In the biography of her friend and famous choreographer Martha Graham, dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille recounts a conversation the two had about their fledgling careers.
“No artist is pleased,” said Graham.
de Mille responded, I imagine a bit worried, “But then there is no satisfaction?”
“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” Graham reinforced. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
I hear these words at a writing retreat, during a rare weekend away from my husband and kids, and as soon as I’m home I tack them on the bulletin board above my desk. Yes, I think, so relieved to have my own feelings echoed in the words of another. No satisfaction whatever at any time. It feels like an indoctrination into what it means to live a creative life, always trying to express something that escapes the five senses, always feeling short of it. And the blessed unrest—could it be that it is the key to feeling most alive? I have fought it for so long. These words, the idea that I can embrace this— that the unrest could be blessed—brings a smile to my face and a lightness to my body. It lasts for just a moment, but still, it was there.
Here is the deep, gritty truth I’ve uncovered: when you don’t allow yourself to dream, it feels easier to survive the day. It’s no way to live a life. But when you want nothing else, you can wash the clothes and do the dishes and wipe the kids’ noses and not feel the dreadful, gnawing pull of a bigger life. If you can shut down your desire for something more— and I don’t think you should, but if you can— you are free from the pull. You can settle into life, the one you have. But if you can’t? If you can’t shut it down, you are aligning yourself with a life of discontent, of a never-ending reach, of a glorious and impossible pull.
“No satisfaction whatever at any time.”
At least, this is what happened for me. I think we are set up—as women, as mothers, as artists of any kind—to be quiet. To keep our weirdness or our specialness or our vision to ourselves. The world has told me many variations on the sit down and shut up philosophy. I’ve been told I think too much; that I’m too idealistic, as though it’s a bad thing; that I’m inflexible. I’ve been told, by a professor, that my own writing, pulled from both the truest parts of myself and real-life experience, was apocryphal. When I was pregnant with my first child, my boss told me to wear loose clothing to a meeting, because if the client knew I was pregnant, they would think I couldn’t work on the project. The messages: step aside, you with your inherent creative nature, the way you make words and life. Hide your light, it’s too bright for the world.
There is this, too— the way we diminish can have nothing, nothing at all to do with the world around us, and more to do with ourselves. How much we believe what the world tells us. How much we allow ourselves to feel what we know, to embrace our truths.
The spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson says, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.” I wonder, then, if I’ve given too much credence to those who want that light dim. Maybe it wasn’t them, really. Maybe it was me.
It is a thought very painful to bear. And then again, how can it happen otherwise, when we are all a product of our environment and culture and until we learn to break that, we’ve cast ourselves in the underlying role of victim? But let’s leave that aside, the blame. Here we are: it is easier, sometimes, or it feels easier in the moment (it is not easier in the long term) to settle, shrink, lay low, diminish, dismiss.
When I settle, I can almost trick myself into believing that it’s enough. I work, I fold the laundry, I make and clean up the dinner, I play with the kids, I bathe them. There is joy in those small moments. The moments tumble into minutes and hours. There is always the dark spot in the back of my mind, but it’s learning to live with it, it’s learning to deny it, ignore it. Then you can get through the day.
But when you know you want more, and push yourself to try— that is scary, and you go from safe to exposed, from fake comfort to fake danger. And, fake or not, comfort feels better than danger.
So I think this is all to say, that you can see how, when none of the conditions were right and the idea wasn’t accepted and women had to fight for everything, it felt easier to lay down and die. And by that I mean, to put on the pretty dress and the lipstick and the heels, to clean the house and pride yourself on your children’s clean faces, and your clean floors, and your own mind clean of dreams or desires, or so you thought.
There is a kind of endless pursuit in creativity, an expansiveness of interest that makes it near impossible for it to ever feel complete, that you have to learn to live with, I think. It fights against time and money, it begs you for more knowledge and more play, it keens to you from the so-called silence of your mind, the back corner where your secret thoughts are kept, but they creep out sometimes, maybe when you sleep, or when you’re driving, or washing the dishes yet again. I don’t know where they come from or why they come, but they do.
“No satisfaction whatever at any time.”
