My State of Being Convinced

I shot awake at 4:30 a.m. last Thursday, for no reason at all, and lay in bed waiting for the sensor spotlight outside the front door to shut off. I routinely imagine a burglar barging through the glass front door, all the while knowing it was probably a squirrel that set it off. When the light switched off again, I focused on the sound of footsteps in the room above my head. Dr. Thomas Fraser III, I imagined, clambering around for the first cigarette of the day. A man at the mercy of medical emergencies, he is no stranger to 4 a.m.

When you start your day in the wee hours like that, 1 p.m. can feel like the twilight zone. I dreaded that surreal feeling, and debated whether to try to sleep again or get a jump-start on my day. One by one, lists and ambitions and frustrations of the day crept into my head until I swam in an impossible sea of to-dos. Without exhaustion to put my mind to rest, I threw the covers off and woke up to the icebox known as my basement apartment.

At a loss for what to do with my morning, I figured that I would jump in the shower and head to work sooner than planned. There, I could sit at my computer with a hot cup of coffee and write for a few hours before anyone else arrived. I really hadn’t written anything in weeks, which apparently drives this writer to the brink of 4 a.m. insanity.

Though it sounded like a good plan, in reality I moseyed around the apartment for an hour and a half. When I had listened to the same Headline News loop a third and final time, I left for the office. For the first time in the history of any job, I was the first employee to arrive. They are all going to think something’s wrong with me, I thought. Once inside I cranked the heater, brewed a knock-your-socks-off pot of coffee, and sat down at my computer. By then it was 7:30. I had just enough time to check my email and type a sentence when my early bird coworker bounced through the door.

“Is everything all right?” she asked. Just like I knew she would. Everything was fine, I told her, and though she suggested a few scenarios with her eyebrows raised, she guessed nowhere near my real worry.

Three hours later I found myself sitting in her office, confessing. I’ve been called a lot of things in my day, but private isn’t one of them. It’s like clockwork, I explained to her. Every so often --and I’m not even sure how often, just that it’s happened before, I get this unbelievably anxious-restless feeling. I can barely recognize that it’s happening at first, only that I become entirely preoccupied with questioning myself about the tantalizing direction of my 25-year old existence. Before I know it I’m analyzing how well I’m contributing to the things I’m passionate about (fashion, writing, politics, design, art…) in my life.

Then I scrutinize, criticize, bully, and beat myself up in comparison to the people I admire. How will I ever get there? How am I living for the things that I love? Am I surrounding myself with people who inspire me or merely fill empty space? Is my job, is my lifestyle too safe? Am I taking the necessary risks to be the artist I hope to become? Have I exposed myself to the right environments, the right people? When will I dare to chase my impossible dreams? And when will I know the time is right? …Am I doing enough? …Am I doing anything at all? And the questions keep coming…

It’s almost like a creative state of heat –a desperate, insecure, fragmented search for reassurance. This state of mind is like a pothole on the path to envisioning my dreams, designed to trip me up and throw me off course (ironically, the same state of mind has the ability to wake me from my dreams at 4 a.m.). For several nauseating days, I go through the motions of working, eating, and sleeping, while my mind wallows in a self-depreciating muck. It is a test against my worst fears of failure. My mind tries my body with restless nights, and for a moment, doubt paralyzes every artistic bone in my body.

Thinking back on the times I’ve felt this way, it’s been onset by a long, creative dry spell, that’s finally relieved by my obsession with a new idea, perspective or project. The return to sobriety after that makes me feel more focused and alive than before. On the other side of this intoxicating insecurity is a burst of confidence in myself, and I think that’s called conviction.

CON–VIC–TION [kuhn-vik-shuhn] –noun. An unshakable belief in something without need for proof or evidence. Lindsey's state of convincing herself that she can save enough money to move to New York and get a job in the publishing industry.

Conviction must be what separates creative minds that succeed from creative minds that fade into envy and once-was. I think an artist’s misguided conviction can be misinterpreted as egotism, vanity, or pride –when, in fact, it is the most important tool for survival. What do artists have if not the tools to convince the world of their worth? And where would the conviction be without the confidence to persuade them self? As jewelry designer, Robert Lee Morris, once said, “It’s good to see that kind of conviction [in a young artist], because you’re going to need a lot of it.”

I had a lot of questions to answer for myself last week, so maybe it makes sense that my coworker thought that something was wrong. I can tell you this: to an artist, even if nothing is wrong, it can take a whole lot of conviction to believe that you are right.