An Art-Do Mindset (aka the Growth Mindset)

Do you ever get this gut feeling that something is wrong? Just pure gut. Even though you rationalize it at the time as right, you feel that something is off. 

That's how I felt after publishing the Anxiety, Depression, and Imperfection post. Everything felt okay until the last part when I tried to reach some sort of conclusion. After a few days away from the keyboard and keeping myself active by putting together bookshelves and organizing my room, a few epiphanies came to me, which of course is why I'm back here. 

I was a Business major in college (and an English major, but that's beside the point), and almost every semester there was at least one business professor who set aside a segment on personal growth. The pervading theme was the growth mindset, preferable over a fixed mindset. Having a fixed mindset is believing that who you are is who you are and that's the end of the story. That also means failures are who you are. If you're bad at bowling, you're just bad at bowling. If you're good at math, then you're good at math. Sounds straightforward, right? 

On the other hand, having a growth mindset means that rather than looking at something you're good or bad at as the whole picture, a person with a growth mindset sees that that moment in time as one point in a greater line graph. They believe how they do then is not determinative of how they can do. You score a whopping 23 points in bowling? Sure, you're bad then but keep practicing and you can score 300s. And the growth mindset's applicability doesn't end at failures. If you're good at math, you can be better by feeding your curiosity. 

What I mean by line graph is that every time you practice, you don't get exponentially better. There will be times when you feel like you're getting worse or you're flatlining. A person with a fixed mindset would think, "See! I knew I was bad at this." A person with a growth mindset would think, "Maybe I'm approaching this the wrong way. Let's try this instead." 

I spent four years with professors drilling this ideology into my skull. When I attended orientation for law school and passed out growth mindset articles, the concept was already old news. The thing is I completely agree with the growth mindset ideology. But like I said before, and I guess that's the running trend with me, there's a difference between knowing and understanding. 

I was very much in the know, but the understanding hasn't tapped in until now. 

In the last blog post, I noticed how what I wrote sounded very fixed mindset. "I am imperfect." And that was the whole picture. I was considering people and myself as either perfect or imperfect but that is such a determinative way of looking at things. Yes, I still believe I am imperfect. I think I was getting close to the answer towards the end when I resolved to approach my imperfection with less emotion. 

My mind is a scrambled mess, so if you're going to be reading these posts, you've got to stick with me here. So, drawing. Art. Ever since I was young, I loved to draw and create anything with my hands, whether that be with paint, clay, mixed media, or even a small slip of paper that could be folded into an accordion. I got to a point in middle school when people were telling me, "Frina, you're so good at drawing!" That statement felt weird to me. I never really associated what was on the paper with my being. I mean, I was always critical of whether a line was crooked or if a drawing emoted what I wanted it to emote. I had a sense of good and bad drawing. And it gave me such immense satisfaction and joy when I was able to create something I thought was good. But I never connected to how good or badly I drew to whether I was a good or bad artist. 

But I absorbed what they said and started thinking of myself as a good artist. That's also when I started comparing myself to other art-lovers. Before, I would look at good art and think, "That's amazing! How can I do that? I want to achieve the same effect." It was never an ego thing for me. But the second I thought of myself as an extension of my art, I started to see people as an extension of their art.

There was this one time in high school when I exchanged my first commission with another art friend at school. She drew me and I drew her and there were zero rules. So I drew her as a snake. Now the word "snake" has taken a colloquial meaning as a liar and a cheat, but she seemed to me like a snake in that she was cool-looking lol. I spent a long time on that drawing. On the first day of class, I met up with her and gave her my snake drawing. Apparently, she had forgotten about the commission. During the lunch break, she gave me what was clearly a sketch. It was drawn on a half-ripped paper and I could still see the guideline sketches, which meant that she didn't even bother to erase them and clean the drawing up. I could tell she didn't spend much time on it, especially since she had to have drawn it between the first class I met her and break. Still, her drawing showed confidence and the proportions were satisfying. I loved the composition and artistic style. Even though it was a sketch, you can clearly tell she was practiced in her craft. 

I was so jealous. I felt terrible as an artist and ashamed. I couldn't believe I gave her that stupid, childish snake drawing. She could probably see it was bad like how a parent looks at her child's wonky stick figure drawing, smiles, and tells her it looks lovely. I don't think I could talk to her normally throughout the rest of the high school years. I still look back at the drawing (I kept it) and those feelings come rushing back to me every time.

I started to depend on my art as a reflection of myself. High school was when I really started to recede into myself. The constant pressure at Lynbrook High was to be good at all your subjects, master your hobbies, lead a few extracurricular clubs, and be warm and personable with the appropriate sense of humor and cynicism. Of course, that wasn't me. I didn't do well in math and science and I wasn't leading any clubs. I didn't want to be nice to everyone when I didn't feel like it or when I didn't like the person. I didn't have the same sense of humor. I did, however, always get compliments on my doodles, so that became my personality and reputation. I heavily depended on being a "good artist" for social status. I still loved art but somewhere down the line, it was polluted and corrupted with social pressure and ego. 

