Goodbye, My Beautiful City of Wishes

creative sensitivity and how to be a swifter feeler

In the making of art, we’re cultivating a ridiculous level of sensitivity. We perceive with nuance, then keep asking for more. Does every brushstroke of this painting register on our most intimate, razor-sharp capacities for awareness, such that we nearly swim in the consciousness of its painter, whose name we can’t pronounce? Then we step over to the sharing of art, and suddenly insane levels of sensitivity are a major drag. Though not actually a liability, as you might fear, because pain is exquisite information. When you show someone your work, and they do a five-second pause then mention the weather, the enormity of their silence on this matter will inflame every cell of your being. In the long run, this is to your advantage. Unlike humans who pretend to be stones, or whom genuinely enjoy the simple comforts of placid nervous systems, you are reached and informed, deeply. That’s meaningful. It’s a gift. You’re picking up nuanced feedback at 100x, whether you want it or not. This is your superpower.

The urge is to inoculate yourself. To accumulate scar tissue, or sport a fluffy personality duvet. And people do, you see it every day in promising careers that stall and don’t evolve. Because it’ll take another bleeping starless night to find a new horizon. Eventually someone’s going to bring a rejection to your attention, and there’s no way it won’t suck.

After a breakup in 2018, I couldn’t feel the rejection. My nervous system lacked the plumbing. Best I could do was shred a ginormous box of old receipts during business hours for days, skirting the edges of a thing otherwise too gargantuan to feel. When a colleague I ever so much wanted to work with sent an it’s-not-you-it’s-me email, I lapsed into a trance. Strangely, nobody teaches you how to feel. Back then I wasn’t clear that it’s a skill. When I encountered something too much, I punted and shunted, you could call it coping.

No more.

Today a thing didn’t go my way, and this time I wanted the entire 300lb rejection on my chest, contorting rib cartilage into sensations too obscure to name. I didn’t want to diffuse it with false hopes, my subtle rejection-debting whereby I reasoned I’d deal at a later date, which somehow never came.

If you don’t allow yourself to feel, you’re procrastinating truth.

I felt this no, and it started a bonfire. The overgrown foliage of my wishes got smoked. But I didn’t interfere. I wrote, breathed, took a walk, and ate a package of blueberries—those should be considered single-serving packets. The sun shone. I felt a smidge better.

Objectively, it wasn’t a superbad rejection. They don’t come on a calibrated scale. The small ones can have the sharpest teeth, and the most miniature compound.

I aspire to be a swifter feeler, more fluid and if that means a few tears, fine. It’s like the Tai chi principle where the master barely ripples and the stiff guy falls. Don’t be a gym bro with tight hamstrings, over-optimized for chest day yet secretly afraid to ask Stacy out. You want to be limber, rejection jelly that slithers hither and blobs away force on impact. Like water, or Taoist quotes. The sooner I feel it, I figure, the faster the truth can move.

So what if forty acres of my mental Malibu were razed. What a beautiful city of wishes that didn’t quite exist but could’ve, and now wouldn’t, at least in this form. I said goodbye. The air of my mentality was still, and I will admit, newly spacious. A friend told me he hated trees, because they get in the way of the view. He had a point.

Did you know, the conifer seed waits. For decades, the seeds of lodge pole pines lurk in sealed cones, nestled in forest canopies, dormant. The seeds are encased in resin like sleepy, spiky mummies. They’re waiting for a wildfire. Lightning strikes, PG&E, the odd arsonist, whatever it takes—you get a little blaze going that tops 120 Fahrenheit, and the resin of the cone melts, releasing its Rip Van Winkle seeds to the wind. Post-fiery cleanse, loving that crispy, scorched earth, they finally sprout.

Why bother rebuilding, I thought. Those wishes weren’t a fit. Now I’m slightly changed, and something new is stirring. You ever feel like you have potential you can’t quite reach? Perhaps you need some heat. There are seeds in you and I waiting to be awakened from their slumber by a worthy conflagration.