Permission
This is me on NYE 2022, giving myself SO much permission to enjoy friends, dancing, and a chateau in Burgundy. (photo by Nina Hausner)
These days, I’m learning to ask fewer people for permission. It’s not easy for me, and it’s taken 35 years to get here.
I was never a card-carrying rule follower. But throughout my life, I have carried the weight of caring too much about what other people think.
Sometimes I’m sure this fixation comes from a fear of being misunderstood—a fear based in insecurity, and in an awareness of my ultimate insignificance. Other times, the roots of this trait seem less insidious. A desire to please reveals an appreciation for the feelings of others—it’s a testament to an interest in and affection for people.
As with most things in life, the truth is that both sides of the coin hold equal weight:
-I want to please because I want to feel my perspective is valuable.
-I want to please because I value the perspectives of others.
No doubt many people—artists, certainly—feel this way. It would be silly to ignore that we make art out of a desire to connect. We seek a response from other people—ideally one that tells us our perspective isn’t garbage, and that our ideas have some merit. After all, what is applause if not the reassurance that we’re not alone, trapped inside our own head?
But we also make art because we’re fascinated by perspectives unlike our own—perspectives that challenge what we thought we knew. We’re interested in peeking around corners into lives we don’t fully understand. We want to learn, to see, to grow. To think bigger and deeper.
These desires begin when we’re children. My own child is re-teaching me that it’s okay to step out onto the ledge of what we do not yet know. It’s okay—essential, even—to try something new, to fail at it, to try again, to fail again, to accept that others might not agree with you, to stay open to them anyway, to love yourself anyway, to ignore people who displace their insecurities onto you, to embrace the questions more than the answers, to feel confident about certain answers, to never apologize for wanting to learn, to take a bold step forward before you feel ready, to take a bold step forward before you’ve received permission.
Admittedly, none of that is easy for me—especially not that last one. But thankfully, it doesn’t seem to be as hard for everyone, including for some of the artists and people I admire most—artists who offer no apology for their thoughts or existence, and who don’t ask for permission or beg for forgiveness. Instead, they insist there’s no shame in being who you are, and in boldly living their lives, they open up space for others to live boldly, too.
So, what’s a recovering people-pleaser to do except put on her imitator glasses, watch, and learn from the artists and people she admires most?
As the second month of 2023 kicks off (it takes me all of January to figure out what the hell I’m trying to do with the next 11 months), I commit to giving myself permission to step out boldly onto the ledge of what I do not yet know, to try something new and utterly fail, and to feel afraid yet wonderfully alive as I stand on that precipice.
And to all you writer-parents out there, I invite you to do the same. May 2023 be a year of giving ourselves permission.