You Don't Have To Fix It
if it's costing you + Replay
Last month, as we studied Andrea Gibson’s poem about pain as a spider, I realised I’d been relating to the human in the scene; learning to be gentle with my pain, guide it carefully into the garden.
Then an encounter with a real life spider got me thinking about things from the spider’s perspective.
It’s a normal thing for spiders to lose their webs. Weather, predators, humans with hoovers & hoses.
Webs get destroyed all the time.
Here’s the thing: a spider’s web isn’t actually their home. It’s just a strategy. A way they set themselves up to meet their needs.
And when a web gets destroyed, the spider just... moves on & builds a new web, I presume.
No shame spirals. No autopsies. No fingers pointing in blame.
That’s when it landed.
I had been fighting for a web that has beeb in tatters for years. Defending a strategy that no longer worked. Lashing on the shame as if this was exclusively my fault and that I needed to feel very bad about that.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO SALVAGE THIS.
That one sentence released me from an emotional tax I felt obliged to pay; literal years of fighting to keep a tattered web intact at the cost of my own joy.
Performing loyalty to a web that not only doesn’t meet my needs but now requires me to suppress them.
And with that permission, all the energy that had been tied up in that entire drama returned to me.
Now I want to build a new web with it.
This is what journaling does
You sit with a problem. A metaphor lands at exactly the moment you need it. You apply it to your actual life and suddenly you have permission.
Permission to stop salvaging. Permission to let the tattered web go. Permission to build something new.
And watch how quickly your world transforms. Your spaces reflect it. Your art reflects it. How you show up reflects it.
The inner work yields outer expression.
It’s about visibility; becoming visible to yourself as much as anyone else. It’s no small thing.
Amanda x
This week’s journal session replay + remaining June dates are “below the fold” for paying subscribers (thank you). Scroll all the way down.
p.s.
Want A Free Art Journal Lesson?
This July, I’m teaching at Make Create Express for its 10th anniversary along with 36 other artists, each of us with distinct approaches to creative practice.
My lesson is rooted in the question “What if the thing you think disqualifies you is actually your creative superpower?”
For years, I disqualified my art because I couldn’t draw, didn’t care about mastering the skill and had little patience for life drawing, something my brain experiences as a “boring” practice.
I thought those limitations meant I’d never be a ‘real’ artist.
I was wrong.
Because here’s what I know for certain: your creative practice is not something you have to earn your way into. It’s something you return to. Over and over. Exactly as you are.
Even - especially - when you’re not sure how.