Defining Success

A question of how to find fulfillment

What will drive your purpose?

It feels timely that this week I put pen to paper & open up to share more about the colour and shades of my creative life, alongside the re-shaping and re-drawing of ownership over my creative self, my body & businesses.

For a while now I’ve allowed myself to be driven and directed by so many needs and wants of others. Being a chronic people pleaser and working to carve out space for others, has over time left me so devoid of myself that I started to loose sight of who she was (a story so many of us can relate to). I let this lead characteristic drive many decisions over my business, my creativity and my personal life. Wanting & wishing I had more time for the things that brought me joy. Still I never gave in to that knowing, the feeling that I wasn’t quite on the right path. I told myself that I’d get to those heart desires tomorrow, next week or another time.

I’ve lived this way for the past six years. Throughout this time, some practices that sustained small slices of joy have been the moments between big ceramic production jobs where I swore to myself I’d spend one day for me, as a reward for shipping off 350 pieces of pottery. I’d take a day to step back from the monotony of production and create just for the sake of creating. A luxury I felt time couldn’t afford but one that kept me longing for my more free & creative self.

I allowed the stress of achievement & others time pressures & deadlines to embed deeply into my practice. Taking on pressures from larger companies to strive to complete works for their seasonal collections, gave in to stores that need stock with deadlines & bend my practice to create work in a particular way that didn’t quite fit my idea of object beauty, all this alongside quite secretly managing the workings of my pottery school that I often leave out of my personal practice. A whole other job squeezed between the spaces of being a mother & solo production potter. Any of these aspects are fine in isolation, but the surmounting pressure of juggling multiple jobs, time pressures, motherhood & pushing through to create work that didn’t inspire my creative identity, slowly sent me deeper into a practice I no longer desired. I continued to persevere to strive for an allusive goal “success”.

Success
the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.

"there is a thin line between success and failure"

So often we peer into the lives of others & shade it with visions of success. You’re probably surprised to find me here, admitting in full clarity that I’ve been striving for so many years, without feeling a sense of success. When the vision, the studio, the work, the dream, the beauty was seemingly all there. It certainly was in part, but anything can be drained of its integrity & intention when pushed to its absolute limit. Sure as hell I threw myself into this new obsession, pushing my body, my mind & my capacity to the point of depletion. Finding myself stuck in patterns that I didn’t know how to stop.

After years of peering only slightly into my creative self that so desperately needed more sunlight, space and air to breath I finally found myself in a reality check. I realised this deep yearning for freeing my creativity was never going to arrive. The unattainable next corner; “after this job” or “once I’ve completed this task I’ll have more time for the things I want”. These days and times never arrive at our door step, there is no magic moment for the “I’m here now & I can do those things”. It will never arrive, seeing and understanding that is the beginning of finding what truly makes us happy.

I wrote a poem that oozed out of me during this time, an expression of a feeling that had sat in my gut for the last few years. Thick and black, it seeped out of my skin, a deep sense of feeling stuck. This piece of work is very revealing for me & confronting to share. But I will bite my lips and grit my teeth as I pull back the veil.

Monstrous Machine

Big black monstrous machine
Keeps me chained to its mouth, hungry and mean
Insatiable appetite, hurtling down the track
How did we get here? No looking back
Shovel more coal, there’s no break in sight
Insatiable, dark, feasting appetite.
Chained to its hunger you’ve no space to breath
Don’t acknowledge the darkness, no strength to grieve
Catapult faster its hunger grows
Pulling you deeper into seeds you’ve sewn
You feel it grip tighter as reality sets in
This machine was your choosing, you gave birth to its sin
Look left & right entrapment you feel
Is this reality? Your dream became real
From vision to nightmare, it’s not what you meant
Misinterpreted dreams becomes your cement.

It was a rainy day, I sat in the car, digesting the surmounting pressures of commitments that lay before me. Giving space to feel the anxiety building in my body, the pure exhaustion that had piggybacked through life the past year and acknowledge the unliveable days that lay ahead of me. I had nothing left, no desire, no satisfaction, no joy. What lay in its place was depletion. But I had commitments & I must show up, for my staff, my customers, my job. I called my dad, we pondered for a while as I sobbed through tired eyes. This wasn’t the dream I had when I said I wanted to be an artist, it didn’t feel like art at all. My dad asked me “Would you treat your employees this way?”. It was an earth shattering question, one that gave clarity to the expectations I’d held against myself for the past six years. I couldn’t think of one person in my life who I would hold such intense expectations, to the point of forgetting who they are. Draining them to depletion and asking them to drag themselves back in for another day of work. I simply couldn’t. In that moment my mind was made up, this life that I’d built for myself was not the one I actually wanted & the first step to figuring anything out would be stripping it back to bones.

And so it began, my journey of saying no, in order to find my true yes.

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