Recalibrating Identity
From "Professional Creative" to Community Cultivator and All-Purpose Doula
Some consensus of IFS-style Parts that masquerade as “I” can recalibrate identity by deciding that there just isn't enough evidence that other, renegade, Parts are among the plural "me" that "I" generally choose to show up in the world as.
Those quotes are getting old, eh? I’ll stop, but please do me the favor of imagining them around every first-person pronoun from here on out.
I take refuge in the Theravadan Buddhist hypothesis that we can use equanimous acceptance to approach all the Parts that form a Committee in our head. We can radically love them as they collaborate to decide what to do with this meat.
But hey. While we’re here, doing the human incarnation thing, maybe we can also explore the fun of experimenting with Will to use the temporary consensus of those Parts we vibe with most to consciously craft our own “pantheon of identities” that we choose to call to the Committee most frequently. The ones whose voice we choose to honor and prioritize.
All my Parts may be acting for the greater good of the whole meat mech they ride around—putting out fires, protecting its feelings, and managing the way it shows up appropriately for social settings. I can be receptive to whatever arises and love all the shadowy Parts that it’s tough to admit are mine.
Then, I can decide—in consultation with honest intuition and authentic values—that those shadows are an unwanted influence. They’re not how I wish to show up. They’re baggage from childhood, trauma or cultural conditioning.
They’re karma to be burnt.
We can burn these seeds through patience and self-acceptance. By re-knowing them as lovable. We can soothe them through gentle compassion and let them know their voices aren’t helpful. That might be called the Cups energy in the Tarot.
Or we can take a scalpel and analyze our behavior to find opportunities to slice off habits that reinforce identities we don’t wish to invite to the table. That's Swords energy in the Tarot: cut the knots that tie us to identities we don't wish to abide in.
So, how do I want to recalibrate my identity?
I’d like to gently let go of my aim to be a Professional Creative, and replace it with an understanding that my Creekmason art habits reinforce the personas of All-Purpose Doula and Community Cultivator.
Professional Creative no more.
As a result of hanging out on notes and enjoying the shop talk, earning my first couple paid subscriptions on Substack, and watching my follower numbers grow more here in two weeks than they ever did after two years on Wordpress, I’d started trying to claim the identity of “Professional Creative.”
Part of me still thinks it’s generally true: if you earn money doing something, you’re a professional.
Endeavoring to live up to that expectation was a violence against my nature, though.
It demanded I ignore the call to contraction that naturally arises during my bipolar cycle and over-consume to keep being productive for as long as possible. A strategy inevitably generating massive Lows of depression and self-loathing.
It’s my inheritance as the liminal ping pong ball bouncing back and forth between the roles of contracted Hated Alien and expansive Vaunted Savior. It’s a Big binary. These lonely archetypal poles are mythic: zoomed way out from the embodied Earth shit I actually spend most of my time doing.
My reading habits facilitate that zoomed-out perspective. I read roughly thirty books a year so I have to fly pretty high to find the patterns between them. And yet, I can’t seem to shut up about them. From the soaring altitude at which the connections become clear, it's inevitable that my aspirations grow more grandiose. That's where anti-ordinary goals like becoming a Professional Creative flourish.
But as an All-Purpose Doula and a Community Cultivator, I think the orientation is different.
All-Purpose Doula
I won’t spend too much time talking about this here. I’ve already written about how this is one of my roles here in the Creekmasons.
Still. I'm more focused than ever on creating content that helps me move down the path of self-actualization. My essays in this space are so vulnerable, self-examining, and exploratory that they can be healing.
In other words, one of the All-Purpose Doula's purposes is being a doula for himself.
I’ve tried to conceptualize my depressed, self-averted side as a Part that is here to protect me. I theorized it only accelerates into the feeling of soul-crushing imprisonment in despair and self-loathing because I'm not listening to its cries sooner. I keep trying to extend my periods of hypomania, my periods of creativity and inspiration.
As I've been reading baby books in preparation for the new kid, I've learned that crying is a late sign of hunger and a mindful parent can notice the signs that precede it.
Similarly, dramatic self-aversion—and the paranoia that sometimes immediately precedes it if I spend way too much time fantasizing unrealistically about an ambitious future—are late signs of the need to contract.
