Júlia Albertoni

Artistas geralmente a sentem – Neil Gaiman e Emma Watson confessaram que já se viram como impostores um dia. É bem possível que em algum momento da vida também nos sentiremos assim. No mundo virtual, por exemplo, onde todos nós podemos e muitas vezes somos artistas, blogueiros, formadores de opinião, numa rede de 10, 200 ou 1000 pessoas, pode ser que o que desejamos ali é ser um hit, comparando-nos com perfis mainstream. Mas nem tudo pode ser um hit. Está tudo bem se a foto do seu cachorro, do seu tbt na praia verão passado, o seu tweet genial ou seu textão de facebook não ganhe muitos likes, nem seja compartilhado pelo mundo. Você não é uma impostora por isso. Você não é um fracasso. Está tudo bem se eu já fui blogueira saudável, historiadora, professora, produtora cultural independente, taróloga e vibes New Age. Está tudo bem.

Há prática no budismo tibetano que se chama “mandala de areia”, na qual monges passam quase 3 anos criando o desenho de uma mandala com areia colorida para então, num ritual, desmancha-la. Eu sei, a primeira vez que eu ouvi sobre pensei “Que coisa mais inútil”. Porém um dos objetivos da prática é lembrar da impermanência de tudo e oferecer a arte efêmera para o bem-estar dos seres. Então quando eu morei na Itália eu fiz amizade com um senhor de 60 anos apaixonado por ciência política. Ele tem um perfil no Facebook onde posta textos imensos, rebuscados e entediantes sobre política mundial que absolutamente ninguém lê. Num dos almoços em sua casa ele pediu minha ajuda para aprender a usar melhor o computador e eu fiquei muito impaciente. Qual era o propósito de todo aquele esforço?

Alguns meses depois, uma amiga ouviu essa historia e muito sabiamente respondeu, “mandala de areia”. Nem tudo o que criamos ou realizamos precisa ser permanente, duradouro, apegado, ela complementou, “Seu amigo escreve os textos como se fossem mandalas de areia. Ele assopra as palavras no ar”. Toda minha contraditória impaciência e irritação por meu amigo italiano se dissolveu e foi assim que eu passei a lidar com minha síndrome da impostora. Quando eu publico nesse site, visualizo minhas palavras como uma mandala de areia. Considero-as uma oferenda: não espero nada além da certeza que estou mantendo a árdua tarefa de limpar meu rio criativo. 

Hoje convido vocês a reverem todos os seus projetos, todas as suas criações, todas as suas experiências, todas as fotos no seu feed, todos os posts nas suas redes sociais, todas as fases e os imaginem como se fossem pigmentos coloridos de uma grande mandala que afirma “Eu valorizo”. Desse reconhecimento sobre quem vocês já foram e o que já fizeram, abrirá a celebração de quem vocês são. Reconhecemos que tudo faz parte da trajetória, da história, do que formou e do que forma o agora, enquanto seguimos aprendendo a lidar com a voz impostora que por ventura aparece. Vejam o que estou fazendo, republicando projetos do passado ao longo desse texto. Limpamos nossos rios criativos, até assoprarmos tudo para que se desmanche no ar.

Once Upon A Time, An Impostor

Some years ago I urgently needed to make my creative river flow. It was a cold Autumn night in the south of Brazil and I was sitting in the floor of my mother in law cheesy provencal living room with my tarot deck opened in front of me in the shape of a half moon. That time I was a little bit obsessed by tarot and any doubts that might seduce my mind made me run to the cards. The idea of a digital space seduced my thoughts for a while, after all I have had a healthy lifestyle blog years before, but in that moment my idea of healthy living was completely transformed and I wanted to communicate that somehow. So I asked what name should I give to the project of a new blog and the card “Sacerdotisa” (in English “The High Priestess”)  popped up not just once, but three times in a row. That was how I named  this digital space and in the lunar eclipse of January 2018, it was born.

In the beginning I wrote about tarot, self-knowledge and promoted my work as a tarot reader, while I tried to find meaning for my existence. I also wrote short stories of “The Fool’s Journey”, an Instagram column called “Cosmic Advices”, some travel diaries and played around with new ways of creating content. I enrolled in creative writing courses, won a cultural award to create and produce the project “Onde Está Desterro?” (Where is Desterro?), defended my thesis and made it become a public workshop. However, as soon as I created all of this wonderful projects, I couldn’t recognise their radiance and ignored them completely, thinking they were abominations, farces, craziness. I deceived myself well, for a long time… until I decided to stop writing one more time. I had the reasonable explanation that I would never ever find a blog niche, that what I communicated was New Age nonsense, that my works in the cultural field were insignificant, that my experiences had no value at all. Have you ever felt this way?

