Part two: twenny twenny five

Things started to feel less knotted and sad around the time summer fell like a hammer, the tomatoes wilting and giving off their green perfume, Florian launching himself into the clamshell pool in the backyard — often fully dressed — every day while shouting “BONK!” on impact, and me persistently clad in sheer cottons and a week-old top knot, now a semi-permanent convolvulus atop my head after twenty months of motherhood.

Not going to lie: this easing also coincided with me finishing work for the year, which tells me all I really need to know.

I haven’t transcribed much of the soft beauty of my home life in my paper journal this year, instead cataloguing the ways in which I am coping and not-coping with my load. Finally, with time to pay attention to the warm morning cuddles of my child, his gleeful mimicry and emerging ability to carry a tune (even if that tune is ALWAYS JINGLE BELLS, even in January), reading snatches of Deborah Levy’s Real Estate in bed, albeit so infrequently I keep having to renew the library loan, the slow bloom of the purple artichoke thistles —I can clearly see and appreciate small and homely pleasures, and how they have sustained me during this period when I’ve been mired in my professional crossroads and waylaid by near-constant course correcting.

So let that be a paean to the joys of my teeny tiny life, and a note that I have not forgotten them.

I’ve always loved a New Year. And a birthday (mine is next week - 38, jeepers!). I love the jumpstart, of an illusion, of a fresh start. Ha. I enjoy a deep measure of things. I love an excuse to scribble in my journal (often a semi-frantic jabbing at the page before Florian wakes up and I hear that desolate “Mamaaaa!” waft down the hall). And by god, I love planning. I don’t even really care these days that most plans implode or evaporate as you move along. That is their way. I just want that spark of a structure to ignite, and to light my year. And if I have to grapple in the dark a little further along the path, I can remember how it was when it lit up before me, and restart from there. How did I feel? Why did I want that? Have I changed? Do I still want that? And keep moving.

This year I wrote about things I wanted to commit to, embrace, acknowledge, amend, continue, and explore. I won’t bore you with them all, but I wanted to share a handful in case they resonate with where you’re at in these early weeks of another year.

This year I want to commit to:

Trying to fail

I wrote in my last letter about being pummelled by rejections last year. For every five rejections I received, I was offered one opportunity. That’s the maths I’m working with. And, really, it’s not too bad. But given I was striving for successes, it felt like hot garbage.

This year I want to reframe my pursuit of opportunity as a pursuit of failure. I am aiming to fail at least 50 times: for jobs, for shows, for prizes and grants, for any professional opportunity. By reframing my failures as accomplishments, and cheering myself on each time I “fail”, I hope to take the sting out of it. And if some acceptances slip through the cracks, well, I’ll have to try harder, won’t I?

Getting help

In the same vein of trying to improve how I approach my work and my sense of overall balance, I want to commit to asking for help. I have an overwhelming tendency to try and tough things out on my own — or to seek help from sources with a semi-predictable outcome, which means i don’t always get the advice I need. At this stage, committing to help looks like finding a good arts mentor, working with a careers counsellor (if you have recommendations on either front, I am alllll ears!) and maybe, juuuust maybe, talking with a mortgage broker. Gulp.

This year I want to embrace:

Surrender

I am a toddler mother. I am in a challenging job market. Art is a competitive field. Some things are what they are, and can’t be transformed overnight by sheer bloody will. And trying to will change into being sounds like a not-so-delicious recipe for burnout.

Instead I want to choose to see where what is leads: to start where I am, wherever I am.

The numinous

Despite almost 38 years of surface-level skepticism, I’ve spent the past few years nurturing my openness to spiritual or mystic possibilities. Particularly those accessible through the act of making paintings. But. But. There’s more. The larger world, to me, is bristling with its own spiritual electricity - to borrow Julia Cameron’s term in The Artist’s Way. This electricity is cloaked by habit, by screen time, buried by traffic, alarms, machines of convenience. And exhumed by time spent skin-to-skin with the wind, immersed in water, alive to the sounds of birds. In twenty twenty five I want to spent more time convening with the things that feel naturally numinous in the world. I want to float in rivers, speak to the sea, follow my fancies, entertain my inner animist.

This year I want to acknowledge:

My phone is sucking the marrow from my life, and we need to get a divorce.

Maybe you’ve had this thought, too. And maybe, like me, you’re not sure how to extricate yourself from something that manages your life for you. I am still not sure how I’m going to move forward with this knowledge. But more and more I miss the world before smartphones. I miss paper maps. I miss staring out the window on the train. And I think the answer might be to reintroduce some of this inconvenient beauty, this boredom, to my days.

It’s okay to strive for youthfulness, just not for your youth.

Despite all my recent chatter about looming perils (lol) of ageing, I am, in fact, not old. I am in my Mother years. I am not-quite-38. I’m not young, and glad for it, but firmly in that plump ripe middle bit. And yes, I’m greying. And I don’t love it. I decided in the last few weeks that it’s actually okay if I want to colour my greying hair. I’m not betraying anyone. Not even myself. And in fact, it feels like I’m doing the opposite: honouring what remains of my plump-ripe-middle-bit life, and ensuring that my body, in the ways I can control, feels (and looks) fully like myself at this point in time.

This year I want to amend:

My posture.

Enough said. It’s terrible. And frankly, I’m five foot two. I can’t afford to lose that height! I probably shouldn’t have even included this here, but I just didn’t want you to think my resolutions were all fucking deep, you know?

This year I want to continue:

Writing on a public platform.

One of the sweetest joys of 2024 was regularly writing on Substack, becoming less and less anxious about sharing my experiences as a mother-artist with a motley crew of readers known and unknown to me. I started 2024 feeling trepidation about writing these tiny essays, and now I feel nourished, emboldened, and like a missing piece has settled in to the puzzle of myself. Naff, no? But still resoundingly true.

This year I want to explore:

Pathways to building success in my practice.

Success on precisely my own terms, with my own values as the stars by which I navigate my professional decisions. I want to end the year with a clear idea of what’s next, and for those opportunities to be exciting to me, regardless of what they look like to others.

Making bad artwork from new materials

Bronze, limestone, watercolour - I want to try new materials and processes without the pressure of the being “it”. I want to fail at it, I suppose. And learn. Which brings us back to my theme of the year! May my life in twenty twenty five be a series of joyfully exuberant belly flops. With, perhaps ,the odd Olympic dive thrown in.

What do you want for yourself this year? How will you hold your own hand, and how will you hold the hands of others?