the project is released to the sound of crickets, and critics, who balk at the fact that this came seven days later than it should have. the pressing need for artful healing has passed, and all the work of the past couple of weeks is exiled to irrelevance.
this, of course, is all a story in my head. they postponed the olympics, they cancelled the venice biennale, and nobody is going to care that a website launched later than the premiere date which was never even announced in the first place. nobody but me.
all last year, while in the throes of burnout, i had to learn the hard lesson that there is really nobody to blame for the amount of pressure i’m facing, aside from myself. without recognizing that, i’m ignoring the privilege i have for not being at the mercy of a strict and non-negotiable circumstance – a privilege that the people healing others in health clinics, delivering groceries and packages, and under supervision from stubborn bosses don’t have.
when i ignore this privilege, and allow myself to be consumed by the luxurious existential pressures of meaning, impact, originality, i’m relinquishing the power to live well and be healthy, which is all that we should really be asking of ourselves right now.
when i forego patience, flexibility, and fluidity, i’m depriving myself of the nourishing pace and environment that called me to be an artist in the first place.
if there is any opportunity that i’m in danger of missing during this period, it’s not based on any product deadline or notion of contributing to a conversation. the opportunity that i could very possibly miss is to pay attention to why my ideas that come out of inspiration and passion can so often become harbingers of nervousness and pressure. the transformation is happening inside of me. it’s an ailment that only i can come up with a cure for.