Eventually, ghosts haunt the creative river and the only option we have is to clean it. My life stretched, elongated, transformed and the desire to communicate came back from a place that has never left. From this old new need these chronicles were born and I didn’t care much about eloquence, perfection or craziness: I just wanted to create, from the bottom of my heart, express the wisdom that I understood to be part of the wild woman category. The task to clean the river had began and consistency was the most important tool to complete the hard work. But soon enough I realised that there was another polluted element to be withdrawn from my river that demanded more effort – it is incredible how we run away from what we know that is going to restore life. I rolled up my sleeves and organised the random content that hovered around the digital archives of this blog. In the process, I revisited 88 posts that are here filed and, to my surprise, I didn’t feel embarrassed by them or found them “superficial” as one day I judged they were. Actually, I found them great, as the pictures from the post about skin care, the eclipse chocolate recipe, the boho decoration tips, the cosmic advice part of a Newsletter or the short story that was the chapter of The Fools Journey (Sorry, these are not in English yet). Why didn’t I recognise all of that in the moment I created?

I spoke to a friend that is a visual artist and she confessed to feel the same. When she creates something she doesn’t esteem how it is meaningful, wonderful, relevant or the adjective you would like to give. She even feels some kind of embarrassment. After a while, she revisits her creations and acknowledges that the old piece has a true value – aesthetics, emotional, visual – but that can be too late because it is shelved, lost in the piles of work and in the feeling stuck into her memory that one day it was not good enough. How can we consider ourselves charlatans of our own creations? 

There is a term for that. It is called “impostor syndrome”. You can google it. I came across this term when I was in my masters, because apparently most of the post-graduate students believe that their works are massive, big and financed lies. The thought that emerges within this syndrome is that as soon as you create something, like a book, a project, a business, or as soon as you decide to do something, like a workout, a trip, a recipe – literally anything that involves your initiative – you naturally think, “Oh no, they will discover me! I am a fake!” (as we could be fake versions of a Channel bag!). This impostor that communicates to us could be a healthy voice that asks us to evaluate our conduct, but no, it is so trickster that makes us believe that we have no value and that we are actually real fakes.

Artists are used to feel it – Neila Gaiman and Emma Watson confessed that have already saw themselves as impostors. It is possible that at some point of our lives we also feel it. In the virtual world, for instance, where all of us can and many times are artists, bloggers, opinion makers, in a network of 10, 20 or 1000 people, what we could want to be in reality is a big hit, comparing ourselves to mainstream profiles. But not everything can be a hit. It is ok if the picture of your dog, your #tbt from last summer, your genius tweet or your big fat facebook text doesn’t receive as many likes as you would like. You are not a fake Channel because of it. It is ok if I have already been healthy blogger, historian, teacher, cultural producer, tarot reader, New Age vibes and can’t find my niche. It is ok. 

There is a Tibetan buddhist practice called “sand mandala” in which monks spend almost 3 years shaping the drawing of a mandala using coloured sand until one day in one cerimonial they simply  blow it. I know, the first time I heard about it I told to myself “That is useless”. However, one of the aims of the practice is to remember the impermanence of everything around us, including us, and offer the ephemeral art to the wellbeing of all sentient beings. When I lived in Italy I made friendship with an old man that loved political science. He has a Facebook profile in which he posts gigantic, polished and tedious texts about world politics that absolutely no one reads. In one of the lunches I had in his house he asked for my help with computer stuff and that made me so annoyed. What was the purpose of all his effort?

Some months later, one friend heard this story and very wisely told me: “sand mandala”. Not everything that we create or do needs to be permanent, attached, lasting, she complemented, “your friend writes his texts as they were sand mandalas. He just blows the words after posting them”. All of a sudden, the annoyance I cultivated for my Italian friend vanished and that was how I learned to deal with my impostor syndrome. From that moment, when I publish in this blog, for instance, I visualize my words framing a sand mandala. They are like offerings: I don’t expect nothing except the certainty that I am maintaining my creative river cleaned. So today I would like to invite you to look back to all of your projects, creations, experiences, pictures in your feed, posts in your social media, all of the phases, the cycles, as I did here and even shared them with you. Once you do that, you imagine them like coloured pigments of a huge sand mandala that emanantes the phrase: “I value it all”. From the recognition of who you were it will open the celebration of who you are. We acknowledge that all is part of our history and of what makes the present moment possible while we keep learning on how to deal with the impostor voice that can appear from time to time. We clean our rivers until we blow it all up to the air.

J.P.A.