The Perils of Attention (part 1)

How to Find Healthy Recognition in a World that Encourages Dopamine Spikes

Writing about the artist’s ego is a sticky thing; I am attempting to do this for several reasons. Partly it’s to share my explorations of this topic in my book in process, “Rewilding Our Muses,” but I’m also really curious, at this stage in my life, about how recognition and external approval has manipulated my creative impulses and how to liberate myself from that pull.

Questions to explore: When do we learn to seek approval and why does it become a huge carrot for some and not so much for others? Is the need for attention and respect a basic human need? What does healthy ego development look like? When and how does the need for recognition become obsessive? What shapes the urge to see one’s name in print? To win the big award? To be immortal through one’s art? Is it purely an economic need that fuels this compulsion? Is it capitalism’s snare in a culture of scarcity that does not value artists or even how to think about art? Is it our society’s competitive nature that makes some of us crave bigger and bigger attention?

Is it that without being a significant “influencer” your particular gift or offering will not garner sufficient means for sustenance? Many of us, no matter what generation, may have been told that without attention, our art will wither on the vine, we won’t get the feedback we need to grow our work, we won’t adequately shine, and we will suffer from economic hardship. But is that really true, or is that a chain that we’ve inherited that we need to shake off?

I’ve always been curious about how the wounds from our childhoods, growing up without sufficient care and love, both in the family and in the community, can cause an extreme craving for attention, particularly in this era of hyper-isolation and social media. Is cold and disengaged parenting a factor, along with epigenetic wounds? Was it the bullying from peers that provoked a revenge impulse? Is the training in our art schools behind this drive to be the chosen one, the special genius who wins the awards? Or is this a cultural myth inculcated by so many oppressive systems within modern society? What do those of us who do develop a recognized career learn and share about its transitory nature? How do we decolonize from this unhealthy lure?

In exploring this topic, I decided to look more closely at my own journey as an artist with an ego (sometimes healthy, and sometimes not so much), from childhood to the present. I am writing these recollections cautiously because I realize that there may be a tendency to romanticize and dramatize the past. While my memories are a bit hazier than I would like, the viewing of recently digitized films taken by my father were a good prompt. Although not one of them documents my early creative expressions, other than the eating of flowers (my attempt to literally consume beauty at ages 2 & 3), they do provide a glimpse into that period of my life. I offer this snippet of my journey with compassion for the wounds and creative medicine that all of us carry.

I was the youngest of three offspring. Both of my much older brothers were mostly engaged in play (often fighting) with each other, so I was left to my own devices when I wasn’t being asked to help with chores. In those free, alone times, I just did what spirit directed, without inhibition, with no thought about approval. I didn’t expose much of what I did to others because mockery or teasing was often the response. I was too young to realize that my creativity might be perceived as threatening or dangerous, so intuitively I knew to keep it private.

When I was moody or bored, I played improvisations on the piano with abandon. I created dramatic performances with random inanimate objects, broken dolls, shells, and boxes, and built altars with these now animated artifacts. I spoke into a discarded dictation machine and recorded long tales that I created on the spot, and was fascinated by the strange and unfamiliar voice that mirrored back my stories. When the chaos in the house grew to be too much, I took refuge in the garden and developed rituals in the sacred womb-like space under the spruce tree, whispered secrets to the tree, while sniffing the vegetation for encouragement. I greeted insects under rocks and talked to the birds. For one special season, a lovely brown & white pigeon became the fond object of my affections and my muse. When I was moved to do so, I danced and sang to every living thing I saw.

Not all of my creativity was visible or audible; I spent a lot of time staring out of windows, watching the world moving in front of me, making up stories about the movements of neighbors and mysterious cob webs. I also hid in closets, investigating their contents, playing detective with what I found. Sometimes I was hiding from punishment, harsh words, and loud conflicts that others were expressing, but there were family secrets that were not discussed and I was determined to find out what they were.

By the time I was 7, my creative impulses were corralled by assignments and directions from others, and immediately inhibitions took hold. Because I was naively perceived to be a child prodigy, piano lessons were offered. Even though the first teacher was kind, memorizing notes imposed a discipline that crimped my wilder flights into sound. When that gentle teacher left town, a second piano teacher was found to prepare me for concert performances; she was exacting and cruel, and a poor match for my experimental ambitions. After a few torturous years, I left my piano playing, never to return.

As hand-drawn imagery emerged in response to assignments, I learned that my creations drew attention and praise. One would think that this would provide me with encouragement and pleasure, but even hearing the words, "you are an artist," from my second grade teacher filled me with contradictory emotions. The thrill of hearing those words was not a sufficient antidote to my already active super ego who poked doubts into my swelling head. If I shared my pride at home, it was torn apart as unhealthy bragging, not suitable for the humble girl I was supposed to be. Still the dopamine spike of praise usually lasted longer than the high of eating sweets, and although I was unconscious of the craving planted in my psyche, it was there, waiting for the next hit. What truly fed my ego during those early years, from age 9 to 11, was applause. I had a voice then, and was a featured soloist in the elementary school choir and performed at summer camp. The cheers and claps of the audience were like medicine, soothing all of the bruises accumulated in those early years. I dreamt of being the next Janis Ian until an embarrassing incident on stage short-circuited that vision. I burped into the mike, and, alas, at age 11, I didn’t have the comedic charisma to turn that moment into a crowd-pleaser.

