What does it mean to be a creative soul in a challenging and often uncreative universe?
How can we tackle those challenges to embrace our inner creativity in whatever form it takes?
To inspire you on your journey, here are some hopefully helpful snippets and contemplations from my life as a writer, activist, and wannabee musician–the good, the bad, and the ugly, but mostly stuff I’m grateful for!
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When I was around 6, I never felt that any of the images I saw in the mirror, twirling around in my powder blue party dress, school bound in my navy blue jumper with the gold buttons, or lounging in my light cotton pants and Danskin turtle-necks was really me. Other children in my class looked like themselves–in and out of the mirror–but I could barely recognize myself as a body with a face and curls and skinny limbs. Who was that apparition that stared back at me? It didn’t look anything like the way I envisioned myself. What did I–whoever I was–really look like? When I ran the “me card” in my mind, there was no face or body. “Me” was a wispy, invisible thing rooted in my brain’s fuzz: airy and intangible. And even after decades of body-grounding practices, that little germ of me is still that flighty, fuzzy thing, nearly impossible to see.
So, for this reason, I’ve always been wary of mirrors, or any item like video or audio recorders, that attempts to cast some aspect of myself back at me. It’s hard for me to watch images of myself in motion or listen to myself speak. When I taught my classes on Public Speaking, I told my students that while recording themselves could be helpful in noting areas they could improve on, it would be better not to record if they didn’t have the stomach for stepping out of their own self-perceptions and seeing themselves as others saw them.
Over the years, I’ve grown more immune to this schism in self-perception. Now, when I look into a mirror, I have an expectation of what I’m going to see, and the resulting reflection doesn’t surprise me, even as my aging body is becoming more angular, my hair slowly more gray. I can laugh when I see interviews of myself using my hands when I talk, and enjoy listening to myself reading poems. While I still don’t like my voice, which seems to be growing grainier and more old-ladyish by the minute, its New Yorker inflections continuing to underly my roots despite 40 years out of the homeland, I can appreciate my expressiveness as well as the echoes of my family legacy–poignant inflections that sound so much like my mother and grandmother.
But last night, I took a big step into the void between self-perception and reality. I recorded myself singing.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I completely lost my ability to sing without croaking a few years ago, and it took a year of lessons before I could get my voice back. This felt like a big investment because didn’t have a strong solo voice that felt worth preserving. But I missed being able to sing in choruses or community gatherings so much, it felt essential to my mental health. One of the most fun things about voice lessons was practicing solo songs, so since then, I try to devote a couple of evenings a week to doing vocal exercises and singing along to Karaoke tracks or accompanying myself on the piano. It’s a blast!
Truth be told, when I think of myself as a singer, I’m kind of like that picture of a cat who looks in the mirror and sees a lion. At least, that’s what the wishy part of me wants to see. Mirror, mirror on the wall, whose the fairest singer of them all? I knew that recording myself might quickly put a pin in my inflated self-perception, but I felt that it was finally time to do what many public speakers do: listen to themselves with minimal self-deprecating judgment, but a clear focus on what they can improve.
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So I turned on my cellphone recorder and hit play, totally prepared to delete the recordings if they were too painful to listen to.
What did I hear? Yes, my grainy, New York, old lady voice. But good breath control and good vibrato. On pitch nearly all the time with just a few flat notes I could work on.
Did I sound like someone I’d want to listen to on Spotify? No. Could I sing competently in a group, or lead a song if I wanted to? Absolutely.
And that’s what I used to tell my public speaking students. You may never speak like Martin Luther King, but that’s not the point. You can get to a place where you feel more competent, more confident, and hopefully begin to like what you’re doing.
Truth: I did delete the recordings after I listened to them. But not because I was ashamed. I think I just wanted to hold onto the illusion of the cat seeing the lion in the mirror. Better than the little girl who couldn’t see herself, even when she was dancing.
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I have a designated airplane outfit, which I need to wear each time I fly so the plane doesn’t crash. And the minute I get on the plane, I have to do a complicated 4 x 4 sudoku puzzle and not pay attention to anything else until we reach 10,000 feet, even though I’m not particularly afraid of flying. Nor would I call myself superstitious, other than carrying the inherited “wisdom” of my Jewish ancestors: Don’t make up lies about bad things; otherwise they will happen. For instance don’t say you can’t do something because your grandmother is sick, and—God forbid—don’t say you missed class because your grandmother died, because then she will.
But despite positioning myself clearly in the quadrant of “not superstitious,” it’s still a long road between there and the end of the axis: trusting that the universe will take care of you.
