Visibility, self-doubt and space 🤲🏼 💌 🌝
A deep dive into how the increased self-reflection of turning a year older can lead to self-doubt, the pressure of having a "visible" and "constant" work output and the need for space to create.
Visibility, self-doubt and the need for space 🤲🏼 💌 🌝
I find this time of year comforting and discombobulating in equal measure. I love the decay and regeneration of autumn; the incoming cold weather and need for more layers. I’m also thrown off by my impending birthday and the intensified self reflection it brings (I turn 27 on Sunday). This morning (which is actually this afternoon, as I’ve been sleeping later and later), I tried to claw back some comfort by reading Olivia Sudjic’s Exposure (2018) in bed. But I couldn’t keep still, jerking awkwardly between reading a few pages and writing a draft of this newsletter in the notes of my phone.
I put on Radio 6 and the first song that came on was Bowie’s Space Odyssey. Bowie makes me feel instantly nostalgic. My mum used to play his albums round the house. When I was around ten and in the final years of primary school, struggling to complete my maths workbook, she would play Kooks solely for the line “and if the homework brings you down then we’ll put it on the fire and take the car downtown.” Bowie became our mother-daughter love language and when I moved away to uni in late 2012, I raided my mum’s CD collection and took The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) with me. In my first place on campus, with a little balcony overlooking the uniform rows of student houses, I sat outside in the early-autumn frost with a blanket wrapped round me and played Bowie loud from a CD player. As I did so, a silent thread extended out towards my mum back in London. So, it feels fitting to be in this phase of deep introspection and hear Bowie come on the radio.
Self-reflection, for me, often descends into self-doubt. Towards the end of the year, a combination of burn out and sentimentality further breaks down my already thin skin, until I become hypersensitive to falters and criticism. This autumn, as with many autumns previous, I have been feeling like a fraud. At the start of 2021, I fell into art making, almost by mistake. After somehow convincing an organisation to commission my first film and lining up my first group exhibition, I have been hiding in the shadows waiting for someone to expose me as an impostor.
Now the film is out in the world and the exhibition has been hung, I have more and more reason to believe my foray into art making was a fluke. To put it plainly, I have second album syndrome. I am feeling the intensified pressure and expectation that comes after putting your first work into the public domain. To this day and after many iterations, Sugababes first album One Touch (2000) remains their best. The original line-up of Sugababes recently reformed and I find myself wondering whether they’re facing the daunting second album syndrome over two decades later.
For the past two years, I’ve been shuttling from one deadline to the next, propelled by a need to make ends meet. This week is the last I will spend in my mum’s flat, having lived here since early 2020. In anticipation of the move, I took on too much work in September and October with the goal of being able to pay rent. As with most year-endings, I’m exhausted. Everything I do revolves around being output driven. I only see exhibitions and read books when I’m writing about them, I’ve largely stopped watching films and reading fiction (two of my favourite pastimes). This has also been a result of my reduced energy reserve, a symptom of my invisible disability. I have to be careful and selective about the things I commit time to.
In Alice Hattrick’s Ill Feelings (2021), they write about how their’s and their mother’s chronic illness has lead to this weighing up of activities in relation to how much energy they will expend; ‘We walk quite far that evening, further than I expect. My mother wants to walk further still, but she is worried about walking back, about me walking back. She is used to negotiating the length of these walks in her own mind, depending on how she is feeling in her body, and the things she still needs to do that day, or even the next day, like go and see her father at the care home, or finish filling out another form relating to her “Ill Health Retirement”. It is a careful calculation that, once decided upon, can and most probably will be ruefully ignored – she just has to face “the consequences”.’
Within this transition, I’ve largely lost a sense of self. Since I was a teenager I’ve over-identified with my work, meaning the non-labour-driven side of my life is largely obscured. Years ago, I “balanced” out the labour/leisure divide with excessive drinking and partying; the only method I could find for decompressing from the stresses of work, as well as a crutch for my barriers around social interaction. After my health forced me to stop drinking for 9 months – before slowly reintroducing it at a dramatically reduced rate – the ways I experience leisure have radically altered. I think this shift is in part due to not having stable footing. Simone Weil, quoted in Exposure, said ‘to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.’ Due to a deteriorating relationship with a neighbour at my mum’s, for the past 4 months I’ve been ferrying around between house sitting, work trips and my boyfriend’s parent’s house.
