How to creatively direct your life

Issue 8: Who’s going to tell you not to?

“Doing is living,” the artist Ruth Asawa said, talking about how she saw both her life and art practices come into being through action. “That is all that matters.”

I found a lot of inspiration in seeing Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective at the MoMA this fall, because of how her artworks across different mediums (more than three hundred on view!) truly embody how to Asawa, “all acts, including daily activities, held creative potential.” She made art every day (ok brag), but was less concerned with the “expression of something,” she said. “I’m more interested in what the material can do. So that’s why I keep exploring.”

This idea of continual exploration, and exploration driven by an interest in what something can do (in Asawa’s case, it was paper, wire sculpture, watercolor, bronze casts, and more) is an outlook fruitful for not only art, but for life as well.

It is not dissimilar to the outlook I’ve really tried to personify for the latter half of this year, though mine is definitely sillier than Asawa’s: What if I just started being the creative director of my own life?

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Seymour Krim writes in his essay, “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business,” about this dream of self discovery:

“Our secret is that we still have an epic longing to be more than what we are, to multiply ourselves, to integrate all the identities and action-fantasies we have experienced, above all to keep experimenting with our lives all the way to Forest Lawn... Let me say it plainly: Our true projects have finally been ourselves.”

This “epic longing” Krim names is one I’ve felt consistently throughout my life, whether for the hazy contours of an imagined adulthood where I’m a cool journalist for a glossy magazine (okay, just Andy Sachs), or a sharp desire for more feelings of happiness and excitement against the Sisyphean rhythms of the adult condition in my “mid-thirties” (yuck).

There’s something about the silliness and whimsy in giving myself a fake job that lets me indulge in my fantasy of being arty, designy, ~chic~, free from the corporate drudgery of slide decks and circling back and asking for feedback and wordsmithing executive summaries and getting more feedback and writing docs no one will read and oh, I love more feedback, so we can align before the meeting and then re-align in the meeting after the meeting.

Somewhat paradoxically, giving myself this fake “job” has been a tangible way to embrace what Oliver Burkeman calls “bold, imperfect action” amidst the overwhelming finitude of life: “Ceaseless efforts to get in the driver’s seat of life seem to sap it of the very sense of aliveness that makes it worth living in the first place,” Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals, leading to days losing their “resonance,” as Harmut Rosa so precisely names this feeling of aliveness.

The title “creative director” may seem antithetical to this, but it’s not about becoming a “real” creative director. I don’t even really know what one does, like DJs! “What the fuck do DJs actually do??” For me, it’s about embracing the “who is going to tell me I’m not” attitude towards my own life. Letting myself play make believe has been a fun way for me to indulge in (a bit) of delusional amusement, to live in my circumstances, and just to have some fun in the intentional over-romanticization of silly little things. I have a natural tendency to jump to systems and organization, trying to exert too much control over situations, creative projects, and yes, sometimes, the people in my life.

Anointing myself the Creative Director of katie (katie mag, katie productions, katie art, katie kapital, katie LLC, etc) is a form of attention that helps me directly bridge my art life and lived life, to see and experience the world in small, new ways. Creative directing my life replenishes and enlarges my experiential stockpile—for when I lack inspiration for a creative project, yes, but more importantly, for surfing the waves of my mood and when I find my supply of contentment and excitement running low. It feeds my imagination, and gives me more motivation to keep my consumption and experiences varied.  I keep putting enough creative direction in, so that art (whatever form it may take) keeps flowing back out. In this way, I’ve found many more possibilities floating in and around my life.

For me, creative directing is not about achieving the glossy, high polish photoshoot or editorial output. It’s not even about the end result at all. It’s about finding joy and appreciating imperfection in the process. The fake title gives me a new “start from” place, instead of “striving towards” (save me, Oliver Burkeman, save me), which definitionally places the thing out of reach from where I currently am. If I instead embody a specific orientation towards life, then I’m starting from right here. What does my life look like if I start from a place of acting like my own creative director? What would I do?

Well maybe I would decide, like Asawa, that everything I’m living and experiencing can be creative material. I’d photograph the light as it moves through my apartment, or pause to notice the rain droplets on the first buds of spring, or file away the colors of a winter sunset and make a note to try a purple underpainting for my next canvas. Or on the days that feels too overwhelming, nothing has to be material. Maybe it’s just lighting a nice candle as I curl up with a book (okay okay, my phone) or re-arranging my Labubus and Jellycats (they need to experience new perspectives too). The point is I am the director! I can “direct” what I want. I decide what counts.

