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FULL TRANSCRIPT

I was a "different" kind of kid; past episodes have given you glimpses of my awkward early years. I just didn't "fit in" for a very long time. I have one of those last names my teachers could never pronounce and that made me an easy target. And I was interested in different things, read different books, listened to different music than my peers. The kids around me in grade 4 liked bands like Pink Floyd. I liked—and to my detriment unselfconsciously admitted that I liked—Abba, and Neil Diamond. I might as well have told them I liked Nana Mouskouri while I was at it. And where other kids were good at team sports, I was better at being off in my own world which I frequently was. I had a penchant for sarcasm and quirky humour, too. I still do, though it gets me beaten up a little less these days. In reaction to all this, to being so unlike the other kids, I was teased and bullied and the enduring lesson of childhood, at least from my peers, was "you're different and that's bad."

I think many of us learned that same lesson early on, and things don't change much as we get a little older. In my experience they intensify. High School only increased the stakes. We didn't have a lot of money as I grew up, so fashion wasn't something I was often guilty of, and in high school you are what you wear. I never had the cool stuff. For a while there I took to wearing a grey track suit. Somewhere, there is a picture of me in grey sweats with a pink polo shirt, the ensemble made complete with a Burberry's trench coat that only later I learned had been pulled from a dumpster by an eccentric step-aunt before being given to me. It should surprise no one that I was called Inspector Gadget for a year or two. Then I did such a dramatic about-face that they started calling me GQ after the men's style magazine of the same name. I couldn't seem to win for trying, each moniker a reminder that I was different, and that was bad.

It's not like I didn't know, or wasn't learning, the so-called rules of engagement. It's not like I was trying not to blend in. I'd love to say I was just marching to the beat of my own drum, which I guess I was, but I really thought I was in sync with everyone else. Turns out I just had no rhythm, though God knows I tried hard enough. Being different was too big a liability as kid for me to just willingly dive headlong into it. Perhaps you can relate. We all tried so hard just not to stand out, didn't we? To just keep our heads down? While some of us were more successful than others, I was in the remedial class for kids that just couldn't blend in. I still am.

In his book Modern Man In Search of a Soul, specifically the essay titled The Stages of Life, the psychiatrist Carl Gustaf Jung eloquently puts his finger on the cost of these early lessons when he says, "we wholly overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at a cost of the diminuation of personality."

I don't think I could sum up the struggle of my younger years any better than that. But here's the thing: somewhere along the way, something changed and all the liabilities turned to assets. I stopped twisting my ankle on the weird topography of my personality. I stopped, for the most part, being ashamed of the things that made me so painfully different—and here I'm talking about the whole package not just my ill-advised and overly-vocal affection for Neil Diamond. Those things and the ability to be different, or comfortable being different, equipped me for roles I never imagined I'd be playing now. "You're different and that's bad" turned to "you're different and that's good, or useful." So what does that have to do with you and your own life of creativity? I'm David duChemin and this is episode 77 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let's talk about it.

Wikipedia says that "personality refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving." - the very things so often chipped away at in our earlier years and, if we're not careful to resist it, well into our later years. Individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving? What else is there? That's everything that makes us us! If that's the cost of blending in, and having the bits that stick out sanded smooth so they're easier for others to accept or understand, then the cost is much too high.

Later in the Stages of Life essay, Jung talks about the lessons learned in one stage being unsuitable for the lessons learned later on. He says "we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life's morning—for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie."

That was the idea I wanted to camp out on in this conversation, that the creative life is one of constantly re-learning our lessons, that there are stages in the creative life and that what works at one point in our creative life, may not work in later stages, and that one of those lessons, specifically "you're different and that's bad" is a lesson many of us need to stop applying. It's a lesson that once made life easier but never once made it better or deeper for those that took it to heart.

But I don't think I'm going to get there right now because I'm stuck on this idea of the diminuation of personality and my growing suspicion that the role of the artist, no matter the discipline, is resistance. Specifically, at least in this conversation, resistance against conformity and the voices that encourage it. First in, and for, ourselves—because if this isn't one of those put your own oxygen mask on before helping others situations then I don't know what is—but also for others.

The creative life is a chance to amplify and explore differences. To learn from them, to draw on them. Celebrate them rather than fear them or mock them. It is a chance to encourage and celebrate the differences in our ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that make us individuals. To find in those dissimilarities new ideas, emotions, and ways of doing things, all of which could be exciting new raw materials for artists looking for new stories, themes, or ways of working.

If we have any hope of making art that pulls us forward rather than repeats what has been done before, any hope of being at home in our own quirky skin and finding in those quirks some fascinating contour to be loved and built upon rather than something to be hidden and of which we are ashamed, then it is to the differences we need to look. It is by the differences we, and our work, will be recognized, not all the ways in which we conform.

But it's not just that. I think art-making is a form a leadership. It's a means by which we encourage our culture, with what we make and how we make it, to think in new ways. I think a life of everyday creativity is an opportunity to nudge our culture away from homogeny and sameness, to actively resist the diminuation of personality and—so far as we have any say in it—to amplify the efforts of others to do the same.

The whole idea of a beautiful anarchy, not the title of the podcast, but the idea itself, is one of defiance, one of resistance, and while I think there are many directions in which that resistance can be applied, one of them must be a resistance to conformity, and to sameness. As creators and artists we are makers and one of the things we have always made, collectively if not always as individuals, is change. Change-makers, however, do not blend in. They not only do not believe that being different is bad, they believe different is what we need, that to make a difference we need to be different.

So I don't know what voices still rattle around in your head, the ones that point out all the ways you're not like everyone else. I don't know what kind of traumas, big or small, have contributed, perhaps still contribute, to the diminuation of the individual differences thinking, feeling and behaving that make you, you. And I can't un-speak the words with which others teased or mocked or belittled you. Nor can I un-hear the words spoken with that same intent to me. But I can tell you you aren't alone. Look around and you'll see a lot of us. The ones that Apple, in the now legendary 1997 Think Different ad campaign, called, "the crazy ones."

"Here's to the crazy ones," it begins. "The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Different isn't bad. Different isn't even necessarily good. It's what you do with it. It's not only that you are different, it's whether you make a difference and how. And to those of you who have long lived comfortably with whatever it is that makes you different, thank you. Thank you for showing the rest of us that there's something beyond the fear of ridicule and the discomfort of not being the same as everyone else. Thank you for giving us hope, and for making the things that enrich our lives, taking the risks to buck the trends and rock the boat, for doing what is new and unproven, and being willing to look foolish in the doing so. Thank you for resisting whatever forces that might have otherwise crammed you into a mold that didn't fit, and for giving us the courage to do the same as we try in our own way to make something beautiful.

Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0

life creativeDavid DucheminNovember 27, 2021Episode 077