I’ve also stopped writing for me. Although, truthfully, I think the last time I wrote for myself was nearly a decade ago. Now I’m motivated by the need for an income. My ideas are condensed into 500 word counts, dragged over with a fine tooth comb by editors - “can we verify that this is true?” I tie up things with a neat little bow for the sake of an ending; things that are too vast and messy to succumb to succinctness in daily life. My anxiety becomes a funnel for the interdependence of shared experience. My mum being my carer when I was too unwell to look after myself becomes evidence of the need for a societal valuing of care work. None of these experiences have felt remotely close to being finite or obeying the narrative technique of a conclusion. My mental illness does not have a beginning, middle and end. Every time I think I’ve clawed my way back from the debilitation of panic, there it is again, pulling me under until I find myself screaming and hyperventilating on the bathroom floor.
Writing is a solitary excursion which in recent years has been translated into an overexposing public domain. In childhood, my original desire to write largely stemmed from a need to be anonymous, of feeling too sensitive and unsure of myself to do anything that might attach my face to it. I lusted after the anonymity of a book, with the only possible identification stemming from one photo inside the jacket cover. With the rise of social media over the last decade, the once anonymous writer has fallen into the trap of using their face as a tool of self-promotion. As noted by Sudjic, ‘The anonymity writing once afforded to authors made Plato suspicious. It enabled a writer to disconnect from the text (the advent of ‘Anon’) rather than embody memorised words with public speeches. But in our present age of constant exposure (from social media to data capitalism) such anonymity, even as private citizen and reader, is impossible.’
With so much time working from home, often not seeing another soul for days at a time, the internet steps in as an alternative to meeting colleagues around a water cooler. Sudjic describes how the isolation of being a novelist can lead to a familiarisation with social media, ’Now I no longer have colleagues or a shared space in which to work, or a kind of work that can be relied upon to transport me outside my own head, my smartphone is a more addictive conduit to the outside world.’ I don’t have any close friends who are writers and so my lack of self-belief compounds with an inability to cling on to another warm body for support. Simultaneously, my introversion repels any possibility of building bridges to new people.
I have a note on my phone aptly titled ‘people to see’ which lists the distant acquaintances I have felt fleeting connections with over the past few years, but haven’t had the confidence, time or mental space to reconnect with. Strangers-cum-almost-friends are the ones I’m most likely to make an optimistic plan with then cancel on. Instead, I always find myself returning to the comfort of the handful of friends I’ve known for 10+ years, who have witnessed every badly thought-out and flawed version of myself and still choose to love me. I depend upon social media to fill in the gaps of colleagues and friends at work, summarised by Sudjic, ‘I can end up avoiding all interaction except via the prescribed codes of communication social media offers (hearts, emojis, follows), stockpiling memes and “relatable content”. It’s an illusory intimacy that can shadow the experience of reading or writing fiction myself.’
Usually, I deactivate my Instagram around this time of year, finding that the pressures of self-comparison start to become too much. But recently, I’ve broken down the careful barriers I’d previously built around my free time: switching my phone off in the evening and having phone free days. I’ve been leaning into the performance of the online self, letting my Instagram become fodder for the aspirational-middle-class part of my brain. Racking up 8 hours of screen time a day interchangeably taking on the role of voyeur into other people’s lives, comparer of my career trajectory to other “more successful” people, online shopping and perusing photos of fancy restaurants I wish I could afford to eat in regularly. The point where my relationship to social media is at its most delusional is when I start to think of future experiences as Instagram posts - this day might translate into my grid in this way - it is a compulsion I am endlessly ashamed of and one I have been assured by friends I am not alone in.
I’m also painfully aware of how I feed into the more negative aspects of the social-media-comparison-mill, using my profile as a platform for work and sharing achievements. In a previous life, when I ran a small, independent magazine while at university (an endeavour which, for the entirety of its three-year lifespan, I felt riddled with guilt about; a story for another day), someone told me that my social media feed made them feel anxious and like they weren’t doing enough. The irony is that’s exactly how I felt and continue to feel about everyone else online. Social media diminishes and clouds the nuance of real life, tidying us up into edgeless little boxes which don’t truly reflect the reality of our lives. We all know this by now, so why do we still let our social media feeds make us feel not good enough?
