I Grant You Permission to Write

Trouble is, I’m not the one who can give it

Recently, at a workshop geared toward artists who are also parents, I asked participants to think about what was getting in the way of their work. I envisioned material things: lack of childcare, paucity of time, no quiet space of their own. Their obstacles, I should not have been so surprised to discover, were more spiritual in nature. They wanted to know their work was important without publication or financial reward. They wanted to know it was okay to devote their lives to what other people may not understand, value, or care about. They wanted someone to grant them permission.

In that moment, I fell back in time and was a student again, sitting in a teacher’s office in art school, my head lowered, my eyes searching, desperate for something I couldn’t yet name. I remember walking out of her office — and away from every meeting with my teachers in those years — feeling flayed, drained, needy with unarticulated desire.

Eventually, I figured out what I wanted from my teachers. I wanted their permission, implicit in which would be their encouragement. I wanted them to tell me to keep going.

Everyone needs encouragement. Art is a form of expression, and finding a receptive audience for your work is essential. (Another reason to cultivate an artistic community in your life, if you don’t already have one.) Further, no work is beyond improvement, and continual study and practice deepen our understanding of what it is we’re up to in the studio.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. The permission I sought was cellular, soul-deep, and not on offer from the external world.

So I want to say two things you may need to hear in your artistic life, the same two things I said to the workshop that day: I grant you permission to devote time and money, heart and mind, to the artistic work that sustains you.

And: The permission you seek is your own.

I wanted permission to make my art because I wanted external confirmation it had value. I wouldn’t take my mother’s worn and busted gold necklace to a pawn shop. Why would I ask for an appraisal of what already meant the world to me?

An artist, writer, creative consultant, artists’ cheerleader, author, and brilliant human, Beth Pickens, is someone whose quality of life suffers when they’re not making their art.

“Making their work is a way artists take care of themselves, communicate, process information, engage a spiritual interior, or strengthen their relationship to themselves and others,” Pickens writes in Make Your Art No Matter What. “Artists make art.”

Many of our behaviors live in close relationship to their results. Yoga loosens a tight back. Filling the gas tank makes the car go. Cooking a pot of pinto beans means tacos all week. An artistic practice is sometimes like that but sometimes it’s results are more oblique, more expansive, and all in all, so much more.

Your artistic practice wants to be liberated from a shortsighted, cost-benefit analysis. It wants to be decoupled from a capitalist’s vision of labor and value. It wants to be watered like a maple sapling. It asks for your curiosity and delight.

What if there were no reward in the end? What if the only reward were now, in the process of doing? Your art wants your time given freely for no other purpose than the difficult pleasure of its pursuit.

Grant it permission. It’s the deal of a lifetime.

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