looking up

Atlanta's most enthusiastic Flickr afficianados gathered on Monday night in Little Five Points for a little soiree. While sipping on a glass of red wine, I bumped into a fellow photographer named Jason. We'd never met, but we started talking photography.

It turns out that Jason is a candidate in the MFA photography program of a very good art school here in town. It turns out that the school he attends happens to be the same very good art school to which I hope to apply next year. They have an excellent photography program, a curriculum that asks just the questions I want to ask in my photography.

It was great to connect with him. We talked about different photographers we liked, approaches we take in our own photography. We talked shop. I walked away feeling encouraged and nervous and happy about my own photography and my application to grad school.

This jumble of delight was followed immediately by a wave of genuine terror at the thought of actually doing something with my photography.

In many ways, it's much, much easier for us to be unaccountable to our own artistic impulses. We know very well how to lumber along through the work week. How to be a successful wage slave and keep our supervisors happy and count down the days until the weekend. (When I go to the office, I wear an ID badge around my neck all day. I know exactly which doors it will open and which ones it will not.)

The thought of potentially going to school for photography makes me accountable for my creative longings, and this thought is genuinely frightening.

"Well, it's just a hobby," I've said to others over and over again. "I don't do it professionally. Just for fun." Only yesterday, I told a friend, "Well, I want to study photography. I mean, the company's paying for it, so why not." I knew what I was really saying: I'm not dumb enough to think I really deserve a degree in photography from this fancy school.

There are doubts at every turn. When Jason said something nice about my photography, I was ready with my bow and arrow to shoot down his compliment. (I am an excellent archer.)

Julia Cameron, that wonderful self-help guru for artists, writes, "Perhaps the greatest barrier for any of us as we look for an expanded life is our own deeply held skepticism.... It does not seem to matter whether we are officially believers or agnostics. We have our doubts about all of this creator/creativity stuff, and those doubts are very powerful."

What I'm seeing tonight is that all those doubts are starting to wear me out. Carrying around these duffel bags full of arrows and reasons why I should not be taken seriously as a creative person is actually kind of exhausting.

I think I want to try something different. I think I want to see what happens when I put the duffel bags down, and stop spending so much of my best energy developing reasons why I can't give a voice to my own creative desires.

I like the way Rumi put it: "Listen. Make a way for yourself inside yourself. Stop looking in the other way of looking."