In the last few weeks, a potential lifeline came. An offer to start working as an associate lecturer and the promise of some degree of regular income which could mean I don’t have to write as my bread and butter. With that, came a new anxiety of its own… what if I stop writing regularly and as a result the possibility of writing dries up altogether. We are all familiar with the need for constant output (nowhere does it seem more embodied than in 3 colossal albums, multiple narrative music videos, tours, performances and standalone singles from Ariana Grande in 3 years). I’m convinced that if I stop doing something regularly there will no longer be the opportunity to do it at all. Meanwhile, having a constant output has eradicated any possibility of being thoughtful, or approaching things with deep research, or feeling like I can stand behind the things I write. I don’t know what space looks like anymore; truly, I don’t know if I ever have.
Space, though, is also a necessary component of creation. Solitary time, away from the chaotic thrum of city life, is the only environment that truly allows creativity to flourish (of course, busy-ness also has its own impact on the ways we create, making it more immediate, cutting through the waffle and reflecting the vivid colour of our surroundings). I spent September obsessing about a window of time I was convinced I’d managed to carve out in November and December. Having taken on an intense amount of work in the preceding months, it seemed there was a period of relative leisure in which I could really focus on something. In the lead-up, I couldn’t stop fretting about how that time would best be spent. I was having repetitive conversations with artist friends about the conflict between having two parallel but unentangled modes of creating or working – for me writing and making art.
Do I focus that rare period of space on trying to carve out the skeleton of the draft of a book (something I’ve wanted to do for years, but which continues to elude me) or try to make the next films in my three-part series? I also watched as online acquaintances whose career trajectories have taken place in the same time period as mine, but always that bit shinier and better received, made announcements about securing book deals. Like the domino effect where one person on your timeline gets married or has a baby, my social media epidemic is the first time author. Finally, as November edged closer, I realised that the space I thought I’d carved out wasn’t really space at all, as I had to ask for more and more extensions to allow for time to deal with the life admin of moving house.
In September upon receiving an Emmy for Best Writing for a BBC/HBO limited series, Michaela Coel gave a speech that I felt deep in my bones. ‘In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to, in turn, feel the need to be constantly visible – for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success – do not be afraid to disappear, from it, from us, for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence.’ I don’t know where the next year of my life will take me, as I edge closer to thirty, but I do hope I can find a way to embody the words of Michaela Coel; to give myself permission to come offline, stop looking over my shoulder and comparing myself to other people. Maybe, in doing so, I might grant myself the space I so crave, to then see what might be possible in the silence.
November updates 🤲🏼 💌 🌝
🤲🏼 For spooky season, I wrote about whether vampires can ever be reformed for Elephant Magazine.
🤲🏼 My second column for Frieze on disability inclusive resources is online and in print in issue 223.
🤲🏼 I interviewed Rene Matić for British Journal of Photography’s Activism & Protest issue.
🤲🏼 I have some writing in the forthcoming issue of Riposte magazine which you can pre-order here.
Currently watching 🤲🏼 💌 🌝
As with the majority of the population, I’ve been getting caught up in the hectic world of the Roy’s in Succession, because let’s face nothing soothes an anxious mind like seeing the lives of the 1% blow-up. Hettie Judah wrote a piece of fan fic for GARAGE, masquerading as the Roy’s art advisor during Frieze week, which really animates the (imagined) unseen parts of the family’s lives.
Currently reading 🤲🏼 💌 🌝
Alice Hattrick’s Ill Feelings (2021) (mentioned above), which combines Hattrick and their mum’s medical histories with testimonies from women writers around ill health, including Virginia Woolf, Louise Bourgeois and Florence Nightingale.
Currently viewing 🤲🏼 💌 🌝
I managed to catch Paula Rego’s Tate exhibition before it closed. I’ve run out of words (I don’t know if you can tell) but her work speaks for itself.
See you next time…
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Jamila Prowse is an artist, writer and researcher who works across moving image and textiles to consider methodologies for visualising mixed race identity and the lived experience of disability. She is drawn to stitch making and patchwork as a tactile form of processing complex family histories and mapping disability journeys, and moving image as a site of self-archiving and autoethnography. To find out more about Jamila’s work visit her website. Follow Jamila on Instagram here.