While I loved my dance teacher, Dot Perron (a very talented & respected dancer in her own right, and mother of the renowned performer, writer and editor, Wendy Perron), who helped me go deeply into my body's expression, I was not so uninhibited when performing for others. Rehearsing in Dot's basement was a safe space, but getting on stage in a leotard or costume, was not. I could feel judging eyes upon me, and I could not get into the zone that allowed for joy. Looking back, I recognize that I had already been taught to dislike my body. Sadly I could not enjoy the experience of being publicly scrutinized with that operating in my head.

During those early years, I was blessed with so many opportunities to express myself creatively. I don't think that my parents were consciously trying to shape me into an artist, in fact, that was not at all their intention. As children of immigrants who had grown up with few resources, and none whatsoever for arts education, I'm sure that they felt strongly about compensating for their own deprivations. They also were determined to help me assimilate into the educated class of American culture, despite many hurdles that they had faced and being "cultured" was part of that project. Unlike my older brothers who were traveling that road via sports and academic excellence, and who grew up with much less economic stability than I did due to my father's blacklisted status during the late 1940s and early 1950s, my mom budgeted carefully so that I could be given piano lessons, dance classes, and access to free arts events in NYC. In retrospect, I am enormously grateful for those privileges, although the arts programming was pretty conventional (tame art for the suburbs and high art for the elite).

The art forms that attracted me changed abruptly during my teen years; words arrived as poems and were welcomed by a particular teacher, Mr. Okey Chenoweth. If not for his encouragement, they may not have arrived. Okey, as he liked to be called, was a creative wizard in the classroom and one of the kindest mentors I've ever encountered. As the high school theater director, he could get the most ornery of teens to become a Pinter character and let loose their angst as poignant lines of poetry. At first, I was a bit tentative in the world of words, having a mom who was an editor, who found it necessary to constantly correct my pronunciation, usage, and grammar. Thankfully the superego who was shaped by her efforts has been tamed at this stage in my life, and I'm able to let the words flow without constant interruption.

One of the fiercest poems that emerged in Okey's class, after being published in the high school literary magazine, was reprinted (without my permission) in an Irish journal of poetry called Minerva, sometime in the late 1970s. A few years after the world wide web was a thing, the former editor of that Irish journal, Paddy Murray, sent me a lovely note telling me that my poem not only stayed with him for decades, but that he had shared it with an Irish poet laureate, Brendan Kennelly, who was deeply moved by it. I was glad to receive such positive feedback for my angst-filled poem decades later. The first line of the poem said, “In the painful ecstasy of shattered glass” and the last line was, “the world punched back.” The rest of the poem sits waiting for me to find it somewhere hidden in my hard copy files.

Edit: FOUND, the original hand written version on 10/10/2023.

During my last year in high school, I performed in several plays as an old lady, an alcoholic and tuberculosis-ridden woman, and a crazy lady (never an ingenue) and created paintings and drawings about my fears and dreams. It was a time of great emotional turbulence, and without these creative outlets, I might have made more self-destructive choices than I did. I didn’t get much external approval for my creative efforts, but no one prevented me from making art and the process kept me sane. At the insistence of my parents, I saw a psychiatrist who told me that I had a “crazy-making mother.” That comment, in itself, grounded me. She asked to look at my paintings of dreams and nightmares (none of which exist today) and we would deconstruct their meanings together - this response was a huge encouragement.

In retrospect, her Jungian approach in our sessions, really strengthened my relationship to my muses in the best way. I was not yet aware of the epigenetic trauma carried by my parents and their parents, but my paintings of that period were clearly in touch with something both ancestral and collective.

I didn’t think that I was craving anyone’s approval; I was a seeker, trying to understand why things were so fucked up, and part of the menu of the counter culture that was available to me at that time, reassured me that an upwardly mobile life in the suburbs was not in my future. I was practicing yoga, smoking pot, dropping acid, going to anti-war protests, eating vegetarian, listening to the blues, reading alternative newspapers, and learning as much as I could from peers and wise elders. I was angry and idealistic. I had not yet encountered feminism other than my reading of Simone de Beauvoir. I had experienced racism and was terrified by those experiences, but I did not know how to make sense of it. I was attempting self-awareness as best I could, but I was quite vulnerable due to some pretty huge holes in my self-esteem. My rudimentary consciousness of systemic oppressions sparked me to organize my female peers to change the dress code at school and to speak out against patriotic propaganda, but I was unconscious in some pretty major ways. Floundering like most young people do, I was grateful to be part of a movement of people questioning every value promoted by the authorities around us.

My high school art teacher, the late Mr. Sponzilli, the first out gay man that I had the pleasure to work with, asked me one day, as I was packing up my portfolio in his classroom, just before graduation, what art school I had chosen to attend. I responded with a loud guffaw, “Art school, you’ve gotta be kidding me; I’m going to something serious with my life!” He shook his head side-to-side, and sighed with discouragement. I regret never going back to apologize to him, even after becoming an art professor myself. In my high school yearbook, under my photo, was printed my future aspiration: “Communication through the Arts,” but somehow during that particular year of endless social upheaval (1970-71), I had felt that the arts were too trivial to contend with the problems of the world. I wanted to do something “serious.”

Navigating the emotional issues surrounding self-esteem and healthy ego development were barely conscious concerns as I entered college, but as you will read in my next post, the tensions between wanting to “make it” as an artist, wanting to be of service to humanity, and wanting to model utopian ideals by living in an alternative collective and promoting radical pedagogy were the pulse points of those years. I’ll have to look back at my old journals to see if I was able to articulate those desires at that time, but I have feeling that they’re mostly filled with endless ruminations about love and existential dread.

Thanks for your readership. If anything I’ve shared here resonates for you, I’d be grateful to hear about it.