Learning linocut printing to fight being practical
I’ve been having a battle with practicality.
I don’t feel particularly compelled to be practical anymore. I feel I’ve been very practical for a very long time—what with all my stable jobs and marketable skills and retirement accounts—and I no longer want to seek practicality out.
Not in a professional way at least. Definitely not in an artistic way. I’m tired of explaining myself which is making me a little tired of writing nonfiction where I feel like I do nothing BUT explain myself. It’s definitely making me tired of working a desk job. I’m stuck in the practicality of making arguments when what I really want to do is tell a story. So I haven’t been writing much of anything. And I haven’t been particularly inspired by work.
I don’t know when all this practicality started—when I became so enamored with it. My brain flashes to college, but I’m sure the seeds were planted sooner. The last time I vividly recall being utterly impractical was my freshman year of college, 2am on a Wednesday, dumpster diving the streets of Pittsburgh with a boy I just met who I was crushing on just a little. We were stopped by the cops for trespassing and told to go home and so we walked several miles back to campus fueled by adrenaline in an early fall chill.
There was no utility in that kind of night. No use to our endeavor. We giggled the whole walk home when we realized the buses didn’t run that late. The best things we gleaned that evening were a clean bag of stale bagels and a Trader Joe’s orchid that my mom later nursed back to health. I wouldn’t call any of those things practical. (If LinkedIn can be trusted, that boy is now a microbiologist working with NASA).
It was easy to be more impractical then. I’d already gotten into college so I didn’t have that to think about anymore, and I wouldn’t have to think about a full time job for another 3.5 years. I was left with a stunning window of time to be utterly myself—my most practical act was showing up for class on time and turning in assignments. Unlike a job that can drag on for a panic-inducing undefined number of years, the semesters swapped every 15 weeks. And I could fake a practical attitude for even the lengthiest three hour class knowing it would all wrap up at some point.
I sometimes mischaracterize these years as “discovering” myself, but the reality is that I already knew who I was. I wasn’t discovering anything. I was simply basking in all these wonderful days of impractical magic in which I took courses like Russian Fairy Tales and worked a job in the early mornings before class cataloging birds in the private stacks of a natural history museum.
Never since have I been able to flit so effortlessly from one interest to another without wondering, at least a little, if it was worth my time. If it would lead to something larger. If it was…practical.
It’s harder now because the stakes are higher. If I dare to allow myself a moment of impracticality, who knows if it will ever stop? Who knows if the rent will be paid or if I will obliterate my credit score? Who knows if I’ll even need a credit score? What if I do? Also, rather than a gentle 3.5-year container to be an impractical little gremlin, I’m now in something like a 45-year jail cell in which, perhaps, if I play every card just right and stumble into a whole lotta luck, I can be a LITTLE impractical at 70 when (if) I retire.
Once, at a new job, I had all my coworkers over for a potluck in the backyard of my rental house. I mentioned something about being in my twenties and one of my new coworkers looked at me dumbfounded and said, “There’s no way you’re in your twenties. Your life is too put together.” And I beamed with pride.
Having a put-together life was the sweetest relief for my little practical heart. I would NOT be a mess, I would NOT crash out, and I would NEVER hit rock bottom. And I didn’t. But more than that, even when everything was held together by the stability I had so carefully crafted (and I was nothing if not stable), I still needed my interests to also appear practical.
I didn’t get the MFA in fiction I actually wanted. I got an MA in journalism because that was a way to make my love of writing practical. And when I realized journalism was a declining field, I pivoted to simply communications so that the love of writing I’d already diluted for the sake of practicality could be diluted even further. God forbid a girl go to grad school simply for the love of the game.
Those two years were nothing like undergrad. From day one, we were talking jobs and careers and internships and judging one another and sussing out who took this “field” most seriously. Who was being most practical? Who was being wise? Who was ensuring their utility couldn’t be overlooked? To love literature was to be a laughing stock. I was nominated for a Pushcart Prize that first year for a personal essay I’d written about dead birds and I may as well have told my professors I made macaroni art and stuck it on the fridge.
Now, just eight years later, I have the exact title and salary I said I wanted when I was leaving grad school, which has granted me the incredible privilege of having (slightly) less stress about making rent than some of my peers and a magnificent numbing sterilization of practicality that is suffocating me.
Sometimes I fantasize about being hospitalized—not with something major of course—but with something undeniable. So that if I were to let the balls drop, my spectators might, without judgement, allow me to rest and perhaps if I was very, very lucky, never pick up those balls ever again.
I don’t know how far away you have to trudge from practicality before you can be creative, but I can promise it’s many more miles than you think. And the longer you live in the land of the practical, the farther you have to go to find your creative self again.
Creativity and practicality naturally repel. They are like magnetic poles—they can exist very close to one another, but will push apart if they ever turn to face the other. I’ve been so practical, turning to face creativity over and over, unknowingly pushing it even farther away.
I started my art business this year—and it’s going okay—but accessing that deep reservoir of creativity feels harder than ever. My brain feels so linear. And linear art is vapid. I don’t want to be linear. I want to be like a great tangled mess of roots. But I catch myself making 5-year plans even in my sleep.
The closest I can get to the impractical is my horse, Tex, and his impracticality is what I love most about him. Several Gen Xers-teetering-on-boomers have suggested that Tex could be the reason I will never afford a down payment for a house, to which I say, well thank god that’s the only reason! Tex is (somewhat) expensive and not a fancy boy and serves no real purpose to me other than being big and silly. To try and name his utility would be an insult. He is a 1,200-pound goober and that’s about where the story ends.
He is art for art’s sake. Tex for Tex’s sake.
Same goes for the bunnies. And bikepacking. And rafting. And a big sip of mezcal on a Wednesday evening. Reading fiction. Writing fiction. Lounging in a hammock on the back porch. Taking a 5-hour indigo dye workshop on a weekday afternoon just to see if you can still thread a needle.
Perhaps I am not as practical as I think I am. But my brain—my thoughts—feel disgustingly pragmatic. Like an abacus keeping count, my mind is constantly tallying how far along I am and how far I still have to go and whether any of it was worth it. Whether it set me up for success or set me back.
I would like another 3.5 years to turn it all off—to play ultimate frisbee on the soccer fields under a thin sheen of rain at 10pm on a Tuesday, to take a class on the geologic history of the earth simply because it sounds interesting, to wear toe shoes in earnest.
I’ll worry about the full time job—what to make of myself—my senior year. Until then, what’s the point?
