I’m directing you to Sarah Laing’s blog because her piece on other people’s success is exactly right and brilliant.
Don’t we all sometimes assume everyone else is having the “party in the middle of the world” and we’re on the outside looking in? (Come on, it’s not only me, right?)
For me the ‘problem’ is that I happen, through work, to know some of the most phenomenally successful (artistically and financially) writers, directors, makers-of-work in the UK (and in NZ where I grew up, and increasingly in many other places too).
Just because comparison is, of course, absurd, doesn’t also make it inevitable.
And still we get up, get on, and make our own work – because it’s only our own work we can make. Only my own work I can make. And mostly that’s totally fine.
(And sometimes it feels ever such a little bit ‘…oh’.)
I love that it’s in pictures too.
My mum is a painter. She said to me once “every time I finish a painting I look at it and think ‘oh, it’s me again’.” I think that’s part of that feeling too: we always look boring to ourselves, whereas other people’s work inevitably looks new and fascinating.
By: Naomi Alderman on June 11, 2012
at 8:49 am
hah. “Oh, it’s me again” is perfect.
By: stelladuffy on June 11, 2012
at 9:03 am