On the lives we don’t live, and what it means to live as an artist
When I was first diagnosed, I started to write my obituary. I got four words down - She lived as an artist - and then caught myself, pressing backspace, letter by letter until the screen was blank again.
The divide between my outer life and inner desires collapsed. When I heard the word cancer, everything unfinished came rushing in. I thought of the things I hadn’t done, the people I hadn’t apologized to, the tethers, the longings, all of it.
I saw it with my grandmother, with whom I had a long-standing conflict. She held on to life long enough for us to reconcile, and there isn’t a day that I don’t wish I had more time.
Now, as the ground beneath my own life gave way, I took inventory. I had accomplished a great deal in a short time, yet something felt unfinished. I felt a profound sense that I had not fully done what I had come here to do.
Ever since, I’ve been trying to understand what that means.
I often think of Mary Ruefle’s words:
I think the sirens in The Odyssey sang The Odyssey,for there is nothing more / seductive, more terrible, than the story of our own life, the one we do not want to hear and will do anything to listen to.”
There is nothing more seductive - or more frightening - than the unlived version of your own life. But it is one thing to know something is missing, and another to know what belongs in its place.
As I’ve tried to understand my own unlived life, the question has only become more complicated. What does it mean to live the life I’m meant to be living? I began examining my motives, holding each one up to the light.
We contain many selves, each with its own fears and desires, each tugging quietly at the direction of our lives. The inner systems we built as children can govern us long after we’ve forgotten why they formed, pushing us in ways that are suboptimal to the whole.
A childhood fear of being unloved can push you to become indispensable, building mastery, building companies, building reputation, a frantic push towards admiration. A fear of exclusion can lead you to construct a life according to everyone else’s specifications, from the acceptable career, the acceptable amount of ambition, to the partner who checks the boxes. A fear of dependence can make you preserve options at all costs across your life, no mortgage, no kids, nothing weighing you down.
Eventually, the life you built to protect yourself becomes the life containing you. Unraveling these patterns requires learning which desires are rooted in love and which are rooted in fear.
Am I living the life I want to be living, or am I afraid of the alternative?
If no one would ever know I’d done it, would I still?
Sometimes, I think it is easier to dwell inside the “I could have been” than to pursue the thing itself and discover it was never enough. Consider Paris syndrome. Japanese tourists spend years dreaming of Paris, only to arrive and find rats and garbage. They are met with disappointment so acute that it manifests as physical distress. An imagined life never has to survive reality. It can remain perfect precisely because we’ve never lived it.
You think - if only I hadn’t left, if only I had tried, if only I had chosen differently. If only, if only, until you are a mouse in a labyrinth built entirely from reasons not to begin.
A few months ago, I was sitting in a plaza in Rome with a friend. He was dreading the training required for his twenty-second marathon, and I, preoccupied with my pistachio gelato, replied perhaps too bluntly, “Then don’t do it. Nobody cares.” I caught myself, worried I had been unkind. Then I turned and saw his face widen with relief as the door to his self-imposed cage swung open.
I’ve put the same lens on myself often since. No one cares if you do it.
It’s not that people don’t care about you. They do. But no one is keeping score. Everyone is too absorbed in the uncertain project of their own life. Everyone has their own grief, their own worries. I think of it like a casual game of golf; no one is actually paying attention to your round. They’re simply happy you came.
I learned this most profoundly in the middle of treatment. People showed up when I had absolutely nothing to offer them - no ability to speak, hold space, or do much of anything aside from gently nodding off to sleep - and, much to my astonishment, they stayed.
It transformed my understanding of love. I had spent so much of my life trying to earn my place in the world, only to discover that it had never depended on what I could produce.
You see, all the world asks of you is to be a body. The rest is up to you to decide.
I don’t think living as an artist is limited to making art. It’s a way of meeting the world, being curious about what any moment might become. To live as an artist is to participate in the creation of your life and risk letting what is most alive within you become visible in the world.
A passage from Rev. Timothy Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage comes to mind:
*To be loved but not knownis comforting but Superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known - and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.*
To live as an artist is to ask this not just of another person, but of life itself. To make yourself known and trust that you do not have to be less of yourself to be loved.
Perhaps we are all artists at our core, before criticism, doubt, convention, and fear taught us to distrust our own way of seeing. Perhaps we are already loved.
And what a gift it would be to let ourselves be known.
I don’t know where life will lead me, what still wants to move through me. But I know this: when I go - and I hope it will be no time soon - I want to leave behind a life that could only have been mine.
She lived as an artist.
Thanks for reading! It makes my day to know that this resonated with someone. Please follow along (always for free) for a regular dose of whimsy and philosophical inquiry in your inbox.
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I’ll open back up the chat - I’d love to hear if there’s anything you’ve always wanted to do, but have been afraid to start (or even a way of being!). Join here <3
PS. And finally, two related but unrelated announcements for you:
I am over the moon to share that I will be having my first proper art show as (part of a group show) at the Heron Arts gallery in San Francisco from February until Easter. I’ll share more details when I have them, but I’d be thrilled if you paid me a visit. I’ll be showing more of my wood pieces. I have a bit of a backlog, but am slowly starting to take commissions too.
I’ve decided to run an experiment and make my Instagram accounts public. Follow along at @thelandofloulou for my artistic adventures and @livenowclub
If you enjoyed this, you may like some of my other posts here:
