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I’m excited to welcome the lovely Vanessa Sage to the 14 Days of Self-Love project! Vanessa is a life coach and fellow Canadian and I’m so honoured that she’s sharing with us a bit about her present journey and how she decided to give herself some space to create and the lessons of self-love that brought her there.
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When I was in the second year of my PhD program I knew I was on the wrong path. I had tried to create poetry out of my comprehensive exams, and I wasn’t in a creative writing program. Both before and after I went into my oral defense, my supervisor confronted me, asking:
“Are you an artist or an anthropologist?”
I didn’t know what to say, except: “both.” Only I had a feeling that was the wrong answer.
In that exam, I talked passionately about wanting to understand the evocative elusive beauty in things such as Andy Goldsworthy’s art (the way some anthropologists work to understand globalization, for example).
How he ground up stones from a river and then threw them up in the air to settle back into the same river. How the material of that river was unchanged, but the act of those stones flying through the air, as dust, changed it somehow. Profoundly.
Or perhaps it simply changed me, and that was the mystery.
Fragility, hope, art: these were my guiding words at the time. I wanted to understand how we make meaning out of these lives that we cannot fundamentally hold. Was this not anthropology?
Right now, as I write this, I’m in the middle of year seven of my PhD program. I’ve taken the courses, churned out the papers, done the primary research, talked to some pretty awesome people, and written a complete draft of my dissertation.
As I sit here thinking about doing the revisions (the almost final step of the program) my jaw tenses, my chest tightens, and tears fill my eyes.
I think to myself, “why did I choose to write about something so painful, and so close, for a piece about self-love?”
I remind myself to connect, let the story that needs to be told come out, and not to try and make it pretty. Getting to a place of love isn’t always pretty.
So this is the story that came out: me in that moment talking about river stones turned to dust, in a room with four of my professors staring at me, realizing I’d rather be a poet.
This is the story that has been sitting inside me for five years. It is the story I’ve used to beat myself up with: “Why didn’t I walk away? Why didn’t I become a poet?”
For five years I’ve been trying to walk two paths. Trying to make these two things make sense. I’ve done my very best. And while I know that I will always be an anthropologist, at my core, I know am an artist.
So, I’m giving myself a gift. I’m going away for three weeks in February to an artist’s retreat in Picton, Ontario to revise an academic work I wrote about artists (because that is what I ended up picking as my research topic). I’m giving myself time. I’m giving myself love.
No longer an academic but an artist.
And, you know, when I am an artist I truly love myself because, as simple as it may sound, I am truly being myself.
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Vanessa Sage is a writer, coach and guide at Sage Life Consulting. Her work embodies an everyday kind of spirit that touches lives the way those stones ground into dust touched the river. She is also completing her PhD in Anthropology on a bourgeoning arts scene in Hamilton, Ontario…and is doing it as artfully as she can.