The One Out of a Hundred
The loud voice is not the accurate voice. Those are two different things, and it helps to keep them separate.
Living by Making | Issue 15
At the Workbench
Some of you in the TOS Insiders group heard the beginning of this story yesterday. Bear with me, it goes somewhere a little different today. I spent weeks before the wedding in the studio with silk. My youngest daughter, Elise, was getting married, and I wanted to make something for the women in her wedding party. Hand-dyed. Her colors. I have worked in silk long enough that my hands know what they are doing, but I have never been more precise with the dye bath than I was on those pieces. Every measurement. Every timing interval. Everything adjusted for the weight of what it was for.
You ask yourself in moments like that whether the work is good. Not in an abstract way. In a very specific, standing-over-the-dye-bath-at-eleven-at-night way. And the answer I kept hearing was: I don’t know if it’s good, but I know I’m not holding anything back. That distinction seems more important than it used to.
Then came the toast. I had rewritten my notes four times. I stood at the microphone in front of everyone I love most in the world, looked out at my daughter in her dress, and thought: none of these words are the right words. I said them anyway. She was crying. I was something close to crying... yea, no I was crying, bumbling, stumbling. Wow. My mother was definitely crying. There is a version of that moment where I nailed it, and a version where I just stood there with tears and a fistful of notes and rambled my way through love. Probably both are true. I have been practicing letting both be enough. That practice has a name, and I have been thinking about it differently ever since last Saturday.
Under the Surface
I came across something a while back that I keep returning to. A psychologist named Roy Baumeister spent years measuring a gap most of us already feel but can’t quite name: one bad experience carries roughly the weight of three good ones. Not because we are too sensitive. Not because we lack perspective. Because that’s how we’re built. For much of human history, missing a threat cost you everything. Missing an opportunity just cost you an opportunity. Your nervous system learned that lesson and never forgot it.
And here’s the part that gets me, that same wiring doesn’t distinguish between a predator and a person who didn’t like your painting. Your body responds the same way. So, the one afternoon in the studio where nothing came right, the one voice in a hundred that said it wasn’t good enough, these register louder than all the rest combined. Not because they are more true. Just because your nervous system is very old and doesn’t know you’re a painter. Or a woodworker. Or someone standing at a microphone trying to say something real about love.
I find it genuinely useful to know this, even when I forget to apply it. The loud voice is not the accurate voice. Those are two different things, and it helps to keep them separate.
Studio Notes
I work across a lot of materials. Fiber, wood, resin, wax, paint, photography, digital painting, synthography. People ask sometimes whether that spread is a strategy or an inability to commit, and honestly I have given both answers at different times. I think it is mostly curiosity, and I believe that. But there is something else in it too, something about staying in motion through a life that keeps changing shape. My youngest daughter will be in Montana soon. My parents are in their late eighties and early nineties. I am at the end of a long stretch of coaching and teaching, and something new is pulling at me from a direction I didn’t see coming. You make differently in a season like this. Your hands know what to do even when the rest of you is still working something out, and I am grateful for that.
Most of what I have ever made sits somewhere between useful experiment and sincere attempt. Not masterpiece. And for a long time the pieces that fell short took up more room in my head than the work I was proud of, three to one, as it turns out, without me even noticing. I have been thinking about what it would mean to extend the same grace to my own creative life that I would give to anyone else’s. Not pretending the weak work is something it isn’t. Not lowering what I am reaching for. Just being a fair witness to the whole body of it, the failures and the experiments and the sideways attempts alongside the work that came out “right”. All of it belongs to the same story. You can’t get to the good work without making all the rest of it first, and I think somewhere I knew that, but I didn’t always act like it.
On the Table
One small thing this week, and you can do it right now if you want. Find a piece of your own work that you have written off. Something you made and decided wasn’t good. Give it sixty seconds of honest looking, not to convince yourself it’s better than you thought, just to look at it the way you’d look at a friend’s work before you already knew what you were going to think. Notice what you actually see when the verdict isn’t already in. Then ask yourself whether you have been a fair witness to your own making. Not a generous one. Just fair. If you try it, I’d genuinely like to hear what comes up. Hit reply or click Message button below.
A Quiet Note
If you are in a season where making feels like the thing that holds things together when other things are shifting, Unhurried Letters was made with exactly that kind of company in mind. It arrives by mail, by hand, a little slower than the rest of the world. Here is a short video. You can find it at unhurriedletters.com.
Leave the Light On
Most makers I know are harder on their own work than they would ever be on anyone else’s. I am. And knowing about the three-to-one ratio doesn’t make the loud voice quiet overnight, but it does change something. It means the loudness is information about your nervous system, not a verdict on your work. Those are different things, and it is worth treating them differently.
The ninety-nine said something. Most of them said it quietly, the way good things usually do. It is worth slowing down long enough to hear it.
Grace is not what you give yourself when the work is finally good enough. It is what you extend to the whole of it, right now, as it is.
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Reference
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). “Bad Is Stronger Than Good.” Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323