Art Journaling as a Metaphor for Life

I’m  taking an art journaling eCourse by Brené Brown who is the author of The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are.  The eCourse uses art and journaling to contemplate and apply the Guideposts in the book, an example of which is Cultivating Creativity: Letting Go of Comparison.  

Used in this way, I find the art journal to be a great metaphor.  

Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work and in a recent eCourse Q&A session she shared a story about one of her college courses.  Students were required to create something, let’s say a widget, and they could create this widget however they saw fit.   To inspire creativity she removed the grading component from the assignment; she gave the students A’s before they started.  Her message being that there was no right or wrong way to create the widget.  Despite this students still asked for more instruction about how to complete the assignment, about what was expected of the assignment.  These students were afraid to turn in something that was “less than” or “wrong”.  I get this.  This is me when asked to produce in areas of my life that are outside my comfort zone or scope of knowledge.

One of our first eCourse assignments was to create an author page in our art journal containing a self-portrait and a list of several things in which we believed.  In the recent Q&A session Brené was asked if it was okay to list a belief that you didn’t practice.  Yes, she replied, because a belief can be something you aspire to practice.   How do you learn to practice a belief that is difficult for you?  First you have to know what the belief looks like.  A belief in connection, for example, might look like sharing a moment of joy with a spouse.  My belief in myself looks like trusting my conclusions and judgement more often, doubting myself less.  Brené encouraged us to use other pages in our art journal to describe our beliefs.  What a brilliant idea.  But wait!  Using extra pages to expand on a difficult assignment was not in our initial instructions!

So how do these two stories relate to my metaphor?  Well I’ve been hesitant to use pages in my art journal for anything other than the assignments as described in the instructions.  If I use additional pages for other moments of expression and creativity I might run out of pages before the end of the eCourse.  I’m controlling what I do now for an unknown outcome.  I’m allowing what’s ahead dictate what I am doing in the current moment.  It’s living in and enjoying the moment vs. living for a future whose outcome, no matter how hard I try to control and predict, is ultimately unknown.

In our first assignment we also had to write permission slips giving ourselves permission to do something scary, to do something we don’t normally do.  I gave myself permission to color outside of the lines.  I need to expand that to living outside the box; to living beyond the pages that are assigned in each lesson.

This is doable, because I believe in myself.