They exist to bluntly knock me down a peg to protect me from realities of being a Professional Creative. Inevitable challenges like people who engage with content in a hateful way by default, the horror of being publicly recognizable, and the impossibility of earning a living without as making the algorithm a less forgiving, more demanding, less empathetic, less human boss than my current one. Conner Habib discusses this in a podcast episode titled “Will your dream job ruin your life?”
These are realities that I’m not personally resourced with the right IFS regulars to happily endure. It just wouldn’t be fulfilling.
My writing, especially lately, seems to be an attempt to doula myself through these changes into a mature Adepthood marked by fulfilling self-actualization, yes, and also by reasonable self-expectations to be nourishing rather than utterly euphoria inspiring and suffering eliminating.
Community Cultivator
What about cultivating the Creekmason community? My art can be self-doulahood, but that’s narcissistic if it doesn’t also serve others.
First, I feel confident that if you examine any one belly button closely enough, it could be anybody’s. My navel gazing is bound to strike a chord with a few people who will benefit.
Second, back to my “cultivator” metaphor, there’s four ways an Adeptus Maker can help the community thrive with their Art:
Sunlight: Bringing in original energy through unique explorations, creativity, ponderables, and the insights derived from conversing with podcast guests and reading books/blogs from thinkers who are outside the community.
Photosynthesis: turning the sunlight from every member’s ponderables into sugar through a process of distillation, editing and, of course, synthesis.
Growth: The same way that an animal grazing on plants that have photosynthesized sunlight into digestible sugar can eventually “grow big and strong,” an Adeptus Maker can take the nourishment available to the community inside themself and metabolize it for personal growth.
Decomposition: the dead selves that are sloughed off a plural identity that is growing increasingly authentic can fertilize the community as well. When we work together in spiritual sangha, we aren’t just learning from successes, but also from the jettisoned identities that no longer serve. Likewise, as Genesis P. Orridge advised, if any authority or mystique begins to develop around you, it will begin to control you, so it’s imperative that you kill it and reinvent yourself.
All of this requires having your thumb on the pulse of the community and being able to express and connect the things that we’re all generally thinking about. Also, it demands original thought.
It’s a lateral belonging where everyone contributes and no one is prioritized.
That’s the only thing that’s going to scratch the itch generated by my Vaunted Savior versus Hated Alien karma.
What’s next for the Creekmasons?
Ok, so I’m no longer aiming to be a Professional Creative, at least not as my exclusive day job. What does that mean for the Creekmasons?
The new pie in the sky dreams are still to save up the money generated through Patron Practicus Membership Dues and Substack subscriptions to accomplish three objectives:
Give Adeptus Makers the financial security to promote enough flexibility to select a day job that provides the work life balance necessary to create art
Fund Creekmason Community Cultivation. I’d like to take retreats together! Or at least help sponsor one another to informally meet up now and then.
Hire outside contractors, like marketers, copy editors, and publicists, etc.
Who makes the money for and from the community? Adeptus Makers.
The full article about the Structure of our Decentralized Collective is here, but as a refresher, Adeptus makers each provide an Art (something that Cultivates Community by attracting new users, in essence) and a Service (something that aids our fellow Adeptus Makers).
For instance, one of my Services is IT admin work, so I handle discord bots, dealing with the Wordpress and Substack backends, and projects like migrating the website to Google Cloud.
Many hands make light work. If one person vibes with creating Social Media posts and another hates it, we don’t all have to be our own algorithm-employed self-starters wearing fifteen or so hats in order to be a content producer.
A shared set of creator tools are part of the bargain. A lot of people Direct Message me asking how to get their podcast hosted and what kind of equipment they need… these are things that would be attractive value propositions to creators who want to join at the Adeptus Maker level.
And once we start making more money than I'm spending on this hobby, after our democratically decided allotment to development and publishing is set aside, the remainder will be divided in a purely egalitarian, equal split among all Adeptus Makers, with a "bonus pool" reserved for merit-based incentive.
You’ll recall bonuses work like this: each Adeptus Maker gets 100 votes about how to spend the bonus pool, and then we vote for anyone but ourselves. Whoever has been helpful to us or the collective. Then, whatever percentage of everyone's votes each Adeptus Maker gets, that's the percentage of the Bonus Pool they get.
I don't honestly feel comfortable doing anything like that until we get an LLC up and running with a customized Co-op style operating agreement and legally viable Adeptus Maker contracts.
Probably about $3000 in legal fees, all told.
We’re saving up, though!