3 Lessons from A Decade of Creative Practice
3 Lessons from A Decade of Creative Practice
On trusting your spirit, power and divinity
Join us for the upcoming Worldbuilding Workshop happening TOMORROW at noon EST where you will locate your “Element X” and learn how to seed, return to or deepen an interdisciplinary practice rooted in your desire.
I could start with the books I wrote in elementary school that my dad helped me illustrate and bind. Or I could start with the digital art practice that emerged in middle school, on the family computer, while learning how to code via MySpace and teaching myself how to leverage the Adobe Creative Suite to express myself on the internet. I could also start in high school where I gathered a group of friends and mentors to start “The Circle”, the first black feminist after-school club in the Prince George’s County, MD public school system, while nurturing a self portrait practice via Blogspot. But we only have to go as far back as college where I created my own interdisciplinary major and founded a tech fashion start-up, Evlove (evolve spelled backwards, it was already giving Sankofa), for college girls to trade in their used clothes for virtual currency instead of buying new every season. In my senior year, I started a magazine platforming the art, culture and politics of the DC metro area called DISTRIKT with a few college friends; in hindsight this was a return to my writing practice which was seeded in childhood. After four years of editing and publishing DISTRIKT, baby got her first studio and Zaire Studio was born. The period of Zaire Studio was some of the most introspective work I’d ever done up to that point. I wrote poems, sat for self portraits, I cultivated a research practice that focused on the politics of black women’s labor then designed, cut, sewed and sold fashion collections to fund the practice. After that I added software engineering to my Creative Ecosystem and was recruited to teach at a coding campus in Brooklyn focused on promoting access to tech careers for marginalized folks. Fast forward to today and I am leveraging the framework of worldbuilding to weave and communicate my constellation of writing, teaching, coding, craft, self portrait, sewing, design, research and collaboration skills into an interdisciplinary practice that nurtures my ease and funds my creative ideas.
I say all this in hopes of getting you to trust and believe me when I say, I’ve made A LOT of mistakes. And it turns out they’re right (sorry) — mistakes are the pre-work for the lessons.
1. Trust Your Interdisciplinary Spirit
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my practice is: I suffer the most when I try to choose one thing. Completely avoiding suffering is impossible, but I realized I didn’t have to choose it either. To choose only writing, or only craft, or only coding was to choose flattening which is to choose suffering. Whether you call yourself interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, co-disciplinary1, anti-disciplinary, or multi-hyphenate, please refuse the impulse to flatten by choosing only one discipline. No matter what your school, friends, job or parents say, refuse this like your life depends on it. Muster all the power and faith you have. This is important: Not only is our constellation of skills and curiosity valuable, it is quite literally our only hope for imagining a different world. I firmly believe the ideas we need now are the ones that can only emerge from convergence2. There are ideas, research, experiences and creative offers overlapping inside your body in ways that can’t overlap inside any other body on this planet. Your generous offer is in your generative overlap. In order to build a world, we don’t need to focus on a specific set of disciplines, we need to focus on a specific set of tools.
2. Trust The Power of Improvisation
The second most important lesson I’ve learned through a decade of creative practice was to trust improvisation; to trust my way of being, my beat, my rhythm, my way of knowing, moving and loving. I remembered any impulses toward perfection is evidence of an infiltration of white supremacy. It is possible (and dare I say better, and dare I say the only way to do it) to move with care and intention without having all the answers. The distance between the what and the how is filled with necessary improvisation. You might have noticed white supremacist institutions consistently buckle in the face of uncertainty, there is a reason for this (they were always bound to fall). But as we heal from these institutions, when faced with uncertainty we remember to welcome the dance, the jazz, the irresistible revolution inside abstract expression. Improvisation is a core tenant of the most emergent forms of black joy and creativity and to root our work in this way of being is to trust and engage with a spiritual lineage that has a depth and power beyond our wildest imagination.
3. Trust the Divinity of Desire
The final, and arguably most important, lesson I’ve learned was to remember I was worthy of my desire. I remembered I was worthy of the succulence that is a creative life. A life that centered my desire, curiosity and care. This may seem like the simplest lesson but this truth was the hardest amulet to grasp. It took me way too long to believe the life I desired, the life most aligned with my gifts and the needs of my body, was actually available to me too. I would watch other worldbuilders through the black mirror and delight in how much space they took up, revel in the delicious audacity of their materialized visions but make the trauma-based assumption that a path that pleasurable was unavailable to me. This caused me to work in ways that had me in consistent loops of burn out, comparison and despair for years. I am proud of myself for always finding my way out of those loops and remaining committed to the validity of my creative voice but ultimately this lesson came much later than I would’ve liked. Being suspicious of my limitless potential has been my biggest source of pain and unnecessary suffering. Which is why it’s the topic of tomorrow’s Seeda School Worldbuilding Workshop and the north star inside the Seed A World Retreat.
Like I said, mistakes? I can name plenty. There is no way to be in a generous practice of producing public facing projects without them. Some of these mistakes were essential, they were carrying divine lessons, and honestly some of them weren’t. The attempts to flatten in the face of the “jack of all trades, master of none” myth (who wants to be a fucking master anyway?), the workaholism unsustainably powered by a sense of unworthiness, solely relying on funding resources coming from outside my work instead of implementing strategies for the Creative Ecosystem to fund itself and the moves made out of fear, the fear, the fear, so much fear, are all mistakes that have cost me time, money, energy, opportunities, unnecessary suffering and even some relationships.
Helping you spot, dodge and/or shorten the length of unnecessary suffering inside the mistakes I’ve made is one of my many intentions inside the Seed A World Retreat. Through over a decade of creative practice I’ve developed a worldbuilding framework I’ll be introducing in the free Worldbuilding Workshop happening tomorrow at 12pm EST. We saved a spot for you and I hope you’ll register to join us.
Thank you so much to Grace Chuang, my fellow dreamer and designer in imagining liberated futures, for the language of “co-disciplinary”!
Within black studies and anti-colonial studies, one can observe an ongoing method of gathering multifariously textured tales, narratives, fictions, whispers, songs, grooves; these narratives push up against and subvert prevailing colonial and imperial knowledge systems by centering and legitimising other (black) ways of knowing. What is meaningful, then, are the ways in which black people are interdisciplinary actors, continually entangling and disentangling varying narratives and tempos and hues that, together, invent and reinvent knowledge. — Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea by Katherine McKittrick, The 2021 Antipode AAG Lecture