The Cracking

2023 Year In Review Pt. I

Dear Friends,

I’ve pretended. I’ve suppressed. I’ve worn ill-fitting masks and ill-fitting titles. I’ve felt my own creative callings and laughed. I’ve felt my own creative callings and listened. I’ve made a living as an artist for the last four years, slowly withdrawing from illusions about who I thought I was and what others wish I would be.

Large steps, I thought.

But nothing like this. Nothing like the beginning of last year.

Julia Cameron calls it a cracking. Creative emergance. When “going sane feels just like going crazy.”

I was in my office struggling to write when I pressed record. Ugly crying through the first few lines of “To The Few.” I scheduled an email to myself for January 1st, 2024 with a file of the raw recording attached and a note saying, I love you. I’m proud of you.

This was only the begining of forming new relationships with doubt, fear, and discomfort. This was only the begining of a creative clarity I didn’t know was possible.

I’ve spent the last few weeks compiling photos, lines from my morning pages, voice memos, notes from books, and scribbles from notecards into a 2023 year in review. A snapshot of things that struck me enough to notice.

I hope the frustration, joy, passion, and hope serve as a mirror to your own humanity.

Thank you, always, for being here.
—Nneka

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January

1/1: “I am a talented person.
I have a right to be an artist.
I am a good person and a good artist.
Creativity is a blessing I accept.
My creativity blesses others.
My creativity is appreciated.
I now treat myself and my creativity more gently.
I not treat myself and my creativity more generously.
I now share my creativity more openly.
I now accept hope.
I now act affirmatively.
I now allow myself to heal.
I now accept creative recovery.
I now accept God’s help unfolding my life.
I now believe God loves artists (and me).”

Affirmations from “The Artist’s Way” that I transcribe at the end of my morning pages every day. Three years ago, upon reading them, I wept.

1/9: You think shaming yourself to the point of inaction is what you need? Stand up. Forgive yourself. Put one foot in front of the other.

1/11: I don’t know what our relationship as women will look like moving forward, but it’s about time I taught her how to treat me.

1/18: You don’t have to make the same things as everyone else but you do have to commit. You have to decide. Action is what moves providence, not planning or pontificating.

1/21: Build confidence, build momentum, build the life you want to live, and give yourself some fuckin credit along the way.

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February

2/1: It’s easier to pretend, to mask, to hide. To anonymously watch in annoyance as the vapid and templated gets rewarded digitally, socially, financially. To use that as an excuse to be a bystander, a critic.

To try and be seen trying, regardless of vanity metrics, is the unavoidable antidote. Action on your own behalf, art on your own behalf, is an integral part of reclaiming the arena of your own life, to possessing your own soul.

So decide what you like, not what you’d like to like, and (please) go do that shit.

2/2: All of this is temporary.

2/10: Morning pages is a practice I want to continue for the rest of my life. Evidence of my fortitude and fickleness. I was just crying into a microphone two weeks ago and now I feel more invigorated than ever.

2/26: On the call today she said she doesn’t use social media much. “I have real work to do and another app is just a distraction from my destiny.”

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March

3/1: It’s dark but you have the skillset. It’s dark but you have everything you need to create. It’s dark but if you keep going, the light on the other side will be like nothing you’ve ever seen.

3/10: "You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not. How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love.” —Anthony de Mello

3/21: Portugal in 3 days.

3/24: The first day, Wilma teaches you a word. It bears no direct translation, the syllables too heavy with sentiment. Saudade: a yearning so deep, so bottomless it splits “I miss you” at the center, or any such phrase too tinged with expectation. “Saudade,” wrote Manuel de Melo, “is a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.” It’s a sweet sadness you stitch to your chest, a wound willingly left open. Proof you are capable of both sides of the human coin: joy and suffering. Maybe it’s what the shores of memory are made of, you think, the unseen edge holding everything together.

3/25: Now, how does one live a life worth longing? It has to be less about accolades, more about little successive acts of attention and surrender. Coming face to face with finality. Of things. Of self. So that the light brushing cobblestone and the curve of a smile and the breast of the bird circling rust colored roofs at what feels like the top of the world in Porto should not be mistaken for routine. You are a living breathing thing amongst living breathing things living the point between longing and looking forward. And you feel it. The other side of ache, watching the sun fall on the first day with two friends and a thousand strangers.

3/30: It’s funny, you know? Finally realizing the person you’ve been waiting for is you.

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April

4/4: I am dedicated to making and sharing art every single day. This is why I am here. This is why I am here. What is inside me must come out.

4/5: 6 months in Brooklyn! Life. Changing.

4/11: Today Cortney said, “you are not the worlds middle child.” He’s right. It’s been extremely difficult shifting the idea that I’m the perpetual middle child (and eldest daughter) who has a sister to raise and brother to praise. “You are your own,” he said.

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May

5/4: Posting on these platforms has never been the final act of creation or the most important act of creation. But it feels like it. It feels like it. It fuckin’ feels like it. I’m glad I can be honest here. Ten years ago these apps felt like, “Wow! a place to share my photography. Maybe 10 more people other than the friends I already shared the photo with might see it.” It’s not as enjoyable anymore, and I hear this calling. I feel this itch to create something beyond short form, beyond the phone screen.

5/9: There will always be distractions along the path, but one must not falter. Keep the pace.

5/27: Nothing in vein. Every inch matters. Every action compounds.