This was the fixed mindset. I AM good at art. I AM bad at math and science. There is also an element of comparison. I AM here, but you ARE below me and she is ABOVE me.

But with my true, natural art mindset, I never associated how well I did to who I was. Messed up a line? Erase it. Or maybe it looks good like that. I always had the mindset of "yeah sure it looks shitty, but I can make it better." If that artist can hold a pen and draw a line on paper, so can I. If Bob Ross can hold a brush sideways and blot a canvas, so can I. No matter how complicated an art piece was, I knew that it came to be with little steps that I could do. It was never about who I WAS but that I could DO.

I came to realize this recently. As I isolated myself from people in law school (because I'm still struggling with self-confidence problems), I had more time by myself and away from social expectations. I drew what I wanted, no matter how shitty or good. I watched a bunch of how-tos and speedpaints on Youtube to learn new digital art and watercolor techniques. I rejoiced when I showed improvements and pushed on when I didn't quite get it right. I love art more than ever and I never want to corrupt it by attaching my sense of self and how others saw me to how I made art. I noticed that when I would post art on my Instagram, I would revert to my old mindset. I'd be concerned with how many likes I got, who liked it, and what comments there were. I felt gross, like I was dishonoring my art. Is it not beautiful in its own right? Can it not hold its head up high without little red digital hearts supporting its chin? I still post on Insta because I like the finality of it and sharing my joy with the world, but I always have to consciously not revert to that old mindset.

I noticed in college how this mindset would also mess with my artist friends' heads. Two of my good friends would always say how good I am at art and follow it with how bad they are at art and it always irked me. Art was never about how good or bad you are, and I hated to hear them say that. I also saw their art and gassed them up when I saw they were doing something well because I wanted them to know they were capable. They just needed to keep practicing. It had nothing to do with how "good" I was. I shouldn't even be a factor in how they did their art. But I was hypocritical because I tended to think that way myself, even though I knew it was wrong. 

With this art-DO way of thinking, I was aware of imperfections, but I never got hung up on them. I was just super-motivated to improve until I got a result that satisfied me. I need to apply that with how I approach my goals in life. There's so much that I want to do: read a bunch of books, write novels, organize and decorate my dream room, launch a business with my friends, do all sorts of art, get back into martial arts and maybe try muay thai, learn my parents' native languages but also Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin or Canto, Japanese, Hindi, just all the languages, own a ton of aquariums and vivariums, and maybe get a farm?? There's so much I want to do and learn in life. But I avoid the hard work that's required to achieve these goals. I literally role up in a blanket and sleep till late afternoon dreading the work because in my fixed mindset, I believe I'm incapable. Hello, Depression.

Like right now, my immediate goal is to pass law school and the Bar, but I can barely get myself to study. It's not like I quit right away. In the first semester, I was organized and studious, but when I started getting confused and behind on the work, I completely let myself go. I have high expectations and expect myself to leap across a 60-foot canyon right away, telling myself, "This is who you ARE." I focused a lot on who I WAS and me, me, me, and not enough time on the work itself. 

I think it makes sense though. If I don't get the material, I look for an easier way out, a way I can make excuses, because if I admit that I'm not good at it, that not being good at law and law school was who I WAS, then I would have made a huge mistake. So much money and time down the drain. 

In reality, I was just taking a harder path through the thistles and twisted roads of my mind. The faster route to success is to push through, not take side roads and "detours" because the path I chose was not an easy one and such side roads are easy escapes. 

I envied my law school peers who seemed to be doing so well. Right now, I'm in the bottom 10% of my class. I have a 2.4 GPA. I need to accept this as reality. This is not who I AM. This is just what it is now. But like I draw, I shouldn't get hooked up on a crooked line. My "failures" are my motivation. You know when you watch those transformation videos? Like if they pick a stray dog off the road and he has a chopped off leg and mange and he's snarling in fear. But that the end of the video, the dog's fur is fluffy and growing back, he's bounding around quite well on three legs, and he's licking and cuddling his foster parents. The greater the difference, the more satisfying the result. I guess this is why I loved being "bad" at art, too. I loved seeing the improvements. So there was a strange satisfaction in being bad because I looked forward to when I would improve. 

If I have this mindset, then my failures now should technically be satisfying. Working towards achievements and solving the puzzle every step of the way is satisfying. With this mindset, whether I AM good or bad doesn't matter; it matters what I DO. 

Recently, I watched this video by the late R.C. Sproul. On his whiteboard, he wrote: "How are you? I am fine." The "am" was underlined. He said we always tend to think of who we ARE. Grammatically, "are" is "to be." We think of the verb tense as "be," which is in the present and how you are in that present is written in stone. But a verse in the Bible reads: "he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus" (Phil. 1:6). Sproul made the point that we are always "being" and "becoming," never stagnant like "to be." And that, I believe, is an essential part of our humanity.