creativity is wellness
you're not well because you're not creating
daily dose:
wellness thing on my mind
This weekend, my favorite pilates studio in Silver Lake is hosting donation classes this weekend. “Community takes effort.” I love that.
the digest:
At a bar in Silver Lake — standing in the smokers’ section, as you do at most bars in Silver Lake — I was making intense conversation with someone who told me he was a poet.
It was the kind of night where your group attaches itself to another group, flowing between outside and inside together, forging one of those instantly intimate bonds that culminate in a night of dancing and secret-sharing, exchanged IG handles, and never seeing each other again.
“I am too,” I confided, relishing the embarrassing and exhilarating camaraderie in admitting you’re a writer, and worse, a poet.
“Have you published anything?”
“Oh no, that’s between me and my notes app.” But he was not charmed by my practised self-dismissal.
“You gotta put stuff out there,” he clutched my forearm and looked me dead in the eye as he said this, I remember that. “It’s what it’s about. Making stuff and putting it out there.”
People are earnest like this in LA. Often, when they give you unsolicited advice, it’s advice they’ve been told, and so bestowing it upon you feels like traversing a boundary, graduating from something. Most often, it’s advice that they need to hear. It’s the mantra they’ve been repeating to themselves, which has to be true so that their lives make sense.
Usually, the advice is forgettable, fake-deep, and inane. And maybe I wouldn’t still think about this moment now if it weren’t for those dutifully swapped Instagram follows. In the years since that night, I’ve watched this acquaintance go from Substack poetry and voice memo music to grants, awards, and festivals.
Dutiful story-liker me, I like every update. And every time I do, I hear it, the certainty in his earnest urge to me.
You really do just have to make stuff. And then you have to put it out there.
necessary friction
For a long time, I didn’t make anything. I talked about what I wanted to do, what I wanted to write — or worse, what I had written or done in the increasingly past past. But I had nothing to show for myself.
“Show” here is not a pantomime of achievement for status or social media. It wasn’t about big-name publications or party invites — though those often feel like the true barometers of success in this city.
When I thought about the work I wanted to create and was creating, the gulf between them always seemed to be widening, not closing.
I was not writing. And soon, I was not even having ideas about what I would write if I were to actually open a Google Doc. So, the spiralling, which stagnation breeds.
The cure: friction.
With everyone talking about “frictionmaxxing,” I loved the recent piece in The Cut that got to the heart of how infantilizing our current age is. And with that infantilization, we are being robbed not just of our capability but also of our creativity. And of course, community.
Stop using ChatGPT completely. No, it does not have good ideas for meal planning. Buy a cookbook. Text your friends for advice. Go to Trader Joe’s. Come on.
When it comes to creativity, the cure doesn’t have to be so Sisyphean (in which you are Sisyphus, the boulder, and the hill). The cure is also not simply going analog. Or numbing our minds with coloring books or whatever else people have in those analog bags.
What I’ve learned: leaning into the friction of starting the creative endeavor is the necessary part.
There is enough friction in the process, the revisions, the agony of putting it out there. It’s necessary friction, sure. But it amounts to distraction. Hard for earth signs to accept: so does planning, when overdone.
Talking to a friend the other day, we reluctantly admitted just how much the trite advice works. Just do it, for example. I ended up on the dark web the other night (the boy side of Pinterest, which was full of Kobe edits — I was frightened). But those over-filtered images were onto something. Slogans like: Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
Yes.
The advice from the baseball-capped poet on Hyperion. Yes.
stop being insufferable and just make something
Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz wrote about the worst clients she encountered in therapy: the ones who wanted to create, but didn’t.
People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with someone who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.
For creative people, the biggest trap to fall into is thinking that we’ll make the work we want to — the work that will change everything and prove to everyone, especially ourselves, that we really are the artists we think we are — when someone finally gives us an opportunity.
In the meantime, we do what von Franz described — creating and fighting in shadow dramas to expend our creative energy without actually having to do the hard thing: make stuff and put it out there.
Until recently, I think I was this insufferable person. Worse: I thought it was a badge of honor. I thought it was a testament to my creative inner life — that I just feel deeply, yearn intensely (re: a crush is a portal), dream of a big life.
But the proof is in the doing, not just in the dreaming, especially when the dreaming is all you do.
world of wellness:
what’s happening in wellness, from new science to new stuff
Is being a Luddite wellness? They’re calling it the new vegan…
Wellness is also going luddite, with the prevalence of “catharsis over clinical data.”
Someone has said this before, but with the EGYM deal breaking, it begs the question: how are Mindbody and Classpass still relevant? There needs to be a better app to do to them what Zoom did to Skype.
lowkey think these snowstorms were manufactured by the Rhode marketing team for the brand’s Rhode Snow Club pop-up in Big Sky.
Vanity Fair wrote about the race to be the It-Bathouse in NYC. Lore is the latest entry — founded by the minds behind my favorite members club that never was
Harry Styles wearing the 111 SKIN eye masks as part of his return to life outside of Berghain (Big Gulp notwithstanding).
#wants
the stuff section
Almost cried when I finished my bottle of Vintner’s Daughter. Then found another one in the back of my skincare closet. There are angels, fr, and they work at Conti Communications.
The best facial I ever got was at GoodSkin in Brentwood. They recommend you take Bromelain 200-400mg to speed healing after a treatment. When a spa gives you Hermes blankets during treatment, you listen.
Hermes blanket and numbing cream, I love LA Next time I’m in NYC, I’m headed to SoHo Pilates.
But while I’m in LA, I need the Café Quesillo Matcha from Chainsaw.
I feel the way about the new Ralph Lauren that they were trying to make me feel about new GAP and new J.Crew.
i can almost forgive the bean boots
one last thing
Find an org that resonates with you to support at StandWithMinnesota.com.