My (current) aesthetic as a creative director:

• Artfully “lived in” and messy chic
• Things that feel delightfully real
• Googly eyes and cute things with googly eyes (this somehow has become the unintentional motif of my living room)
• The conviviality of my inner and outer worlds, yet of course there is some pretense because that is just how I have to trick my silly little brain into doing things… she’s so silly……..
• Blues (literally, I have come back around on the color blue)
• Zooming in

I also accept that my taste has changed over time, or with the times, as the world has acted back on me and my sensibilities (pour one out for all the high tone sepia filters, vignette borders, and millennial pink that got me here).

Ok so how tho…

“How to creatively direct your life” started with a fake job definition. I had to figure out what creative, directing, and most importantly, life meant to me—at this moment in time. I knew a few things: creativity for me right now meant developing more of a distinct point of view (I think just as important to making art is learning to know what you don’t want to make). There are many forms and outlets for creative expression, so I had to be honest with myself about what I cared about creating at this time in my life, what are the things I want to express? How? Art and writing, sure, but as I’ve continued to settle into my Brooklyn apartment, I’ve been expressing more through my physical environment—I love a ware, a little trinket, I love limes and I love to display them in my home like this. I used to think I needed some Grand Vision to “do” interior design, but then I just started buying some things that made me smile. A few provocations if you don’t know where to start (and even care about this sort of thing):

• To reveal or disguise: I’d mostly thought of creativity and expression as a way to reveal an aspect of myself or something I cared about, but at the Met’s Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exhibition, they presented some clothing designs as a way to disguise instead. I loved that idea: what does disguising creativity look like?
• Seeking inspiration from my past self: Searching my camera roll for the word “creative” and laughing at what comes up, or scrolling back through random notes, old emails, and other life artifacts

As a fake cinephile, the concept of direction was not just about developing and overseeing ideas, but I really wanted to finish one project. And for my life view, I approached it from some loose starts and questions:

• How would I describe a life that’s  “well-lived”?
• How does my life relate to others (family, community, world)?
• What do I care about?
• What are things that I actually like?? (Just for the sake of liking them!)
• What do I want to express?
• What does “being creative” mean to me?

Once I sufficiently journaled and spiraled in the abstracts, I reminded myself: do it messy, then do it again. It was time to get down to business (and defeat some Huns—the Huns of self-doubt, analysis paralysis, perfectionism, allegedly…)

Directing from concept to completion (what’s worked for me)

• Start small: It’s not all or nothing, picking a small activity that’s fun can help build momentum
• Yap too hard: Talking about doing stuff can be helpful for accountability, to an extent. (After telling my friend Ashwin I wanted to write this newsletter monthly, he started texting me on the 15th of every month)
• Quit (sometimes) (okay sometimes it’s too often but that’s also okay!!)
• Try again (always)

Reminder (from me to me): YOU get to decide! Be silly! Embrace cringe in how you direct yourself. One of my favorite little writing rituals is my Buttzville mug, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is a mug that says “Buttzville, NJ” on it (a real place!), and I pour myself coffee into this ridiculous little mug when I go to the Center for Fiction and need to lock in.

“People do really love to joke about the fact that I’m always on holiday,” Dua said to British Vogue. “I’m not always on holiday; I just make everything I do feel like a holiday.”

This is literally cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and you can’t tell me Dua is wrong—is there anything she can’t do? I’m reminded of my first therapist drawing the CBT triangle for me each session as I sobbed on her couch, illustrating how thoughts influence emotions, which in turn affect behavior, the basic concept being that you have to gaslight yourself thinking positive thoughts, then mood follows (allegedly…. big if true).

Each point on the CBT triangle influences other points. Like thinking, “I’m a worthless piece of trash who’s never done anything meaningful in my entire life and the people I love always leave me” influences my feelings (I guess). Sadness, anxiety, maybe anger arise in response to my negative thought above, which then in turn also shapes my behaviors: one might isolate themselves, retreat and avoid certain activities or situations (not me, certainly, but one….) Devastating news! But! The converse is true, too: I think, “I’m a creative director,” and my feelings are ones of being inspired, excited, and creative (lol), which feeds my behaviors. I take a painting class even though I’ve never done acrylics, or I do something as simple as plating one of my weekday lunches, to try to appreciate more of the mundanity in routine, especially living alone. This has the added benefit of forcing me to actually sit down and eat, instead of hovering over my cutting board and inhaling my bag of salad.

After all, as Annie Dillard reminds us, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Keep creating, keep directing,

🫧 katie “zhua lipa” 💋