Nose to the grindstone: on success that feels like hard work
The unglamorous business of getting things done
Greetings Ornament fans, and welcome to another edition of Nobody Likes Your Ornaments. It’s late of course, but nevertheless you are welcome.
I’ve been in my synth-n-books cave like a strange goblin most of the last month, writing applications and doing lots of planning - which means soon I will have more exciting fare to share with you, but also means that this time I’m talking mostly about - yay! - ADMIN!
Like I say, you’re welcome.
What is success, anyway?
I’ve been thinking a lot in the last few weeks about what success looks like. Not in the sense of ‘what does my success look like?’ - that rallying cry of coaches everywhere to follow your own personal lodestar and define success on your own terms. This is valuable - and I’ve definitely benefited from some coaching in the last couple of years, learning to better define exactly what it is I’m trying to get at.
But most recently, I’ve been thinking more about success from the inside out. That is, how it feels, versus how it looks.
I think this is because - embarrassingly (I am English, after all) - I’m doing quite well at the moment. It feels odd to admit this. Not just because I have it ingrained in me to be self-deprecating on pain of death, not even because I am cravenly superstitious and assume that any confession of happiness, however small, will rouse Nemesis from her lair to maul my remaining dreams.
It’s not just modesty or caution - or even that I don’t want to brag or risk making others feel bad. It’s that I don’t feel like it’s true.
Nose to the grindstone
When I wake up in the morning, I don’t spring out of bed with the quicksilver vim of one of life’s winners. I don’t even lie there letting the quicksilver vim get its breath before I tackle the daunting task of sitting up.
More usually, I stay prone as long as possible, trying very hard not to emit the long desultory groan that is gathering in my head, while my brain says: here we go again. At some point, when the lying down has become ridiculous, and really inexcusable, I haul myself up, shuffle down to the kitchen for a cup of tea, and then - not without resentment - begin the frankly inconvenient task of cracking on with my day.
I work doggedly, sluggishly, oblivious to all else. I am blinkered and often grumpy. Things get done but rarely in the proposed order, and never without a dollop of procrastination. For every expedient task, three sprawling ones limp in its wake. I can do everything I need - but it takes up all of my time. Each week I judiciously break down my tasks and look at what I can realistically get done. It looks so straightforward I always think - oh, this is ok, I think. I’m surprised there’s not more! In fact, I can probably fit in a few extra things at the edges! Reader - I cannot.
It worries me, this inefficiency. Despite still getting ID’d occasionally (which I greet with characteristic poise and graciousn- no of course I don’t, I squeal like a schoolgirl and bellow I’LL TAKE IT AS A COMPLIMENT as loudly as I can to the general disinterest of the rest of the self-service queue), I am not young anymore - and I find myself both alarmed by all the time that has already passed, and daunted by the enormity of the ideas that grow inside my head with each passing year. The less time I have, the more plans I seem to have for what to do with it. Where was this drive, this focus, this clarity of ambition when I was younger? I always had big dreams, but I was terrible at articulating them, hopeless at putting them into realistic practice.
I tell myself there must be a way to get faster. To do more, in less time. How can I be filling up space like this? How can I not corral myself into a more streamlined motion, smooth off the excess edges? If I could simply complete my work with less fuss, less mess, then I could start to tackle all those unfinished phantoms still hovering in the wings, the ones that didn’t make the final cut to the Official To Do List this week. I could get ahead of myself; I could catch up. I know what I need to do now, after all, I a way I never did before. Finally, I am set on my own course, rather than someone else’s. So why can’t I simply get a move on?
By all of which I mean: I do not feel successful. In the everyday, down in the trenches of Show Up And Do What You Said You’ll Do (albeit out of order and sometimes haphazardly), I am only ever thinking of the not-yet-done, writing down and rewriting deadlines so I don’t forget them, refining lists for the week, the month, the year. I see myself in terms of deficit: the things still outstanding, the deadlines upcoming, the applications yet to be written. I am always thinking of the thing next on my to-do - and adding three more tasks as I go.
Look at where you are now
I am perpetually pitching myself forwards, outlining proposed plans without knowing whether they’ll actually ever happen, talking at once in hypotheticals and absolutes (hello, the glorious paradox of funding bids). I live in the future perfect - the optimistic tense of the yet-to-manifest self who has completed all of the things. The when I will have done this person of next year, and beyond. But my feet, carrying me forwards one step at a time, are very much in the here and now. I am the future perfect present continuous, stuffed into an over-caffeinated human. A lot of good things are happening. But all I can think about is the next item on the list.
If I look at where I am now, I have many things my former self would have thought impossibly cool - probably impossible. I have a studio space that is all my own. I have accrued a lot of fancy equipment - and know how to use it. I have had my music played on the radio. I have recorded on fellow artist’s albums and can play in front of hundreds of people without missing a beat. The Arts Council gave me a grant to develop my creative practice. I have been deemed - by the bodies who deem such things - someone worth investing in. (This includes money for a clowning course, I’m happy to report. I literally get to write ‘go to clown school’ in my diary, in all earnestness.)
All these things would have been welcome but unthinkable to the previous versions of Sarah (who even predates the entity that is TSarzi, if you can believe in such naive times). The me of back then would have looked enviously at these cumulative attributes as indisputable markers of success. She would have had things to say, I’m sure, about how things could be improved - but she wouldn’t be able to argue that, on balance, things are looking good.
This isn’t a post about gratitude, or about ever-moving goalposts. I’m not sure exactly what it’s about, since I started three different iterations and deviated from each. I think what I mean is, success sometimes simply looks like getting on with the work. Not joyously (though there is a lot of joy), nor exuberantly (though I am often exploding with ideas and excitement) - but rather, unremarkably, pedantically, in the everyday.
I think transformation is slow and arduous and in the doing of it it can feel very much like what you have been doing before, only on new terrain, in ways that don’t immediately make sense.
I think what I mean is don’t wait for the transcendental to transform your life into the mysterious stuff of Art life. I am living an Artlife (artlife! Sing it a la Blur) and day to day I have to tell you it involves a lot more admin than I anticipated. This is not a bad thing, just that it bears more resemblance to my not-art existence than I realised. I take comfort from this. It means, if you can do work, you can do art-work. If you can turn up and worry about your existence and turn out good work but also worry about where the time went and think why can’t I just do all of this quicker and better - then you are probably capable of doing the art-work.
The greatest con sold to us, I think, is that artwork is somehow different from regular work. That it occupies its own ethereal stratosphere to which we ascend only when we are worthy, thenceforth to exist only mythic Creators, unhindered by schedule and world, plying the designs of our most profound existential conundrums not without pain and suffering but certainly without mundanity.
The beginning
I said I started this post several times. Here is the story I meant to tell. I had trouble deciding if it was too big or small, and I’d like to come back to it later with more distance, but I think this is why the idea of success and the everyday was so much in my head.
A few weeks ago it was my nan’s funeral. This was sad but not tragic - she was old and it was time. Her length of life now outweighed its quality, and in her last days she was surrounded by family and loved ones. It was what we would consider a good ending. A using up of time in the right way.
At the wake I had a conversation with a family friend that did strike me as very sad however - and it was nothing to do with life or death (although of course it had everything to do with life and death), but rather art and not-art, or wanting-to-do and not-doing.
This friend told me he had always wanted to act - but it was impossible. And now he was set on a course of money and comfort, and too accustomed to nice things. And I asked him why he couldn’t give it a shot at least and he said fear; and I said fear of what and he said failure.
And this conversation made me very sad, because I remember standing on that precipice myself and thinking that if I could just make the leap I would arrive in Artland. As if it was a leap of faith I either did or did not do - and that if I was a true and committed artist, and if I was brave enough, I would take the plunge and cross over and I would be transformed. That failure was a monolithic monster that would happen once or not at all; that fear was a gatekeeper who could be vanquished and allow safe passage into the Elysian Fields of Doing the Thing You Really Want To Do With Your Life.
I wanted to tell him that it is much the same on this side as over there - but I didn’t know if reassurance of continued admin would provide quite the comfort I intended. ‘Don’t worry there’s still plenty of paperwork’ is perhaps not the rallying cry to arms it sounds like in my head.
This moment really wedged itself in my mind, in the context of my nan’s funeral, and the smallness of the stakes (e.g. I wish I could give acting a go), but actually the symbolic enormity of them (e.g. how do you live the life you really want). It made me think about a lot of things - about fear, and failure, and what success looks like, and how that changes over time.
But like I say, I’d like to come back to that one at a later time. As often happens, an idea that seemed neat and compact in my head spooled out into something much bigger when it hit the page - and I want to give it the space to breathe properly.
In any case, I came back home the next day and cracked on with some more admin, because that is my life right now. Not glorious not glamorous, but in a weird way utterly transcendent - because anything life-changing lives in the everyday.
And really I feel, for me at least, that’s what success feels like - nothing more remarkable than doing the work bit by bit by (sometimes grumpy) (often sleepy) (frequently dishevelled) bit.
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back in touch soon with more news about future shows and happenings. For the moment you can follow me on Insta or Twitter. And if you’re enjoying the newsletter, why not share with a friend?
Got something to say about your own success (or failure)? Drop it in the comments, or hit reply. I’d love to hear from you x