Show your rough work

This felt like an important piece for me to write—on art and shyness. You can read it here, and below. I've had some very positive feedback from women friends who have encountered the same issues in their creative lives which made me wonder how much of a women's issue this is? I am very interested to hear from men who have experienced this too!

Do you remember being asked to do that in school? “Show your rough work” makes me think of taking maths exams (which is already enough to make me feel a bit nervous) as that instruction would come without fail: Show how you arrived at your answer, demonstrate your process.

In terms of maths or science, I suppose that the examiners wanted to make sure we weren’t making random guesses or cheating, and I certainly have made a few wild stabs in the dark in an exam hall. I’m okay with that, as indeed I am with showing the sums that helped me solve an equation.

But where the idea of showing my rough work became really difficult at school, in college and in my creative life now, is in art and music. As a child, I drew endlessly; on paper, on walls (sorry, mum and dad), furniture (sorry, bedside table), in home-made books, as a means of illustration, as a way of telling a story, as a way of expressing myself.

I got a lot of positive feedback about my drawings and was aware that people thought I was artistically gifted—which is a special thing to feel. But somehow by the time I was a teenager at school, this encouragement had muddled its way into the misunderstanding that I was expected to come up with something perfect and finished; that art was a kind of “ta-dah!” gesture.

At a school parents’ evening, when I was 15, I remember my brilliant art teacher saying to me and my parents that I needed to worry less about the end result—the final painting—and get more involved in the prep work, the sketches, the rough studies. I felt horrified. I thought: I’m sorry, but I just can’t do that.

Similarly, I fell deeply in love with piano music age 5, hearing my dad play Bach’s Moonlight Sonata. I took classical piano lessons which I loved, but which emphasized very specific directions, when what I really wanted to do was go heavy on the sustain pedal and lose myself in the music. I was not in love with someone else’s idea of “getting it right”, but it didn’t seem to me that there any recognized value in playing with sound.

My shyness about exposing my creative process moved from being an external thing to an internal thing, too. I didn’t want to expose my own vulnerabilities and experiments even to myself! Often, the times I feel most free to experiment as an adult is when I’m on holiday, somewhere warm and beautiful and free from expectation; my own or anyone else’s. When I’m in the city and in my work zone of achieving and competing and hurrying, I have found it very hard.

But I don’t want to live like this—not least because it doesn’t really feel like living, to have to monitor my own creativity. So, lately, I’ve been stepping into the shyness. Feeling the awkwardness and moving through it, knowing that there is something on the other side of that fog that’s worth getting to.

My yoga teacher, Tara Glazier, told a beautiful story about Krishna and Radha recently. Lord Krishna, the supreme Hindu deity, was lost in a terrible storm. Radha, his love—often described as Krishna’s heart—came looking for him. She took his hand and led him back to his village. His heart led him home in the storm.

There was a great storm here in New York yesterday. I took out my harmonium and sat with the door wide open onto the patio as the rain came down. I started singing devotional chants and let myself move into the music and the rain and the sense of something bigger. Then a song came. It seemed to unfold itself, and I went with it—even though I’d decided to record the rain and the chants and the red record button was on, and if my made-up song wasn’t “good” it would be there on my iphone as “proof”.

I loved what came out. It sounded true. I love that when music is honest it can be like holding a seashell to your ear and hearing the sea; only instead you’re hearing someone’s soul. There is of course work to be done with a song sketch or a study drawing or any kind of doodle; there is sculpting, and more experimenting and honing and refining and pursuing. A sense of, where will this go? Catching the melody and riding it.

But I think the need to present something as perfect is not helpful, and not actually true. We don’t try to polish our own souls; it’s more, I think, about taking a journey towards touching our own truth or light, and maybe expressing that, if it feels natural to do so.

I love yoga asana because it is a practice.There is no finished “ta-dah!” result, no goal beyond residing in a truth that’s already inside you. We are always moving towards. We are stretching, extending and relaxing in awareness; moving, finding and discovering. Yoga is “showing your rough work” in all its own perfection. And in this sense, it is practice for doing so in our lives off the mat. It helps me sing. It helps me draw. It helps me live honestly.

May you find creative joy in your vulnerability this week.