Celebration as a Creative Act

How can we use celebration, not just to mark the culmination of a creative project, but as a tool to enhance all parts of the creative journey?

I have always had an awkward feeling on my birthday.

It’s not that I hate my birthday or celebrating it - but year after year, I find myself feeling uncomfortable and slightly melancholy around and on this day. The discomfort is not about turning a year older or aging - like many others, perhaps like you, I find it hard to be celebrated - to be the object of all that human energy and attention, and to receive it fully and take it in.

Yellow square with bold red print, Celebration is a creative act.

Looking closer, I see a similar trend with the artists I coach and support. I have come to understand that there is a vulnerability in celebration, in being celebrated, and certainly in celebrating one’s self and lifting up one’s accomplishments in front of others. Chances are we can more easily direct celebratory energy towards someone else, but find it harder to receive.

And yet, celebrating one’s self is an essential practice for artists.

• What is this reluctance or resistance to celebration all about?

• Why is it so hard to celebrate one’s self?

• And, how can we lean into and establish some tools for celebration, specifically as artists and as part of our creative practices and processes as artists?

• How might celebration, when used as a creative tool and practice, enhance our work?

There is a prevalent philosophy in the peaceful parenting movement that the parent should refrain from saying, “I am so proud of you” when a child does something notable and should say, instead, “You should be so proud of yourself”.

The reasons for the reframe are obvious, I hope - moving the child away from external sources of praise and validation towards their inner sense of value, worth, and accomplishment. And, then, the follow-up questions: What did you learn? What do you like most about what you made or did there? How did you get there? Was it hard or easy?

These questions shift the child away from a focus on empty achievement and people-pleasing towards a more creative, curious, investigative and probing dynamic. Even better, or just as important, the reframe also shifts the parent-child dynamic - as both child and parent are looking together at the child’s work with curiosity, and establishing a healthy but independent bond.

How can we play parent to our art and our creative practices?

Celebration is yet another way to help us get off that wheel of shame and grandiosity (I suck - I’m a genius!) that I wrote about last week on Creative Worth - and instead, to generate more curiosity and equanimity as artists.

On Creative Worth and the Value of Positive Regard

We see the issue with empty praise in today’s society - as one blasts one’s accomplishments over social media and jockeys for praise and attention in a series of endless highlight reels. Not to knock the artist who uses these mediums in this way - I, myself, depend on social media to promote this and my other creative work - but we can all agree these digital spaces accentuate and reinforce the dangerous compulsion to seek praise, and to pursue the dopamine hit of “the like” as if we’re getting an approval pat on the head from an invisible parent as the good little boys and girls we hope we are.

Both curiosity and equanimity in our work allow us to interrupt this cycle and to sustain ourselves in the long term - “to stay on it” as Julius Eastman wrote -

- since much of art-making and creative life happens within the very unsexy, day-to-day showing up with steadiness and wholeheartedness.

Celebration has its part to play, too.

How can celebration support us in establishing a different kind of relating to our art, and even help us make better art? How is celebration a creative tool for the artist?

Dive deeper to look at ways that celebration can be integrated into one’s creative practice, and to move through some practical prompts and tools for enhancing creative projects and creative life.

Or, join the next cycle of SpringSessions starting April 7 to integrate these and other critical creative tools into your work and life.