Maybe we can learn to embrace that, the sinking feeling that we shall never quite feel like we did it right, because this exists in creativity and in motherhood (and what is motherhood but creativity, and what is creativity but a kind of mothering), those feelings of maybe always getting it wrong, alongside small moments where you suddenly, improbably, are sure you’ve gotten something so right, and you don’t know precisely what and you don’t know how but you did. And in that moment the world stills, and feels right. And it gives you what you need to keep going, forward and then back to that place of no satisfaction.
And this makes no sense, I am clear that this will feel like a contradiction, but I think there is also an extreme satisfaction to be found in just one place, one place only—the pursuit. The act of creativity, of mothering—the hope of getting it right and the relentless act of going for it, of choosing to embrace it over and over again—that is where satisfaction lies. There and there only. Not in the outcome, no. There is no satisfaction there, whatever, at any time. Not in the reaction, the acceptance. The only satisfaction is in the process. In the setting aside of your work for the day with the feeling that whatever you did, you did it well, at least mostly. In kissing the chubby cheeks of sleeping babes with the well of love bubbling over, in the recollection of those moments when you look each other in the eyes and laugh and laugh and laugh. The day might not be perfect, but that moment, that act of mothering, of creativity, of being—that is. And that’s all there is. That’s where it is, the satisfaction.
“There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
Only in now, the most fleeting of all time’s moments. Grasp it and it’s gone. The only choice, then, maybe, is to live it. Be in the moment when you have it, and let it go when it’s gone.
And the pursuit, the process, the joy that is in the moment— of choosing the perfect word, or painting the truest thing you know, or finding the perfect harmony, or calming the wayward child with just your very presence—that’s the joy. That’s the satisfaction. We overlook it because we think there is more that we need—results, applause, acknowledgment. But maybe the first acknowledgment needs to come from ourselves. Maybe the only applause we need is our own.
More than anything, I want room and space and fresh air to write and paint and explore. Who I am to do these things? That is the question that has plagued me, but the answer is that these are the things inside of me, and it is like asking, Who am I to let my lungs fill with air? We are all endowed with this right, this perfect necessity. I am made of it, in the same way I am made of bone and blood.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about who I was before I realized it was easier to be otherwise. Creative, quiet, book lover, just a step offbeat, independent, curious, silly, open, loving, introspective, soulful. Soulful, yes, way before I understood the concept of soul, before it actually meant anything to me. I never cared about fitting in, never tried to— so how did I come to stray from myself, from who I was? Did I care more than I remember? Or did I just care about making it all easier on me; did I find, a little young, the heartbreak of life and take it all so personally, that the only conclusion I came to was that it was easier, easiest of all, to be something, someone, different? I can’t say. But I remember myself, content with quiet solitude or peaceful companionship over crowds and parties. Maybe I listened too much to the world, which told me that in our youth, we go a little wild, that that is the way of things. I don’t think it was ever my way of things but I did it, and well. Even the smallest of steps can take you off track, until you find yourself somewhere where you recognize nothing, not even yourself.
I don’t think any of this has ever been about finding out who I am; it’s been about coming back to myself. Who have I always been, and how have I gone a little too far in the wrong direction? How sad, that we can be our own undoing, and how much of a relief, that all the power is ours? There is nothing more that I have ever wanted than that, and I think I knew it better when I was young.
Maybe I was part of the structure that kept me down, and maybe I designed it, too. Bit by bit, without realizing.
It is easier to knock back a drink and wind your way onto the dance floor, moving your body mindlessly, than to be a deep thinker. It is easier to change diapers than to change your life. Maybe I favored the ways I could leave myself because it is just easier to be that than to be this. But that is the trick, again, here it is, because over time that is not the easier thing at all. Before too long, or maybe after too long, you will find yourself lost.
So we lose ourselves. And we can find ourselves.
I know, even now, that so much of me will be misunderstood. But I can no longer be afraid to follow where words take me, in the same way I can’t be afraid to take a breath; I have to live. In all choices, I have to choose me. I have to pursue the only thing that matters—the highest, fullest expression of myself; the width, the depth, the height of this life.
Maybe there will be no satisfaction, whatever, at any time. But maybe, after all the struggle, it turns out that this endless unrest is blessed.