In the Shadows
Or doing everything except the work
Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way speaks of a concept called the Shadow Artist - a person who engages in art in every way except for actually making it. They attend the openings, support other artists, and have a room full of materials, but their own art never gets made.
They live in the shadows.
Sometimes, doing the meaningful thing is hard work. Not just the doing of it, but the getting to point of actually doing it. Not just laying a chisel to the marble, but finding the David inside the block and releasing him*.
Whether the journey is through writing, making, or setting up an important process for your business - all things that will at some point make you happy or proud, or boost your cash flow - you choke and find something else to do instead.
Call it procrastination. Or resistance**.
Or just don’t wanna.
A friend mentioned recently that often we think we are engaging in our craft when we buy stuff for it. And for the sake of this convo, let’s say CRAFT is the stand-in for whatever you are not doing.
In quilting, that means we buy yet more fabric rather than start a quilt with the fabric we have (we often say that most hand-crafts are actually two adjacent hobbies - one is BUYING the materials, one is USING the materials)
In entrepreneurship-land, it’s hopping about for a better solution. This person offers a class (with hook-you-hard copywriting) about making a year’s worth of social posts in just 15 minutes a month, so now we’re subscribed to their list and pondering their class. It doesn’t matter that we’ve already bought 4 classes that offer essentially the same thing, and we’re still drowning in the distracting clutter of the emails from those folks, too, not to mention the shame spiral of not having finished those classes either.
We’re not actually DOING the work. We’re in the swirl, or what my fave productivity expert Charlie Gilkey calls Head Trash - all the stuff running through your head, telling you lies about not being any good at something, while somehow convincing you that buying more stuff (thank you capitalism) will make it all better. And we live in the shadows with this trash, thinking that everyone has it together except us.
Nope… they don’t. We’re all swirling at some level, around some process. To again quote Charlie: we are not uniquely defective.
The cure? Take what you have and dig into it.
DO. THE. THING.
Pull out the fabric and get cutting.
Fire up a biz class you already bought and DO THE WORKSHEETS. Most of these classes DO move the needle, but you gotta do some work.
To quote my late, great drawing teacher Frank Sardisco, you don’t learn to draw by talking about it.
Every time you pull out your credit card around your business or craft, stop to ask yourself if you’re in the shadows, and if you already have a version of the solution you were about to buy.
Every time you feel like doomscrolling for a break (More better shinier stuff to buy! And everyone’s act is so much more together than mine! I SUCK!) walk outside for 10 deep breaths of fresh air instead.
Tell the shadows you’re not hanging out there today.
Real work pays off. Real work shines in the daylight. Real work makes a light all of its own.
*Apocryphally, when asked how he carved the David, Michelangelo responded that he chipped away the stone that doesn’t look like David.
**If you want to procrastinate by reading about resistance, I have the perfect book for you ;-)