Pottery was not my one and only love
I often get emails and social media messages from people wanting to know how I found my passion. That one thing that fulfilled me. I don’t think it’s very useful to frame my journey like this. Telling people that there’s one thing out there that is going to be “their thing” which will make them forever happy isn’t helpful. You set people up for failure when you do that. My journey was not about finding the one thing that would complete me. It was about finding lots of little joys and about learning to appreciate all the things I already had - and about learning to live with the sad feelings too.
It is okay to sometimes give up and redirect our lives like I did but that does not mean that we should start hating on the things that are not exactly how we want them to be. I didn’t quit to find the next thing that was going to fulfil me. I quit to have time for the things that were giving me a sense of fulfilment and purpose, and pottery was one of those things. I think one of the main reasons I have been so okay during this pandemic is that mindfulness and working with clay has taught me to stop trying to control the things that are not in my power and, more importantly, it is because deep inside I know the truth which is this: it could have been so many other things than pottery!
I absolutely love making and I am so grateful that this is the life that I get to live - but it could also have been so many other things that I could have turned into my next “career”. I could have retrained as a yoga teacher and opened my own yoga studio. I could have studied various healing practices and started running retreats. I could have started making cooking videos and made a go at becoming a chef. I could even have gone back to an office job, whilst pursuing things outside of work that would give me fulfilment. I would actually hate it if pottery was the one and only thing meant for me. Imagine the pressure I would be under to make it work, or how devastating it would have been, had SkandiHus not worked out.
Living with the shadow side
The flip side of learning to appreciate the little things, is learning to live with the painful stuff too. To sit with our shadow sides. I spent so much of my life running from my pain. I knew all the tricks that would numb my pain from working too much, drinking too much, binging on exercise (probably one of the less unhealthy ones but it was still an escape in the way I did it), buying too much stuff and obsessively checking how many Instagram likes I had (still struggling with the social media addiction, but you know, I am work in progress too…).
When I say that I ran from my pain, it probably sounds very dramatic, but with pain, I don’t mean big massive trauma or anything out of the ordinary. I just mean that I ran from some of the (perceived) negative feelings that we all have by virtue of being alive, but which the world we live in tells us is a sign of us getting it wrong. In this post-industrial modern world, we have somehow ended up living in a way that encourages us to strive for eternal “feel good” states of being. When we feel bad, we buy more stuff, strive more, do more, say more, achieve more, eat more, look more. More more more. In my lawyer days, I was trapped in this endless upward spiralling cycle of “more”. I put a lot of that pressure on myself because I had this deep-rooted feeling that nothing I did was ever enough. I always felt like I could (and should) do better.
Slowly over the years, I have learned to stop running from my feelings and when you stop numbing out with alcohol/work/shopping/love/social media etc (we all have our own ways of doing it), you end up having to feel ALL of your feelings: The full spectrum of emotion that every human being was created to feel but that the capitalist dream tells us is a sign of failure, ie the notion that you’ve somehow failed in life if you don’t jump out of bed happy every single day. I heard the brilliant Glennon Doyle say in an interview recently that since she stopped drinking, she hasn’t had a single day of “feeling fine”. She went on to list all the things she’s been, like exhausted and terrified and angry. Overwhelmed and underwhelmed and debilitatingly depressed and anxious. Amazed and awed and delighted and overjoyed to bursting. And after a pause, she said “Basically, I have been alive”. And that’s the thing, when you stop numbing, stop living out of obligation - you start living! And that means feeling all of your feelings, even the uncomfortable ones. The trick is to find healthy ways to have breaks from having to feel it all. I find these breaks in nature, meditation and yoga… and obviously when working with clay. For others, it’s dancing or cooking a gourmet meal. For me, the importance is to make it part of my life and not an escape from my life - because when we are needing to escape, we are not fully living our one precious life.
With love, Stine x
