A Battle Within
I have open channels for communication on my website. I try to communicate: I make and post to the website my photographs, I write this blog. Everybody can see my photographs and read my blog. And everybody can communicate back to me - write comments for the photographs or blog entries, send me emails. This is a communication back to me. It is like a walkie-talkie: you talk into this thing in hope that somebody will hear you, then you say “over” and listen. Well, most of the time all I hear is just radio static, but sometimes I do receive communication back - emails, comments, notes. From friends who watch my website. Thank you.
Recently I run into a problem. I received a negative communication. Well, at least I understood it as negative. It was quite unexpected. I am trying to project positive energy and expecting in return a positive feedback. Apparently my efforts could be interpreted in negative sense, with distrust and suspicion.
So, what do I do? Do I fight back? Or drop everything because some people think that what I do is bullshit, and I am just a lair? This is the first natural reaction, acute stress response: fight or flight. Doing so is losing your path, your true self. It is in fact an open permission for others to manipulate with you, your soul. Fighting back creates nothing but negative energy. Wars start from simple misunderstandings. On other hand, hiding away in a cave and eating yourself out is not an option either. Creating positive energy is a constant process, it is a duty. Doing nothing eventually destroys you.
The answer is - face your fears, engage yourself in battle. The battle within youself…
September 6th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
Confidence. Creating any sort of art is having the assurance, and seemingly blind determination, that what you are doing, truly and absolutely makes you happy. Outside that it is simply a matter of fine tuning your ability to acquire that happiness.
For whatever reasons I have always thrived on negative feedback, I always wanted to know what people did not like and why. Because no matter what they said, in my mind I had that almost blind determination, that this was it, nothing else will ever make me as happy, nothing. So then ask yourself how can anyone, with any number of comments, or with any degree of authority, take that away.
Needles to say, fighting back, is not only pointless, it take away the time you could be using to make yourself happy.
Accepting criticism of any sort, good or bad, will have no effect upon your work if you do not ask why.
Sometimes a negative comment is like a bright bulb lit up in a dark room. No matter how hard you try to look away, your eyes will always fixate upon it. You can’t unscrew it because it’s too hot. You can’t ignore it because it’s simply everywhere. So you study it. Where did it come from? Why did it light up now? How does it help me understand my surroundings? Maybe you can find a pair of sunglasses to ease the brightness for a while.
And as you study this light, you come to understand not only the light, but what it has illuminated. And before long you see, with the very help of the light, the switch that turns it off.
So there you are, plunged back into the darkness of your inner self once more, content, secure, comfortable, like the safe walls of a cocoon. There you are, attempting to make sense of the world that is you. Yet it is only after that light has gone out do you realize that your inner-self is no longer as dark, it is no longer as mysterious. All of a sudden you see that the light has given you a better understanding of everything.