Fairly early in my life, I started crafting my identity around being an artist, chiefly a musician, specifically organist. Even as a child, I knew the field was crazy; soon after starting piano lessons at the ripe old age of 9, I realized I had better eventually switch to organ because I was never going to be a professional pianist having started so late! I’m not sure if I should nowadays characterize that as “observant” or “defeatist.” As I think back on it, and I know that music was speaking to me in an important way. I was insecure and must have been feeling very vulnerable in that budding talent. I was also very much stuck in a “you got it or you don’t” framework, one that we’d call nowadays a “fixed mindset” as opposed to a “growth mindset.”
As I’ve written elsewhere, this vulnerability, or rather the accompanying shame, appeared as perfectionism and was ultimately why I stopped my visual arts for a long time, despite loving it just as much as the performing arts. I decided I just “didn’t have it” when it came to visual arts, but the jury was still out on music. So I had to work work work and prove once and for all that I DID have it. Not because growth was possible, but because I had to live up to my inherent, unchangeable abilities (that fixed mindset!). Every success was a small drop in the bucket of proving my ‘worth’ and every mistake was confirmation of what I feared-that I wasn’t good enough and thus never could be.
This underlying chunk of shame-that I wasn’t good enough and never could be, followed me to Oberlin Conservatory, one of the premier conservatories in the world for young organists. It followed me to France the first and second time, where I studied (on scholarship!) with famous teachers. It followed me to study trips in the Netherlands. It followed me back home to the US where I started working as a music director and organist at various churches.
This vulnerability…appeared as perfectionism and was ultimately why I stopped my visual arts.
I don’t know when the cracks in this worldview first appeared. I’d been working on them for years. In and out of therapy. In and out of music lessons. Some of my teachers were more and less helpful. I think that’s because a fixed mindset is an unspoken assumption at a lot of high-powered places. So is the myth of merit. Many of my colleagues who “made it” actually just had better connections! As I was deconstructing this part of my worldview, I would feel simultaneously enraged at the fact they first and foremost had better connections, ashamed I didn’t ‘put myself out there,’ and questioning the idea of “making it” as it was absorbed by my younger self. Ultimately, I needed to completely defeat the ideas I had about a hierarchy in the arts, who produced something of ‘value,’ how, where, and why it was produced to finally see myself as worthy and fully embrace the uniqueness I offer. Sounds simple…. only because I’m not writing a book on all the steps, anguish, and therapy sessions I had.
So yes, I wish like heck I hadn’t had a fixed mindset, but honestly, I wouldn’t be where I am if I hadn’t been on this journey. I’m a better music teacher because of it. I’m a better performer now, even as my circumstances and standards are completely different from a decade ago. Most importantly to me, I’m a better mother because I’ve struggled with this beast. Being acutely aware of my own path to feel like enough makes me acutely aware of the ways society tells children they’re NOT enough, even while pretending to be followers of the Jesus who made no such distinctions. God tells us we are Beloved, precious, created in Their image. No amount of hustle can even touch that.
Broad strokes here, but when we deconstruct any worldview of ours, we are in for a world of upheaval and (very likely) painful growth. But after that, I think we are generally headed for that elusive “peace of Christ” where we realize just how easy the yoke of Christ is. At least, that’s what pops up in me when I think about this journey. The yoke of the world would have you constantly in that field, plowing plowing plowing just to maybe be enough. But Jesus says his yoke is easy and his burden light… That sounds to me that we’re not meant to be plowing plowing plowing. That maybe we yoke up for a time, but we are more than what we do during that work period.
May you find rest, renewal, and the inner affirmation that you are enough.
(Isn’t baby Heather’s tomato art adorable? I would judge it back then as just not enough… Now I’m seeing it with new eyes!)
Actually an Artist 
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