"I Can Buy Myself Flowers"
What Miley Cyrus teaches us about drawing.
Hello GUT Friends!
In case you missed it: We’ve been hard at work developing, testing and creating DrawTogether Classrooms, a program to help educators bring drawing and social emotional learning into classrooms, libraries, homeschools, and beyond. And now IT’S HERE and FREE for educators around the country. Tell your teacher-ish peeps!
Now back to our regularly scheduled GUT Sunday.
I can buy myself flowers.
Have you heard this Miley Cyrus song? It’s catchy. It’s a breakup song, but there’s a larger message: all those nice things we hope others will do for us? We can do them for ourselves. It’s about taking care of ourselves.
Yesterday I was wiped. Wrapping up a huge project is exhausting and all I wanted to do was zone out and sleep. But suddenly I had this long list of things I had to do because because I’d been doing all this other stuff and needed to catch up. Maybe you have this experience, too: the moment you finish a big thing, suddenly all you can see are a hundred other things just sitting there, staring at you, saying “Now take care of ME ME ME.” And then WHOOSH, you’re into the next thing. An endless game of catch up. No stopping. No rest. An endless avalanche of to dos.
I think we all do it. And while there are legitimately important things that we NEED to take care of, I wonder if part of our tendency to keep going going going is a deep fear of how we would feel - even a fear of who we would be - if we stopped.
But! This launch was big. Big for the whole DrawTogether Team, and for me. So despite all the noise and long list of things to do, I wanted to mark the occasion for myself. Do something nice for myself. So I went to a florist and bought myself a bouquet of flowers. I brought them home, put on a background movie (The Fugitive really holds up, btw), and I drew flowers. Like, all night long.
And after I got passed the initial “I should be doing this, I should be doing that..” it felt so damn good.
Ironically, what I “should” have been working on was the GUT for all of us here! But y’all, I didn’t know how much I needed to take some time for myself. To just draw for the heck of it.
A friend shared something with me last week that resonated. She said, “if you don’t have time to sit and meditate for 5 minutes, sit for 20. If you don’t have time to sit for 20 minutes, sit for an hour.”1
Right?? It’s so true. And sure, that is impossible to do on some days. But it IS possible on others. It doesn't have to be a whole night. It could be just 15 minutes in the middle of the day. But it’s deliberately saying “no” to external expectations and giving that time to myself to stop. Which to me, means to draw.
And specifically for us drawers: how can we ever get our eyes focused and ears tuned to the subtle details and the quiet voice that we need to pay attention to if we never turn off all that noise??
So, my GUT friends, guess what. I don’t have a big drawing lesson for you this week. No new artist to learn about, or drawing element to practice. But what I do have for you instead is maybe something many of us, maybe you, need even more. And maybe you could use some help practicing....