If they’re not hard, they weren’t worth it. A belief I’ve carried from when I was small. If it’s not hard, if it comes naturally it can’t possibly be worth something. If it’s easy then everyone else can do it *ouch*. If I don’t worry about it enough times, if I don’t think and think and think about it, I didn’t torture myself enough for it to exist. The tortured artist, the drug addicted, alcohol addicted, mentally ill artist. Surely beauty can only come from pain?

I’m learning to drive at the moment, and it’s reflecting my art process back at me glaringly in the face. I’m asking for reassurance in places I know I don’t need it, I’m not allowing myself to lean on my intuition, I’m asking for outside perspective rather than referring to internal.

I’m both grappling with the reality that at 16 I could have passed this test, but at 31 it has to be hard, it HAS to be hard, otherwise how is it worth anything? And this insistance that it’s hard is making it difficult to make it easy. I tell myself it’s hard so it is hard. I build a wall 10 ft high infront of the ease at which it could come and all of a sudden it’s the hardest thing that could ever be achieved.

Do I need to make the act of learning to drive difficult so that I have reassurance on why I am 31 years of age and only just learning it.

How does this reflect in my art process? My constant need to make sure I have everything planned out first, to critic myself constantly as I go along, to put roadblocks of distrust in the process in my way. That way, it was hard, it was worth it, it was REAL, the struggle was real.

I would be disappointed if it was easy because then the rules I’ve been telling myself about life and art would be wrong. My life has been hard, with my Crohns Disease, whenever I start to fly I start to fall medically, physically, mentally. And to now realise, in a more stable state with my health, to realise that actually things don’t need to be that tough would be to admit how hard things actually were. How unfair, how ridiculous.

The Crohns Disease blocks are no longer there. I’m recreating them as ghost, because I do not know the language of life without the full stops, the new paragraphs, the abrupt cliffhangers.

Art needs flow, art needs surrender, art needs trust. And these are the things my life has brutally taken from me in the past. Learning to let go again in my process will not only help me create better, freer, easier, but will help me to do so in life in general.

Trust isn’t ignoring intuition and knowledge, trust in knowing that those things are there to back you up when you need them.

How to take steps to overcome this?

• Create create create
• Discipline to help give my the structure to flow in
• Trusting myself implicitly
• Acknowledging what HAS gone right in my process everytime something does
• Stay curious
• Stay open
• Don’t be afraid of mistakes or issues that arise
• Some things are ugly and that’s ok
• Throw out perfectionism
• Allow myself to have confidence even if it feels unstable