Paint It Black

“Sometimes, you have to get angry to get things done” - Ang Lee

It started with anger.

I was a blocked writer working at a day job that didn’t pay a lot but still paid more than anything I’d ever done. I had spent my life doing the bare minimum to please outer expectations while trying to pursue my own inner dreams. But somewhere along the line, those dreams got quieter and I got more tired. The only thing consistent was the guilt, screaming at me the whole time: you will be a total failure if you give up on art. Otherwise, what’s all this been for?

Fuck if I knew. All I knew was I had a college degree and a job I could have gotten straight out of high school. I was 31 years old and had only just figured out I was trans a few short years ago. (Goodbye, savings account.) The money I drained was worth it but it didn’t make finally moving out of my parent’s house any easier. I had a boss at work who didn’t respect me or my boundaries, and constantly put down my gender expression and dark fashion sense as well as my sarcastic humor.

Though I enjoyed a lot of aspects of my job, it was a people-facing thing and I’m an extreme introvert. I would come home drained every day, my energy reserves on empty. I knew I needed to leave, but I didn’t know how. I had formed other bonds and attachments at work I didn’t want to let go of, and I was scared.

All my life I’d been the type of person who was very shy, secure in myself alone but suddenly tragically unconfident in front of others. Part of this was growing up in a small town where I never got to meet other people like myself, unless it was over the internet. As a result, every time I found a situation that I could live with, that became comfortable, I dug my roots in and refused to budge. There was this inner voice the whole time telling me that if I left whatever comfortable place I’d found, I’d never find another, that I/my skills weren’t enough and no one else would accept me.

In the writing scene, I’d been querying the same manuscript for a while, but I’d had no luck with agents so I felt I had nothing to show for it. I’d fly into escapism in the form of books and drinking to forget all the dreams I felt I was abandoning by not doing my writing every day.

I came home one day to the little apartment I shared with my friend. She’s a very creative person and was making a large fake tree for an event she was hosting later in the year. She had a ton of large cardboard tubes she’d got from her work and she was painting them brown. It was tedious work, the kind she hated, and while we were out on the porch I’d been sitting with my book and wine and commented that I liked tedious work.

I do. There’s something about it that’s very calming and meditative. In a lot of ways it’s the opposite of creative work in that you’re not constantly afraid you’re doing something that will ruin the ‘vision’. The vision is just a completed work and there’s only one way to do it. Simple, and it makes you feel a sense of accomplishment, which I rarely felt those days.

“Will you paint them for me?” she asked, and I said sure. She needed them done in the week, so I came home from work one day and It was early afternoon but I got myself a drink (I told you it was a problem) and went out to the porch to paint. I put on a podcast on writing and painted. For three or so hours, I dipped a brush into the slick chocolatey pigment and spread it over the length of those giant tubes. I ‘zoned’ out, but it wasn’t like the thousand other times I zoned out. This was different; this was what us creative types might call flow. At the end of it all, I’d barely touched my drink.

More time passed and I kept thinking about it. I wanted to paint something else. There was something in it that satisfied both the logical and the creative side in me. But that’s when I hit the problem: finding a new love for paint and having nothing to paint. There was no outlet for me unless I gave myself a reason.

Another month or so later, I walked into work not realizing that that day would be the day I quit. I was put in an ultimatum- type situation, and my only self-respecting option was to walk out. To date, it’s one of the boldest things I ever did.

But now, here I was: in the middle of a pandemic, jobless, and unmoored from any sense of security. It was exactly as terrifying as I thought it would be.

But I was also kind of pissed.

I was sick and tired of feeling like who I was naturally was something to be ashamed of, something I had to cover up if I ever wanted a respectable job. I’d tried to ‘mute’ myself most of my life when in public to make myself digestible to the highest common denominator, and it still didn’t seem good enough. And I was done with it.

The idea of going back right back to retail was something I couldn’t deal with. I needed to do something that was purely me, a big ‘fuck you’ to the entire situation I was in.

I bought a bunch of wooden signs at Michael’s. I painted them all black. Then I took a pair of scissors and began cutting at some oaktag paper. I made a stencil, by hand, of a phrase in a font I liked: “PLEASE EXCUSE THE RANDOM SCREAMING”

I stenciled it onto one of the signs and stood back to survey my work.

As they say in the Bible, it was good. Well, at least it wasn’t shit according to my dominatrix of an inner critic. And I enjoyed every bit of the process, including- and maybe especially- the learning.

Who wants a sign like this? Well, I was about to find out. I put up an Etsy shop to have an outlet for my creations (and to convince myself I was working at something that might pay off).

Salty Sorcerer Society was born.

I came up with the name after a period of deliberation in which I threw a few dozen other options at myself in the mirror (please imagine this as literal) and none of them stuck. Finally, in the effort of not taking myself too seriously, I picked the name that made my roommate laugh the most.

While ‘Salty Sorcerer Society’ did- and still does- make me think of a circle of wizards muttering bitterly together (for some reason they are in plastic chairs in a high school gymnasium in my head), I discovered with time it was oddly fitting. “Salty” for the sarcastic nature of many of my signs and the resentful rebelliousness out of which I spawned the shop. “Sorcerer” because well, despite the fact that I like to think of myself as a wizard who somehow never got my Hogwarts letter, creation always felt like magic to me.

“Society” tied it all together. I could have gone for many other options, the most obvious of which was “Shop”. But there was something about the exclusive quality of the word ‘society’ that resonated with me.

I wasn’t out to appeal to everyone with what I was doing. I was out to find my niche, my tribe, people who appreciate the same style and humor that I did. Not everyone is going to want a sign saying “Please ignore the shadow figure in the closet” in their home, but I wanted to cater to the people who would. People like me. I wanted to create all the little dark, humorous things I would’ve immediately pressed “Add to cart” on if I’d been the one doing the shopping.

In creating these things, I was taking all my pent-up blockage in the art of writing, and channeling it into a new project I learned as I went (and in doing so, I became less blocked with writing, too. Just saying.) I was also taking all of my hurt and frustration with feeling for a good portion of my life that I as a person was not “sellable”, and challenging that my channeling my personality into products.

The painting was my favorite part, but when I took the risk of buying a Cricut I also learned to love making designs to go over the painted wood, vinyl lettering that I also enjoyed sitting and cutting before weeding out carefully as I listened to podcasts or television in the background. It was the perfect blending of methodical and creative work that I’d never known I was craving.

I made a lot of mistakes, of course, but because it was my very first time learning any of this, I wasn’t nearly as harsh on myself. I felt like there was room to play. In my writing, I’d always struggled with the inner perfectionist, the idea that I should be at a certain place by now, that my words should be coming out exactly in the ideal form I imagined. But for a time, this Etsy store was ‘just for fun’.

The entire time, I would have loved for it to be my official new job, my business, and I never in my heart of hearts thought of it as a hobby. But I honestly couldn’t ever imagine achieving that dream - it seemed too out there- and as long as I didn’t admit it to anyone, I could just go on making mistakes and scrapping what didn’t work, keeping what did. If I started off with the assumption that this listing would never go up (probably), and if it did it would never be seen (probably) and certainly wouldn’t sell (probably), I was able to work freely and was more often than not surprised with how much I actually liked what I came out with. Even if I didn’t like the end result, I learned from it.

Why couldn’t I treat my writing this way?

I can’t pinpoint when this happened, but I started to do exactly that. I started training myself to think of writing as a craft, just like painting or any other ‘physical’ form of artistry. I could just throw things at the canvas and see what stuck. I treated it, like the wooden signs for my Etsy shop, like an experiment. Despite what my brain liked to tell me, it wasn’t like if I wrote something bad (which of course I did) it would stick around forever as defining me. I didn’t have to ever let any of my writings see the light of day.

It was all ‘just an experiment.’

It was during this time that I actually started to use my Vocal membership. I started doing morning pages, a time-bound jotting down of a certain number of stream-of-consciousness thoughts that came into my head, like a sloppy journal (if you’ve never heard of morning pages, check it out, and definitely read The Artist’s Way by Julie Cameron. It will change your creative life.) Sometimes, the beginnings, ends or middles of articles or prompts for challenge submissions would start to emerge out of the mess of words.

Sometimes poetry would emerge, sometimes brainstorming for a novel. Whenever that happened, I’d ride the flow. If it didn’t, it was okay. I’d still done 1,000 + words of writing for the day, even if I didn’t know what the hell to do with it. Yet.

The pioneering spirit that I’d gained along with my new crafty skills made writing seem new and exciting again, and I tried writing pieces I never would have written before (I was purely a fiction & poetry writer for most of my life. Writing like this wasn’t my jam; I always assumed I couldn’t do it).

This story is not over. This is not some article where, near the end I tell you how wildly successful I am now, with my writings that get thousands of reads or my shop that gets thousands of views and multiple daily purchases. I’m still in the beginning of my journey. My shop is almost seven months old and I have twenty sales to my name. I still suck at marketing, but I'm learning. I have plans for this shop- I want to start a newsletter that is part dark, absurd humor and part motivation. I have ideas for so many other fun products.

And you know what? Even if I hadn't sold a thing, this experience helped me. I feel creatively alive again for the first time in forever and it’s all due to finally abandoning what didn’t work in life and in art and channeling my frustration into learning something completely new.

{ if you liked what you read, please consider dropping a heart or leaving a tip to attain my undying love and gratitude. If you liked any of my work here, you can check out my Etsy HERE. I sell t-shirts and some other dark goodies in addition to my signs. Lastly, take all your vitamins and remember you’re awesome no matter what others tell you! : ) }