A few days ago, in Burlington, Mass., a six-year-old girl was on her way to her kindergarten graduation. ICE grabbed him out of his car, and brought the two of them to the holding site where my friend was one of several hundred people who show up several days a week to witness. She watched as the little girl came out alone with an ICE agent, crying and screaming, Mami! Papi!
What superstition could this man have adopted to prevent ICE from ripping him away from his family and severing his dreams? If he ends up on the fast track for deportation, which, thanks to two Trump-appointed judges on the DC Circuit Court, was reinstated after being blocked by lower courts, what shirt should he wear to keep the plane from crashing?
Congressman Jim McGovern visits the ICE holding facility in Burlington, MA. Photo: D. Dina Friedman
And the little girl: What inheritance will she carry from her Papi, locked in a crowded room never meant to be a jail, with no showers, one exposed toilet, and no food except what can be bought bulk from Amazon and put in the microwave. Will this girl ever attend another graduation without thinking of this day? What was she wearing? A pink dress? Or overalls—taking the first necessary step we all must take to buck the little girl princess stereotype? What will she carry in the deepest cavities of her heart—an inheritance that will be hers forever? Will she remember the shadow face of the agent who ignored her screams and smirked as he handed her off to a neighbor to bring her back to her mother and baby sister? Will she remember the faraway voice of her Papi in a distant land? How carefully will she choose her clothes to keep her mother safe? Will she trust in a divine benevolence as so many of the people I met at the border did, despite the rapes, the gangs, the loss of loved ones?
Can superstition save us? Any of us? All of us?
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In these turbulent times in the world, I’ve seen the point of celebrating the wins and not sinking too deeply into the quagmire of yes-but…
But in my own personal life, I’ve realized that one of the key manifestations of my struggle with perfectionism is the way I can so easily frazzle into an “all-or-nothing” mindset, berating myself for the things I didn’t get done, rather than acknowledging with gratitude what I’ve accomplished.
Take the last few days where I feel I’ve been spinning my wheels, unable to ground myself in my writing, eschewing any activism-related task that didn’t affect other people or didn’t have a deadline, and once again putting the pile of administrivia I told my partner I’d finish last week (or was it last month) on the I don’t have the mindset to deal with this right now pedestal. And yet, I still felt so harried and busy I didn’t even have time for walking the ersatz dog in the woods, a nurturing and healthful habit I’ve resolved to keep up ever since my four-legged personal trainer passed away many years ago.
So, what did I do instead? I took care of my grandson; worked out at the Y (where I need to do weight training for osteoporosis), did some PT exercises and yoga/cardio at home, made an elaborate dinner trying to use up as much cilantro as I could from our generous farm share, tried to catch up on a week’s worth of local newspapers, had a long impromptu strategy call with an activist colleague, picked several pints of blueberries and raspberries that are coming in and ripening faster than we can gather them, and pulled just enough weeds in the garden to keep them from taking over.
And I cleaned the garage.
This mucky job has been so low on the list it’s underwater. But we’re getting some work done on it, and our contractor offered us quick and easy debris removal if we could clear it out now.
(Everything has been moved to the middle in order for the contractors to complete their work, but about half the stuff is gone!) Photo by Shel Horowitz
So, for the first time in years our garage looks habitable, though sweeping the floor alone took at least 45 minutes and required a good dust mask. We’ve added considerably to the heap of construction debris and put a few things out on the corner for people to take if they want them.
Photo by Shel Horowitz
So, I should feel good, right?
But in the all-or-nothing mentality that my perfectionist brain lives in, I keep pivoting to what I didn’t do. Even though I am finally getting the insight that this kind of thinking does not serve me. It’s what prevented me from truly enjoying the piano for so many years, because I couldn’t accept my imperfect playing. (Side note: Another thing I’m annoyed with myself about is that due to what feels like other must-do time commitments, I’ve barely played the piano in weeks! ☹️)
And this is what also gets me feeling so down in the dumps in my social change work, and shut down and triggered by others who do more than I do, or who are purer in some way in the political and lifestyle choices that they make.
So now it’s time to think about other ways I can be sabotaged by an all-or-nothing mindset, so I can try to make some changes. And I’d better do this all the time, because otherwise, I will be a total failure in eradicating (another good all-or-nothing word) my perfectionism. 😊
I’d love to hear about other people’s struggles with all-or-nothing. And what you do to address it.
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A big part of who I am stems from the blessing and curse of coming from a musical family.
On my mother’s side, my grandfather, Pop-Pop, was a symphony violinist. He lived next door to us when I was a child and I spent many hours watching him frown at the full length mirror as he practiced, carefully positioning the bow and playing each note over and over until he got it exactly how he wanted it. From him, I learned the importance of striving for perfection, even though reaching for it might seem impossible.
My father’s mother’s family, the Glicksteins, were just as passionate in their love of music and equally accomplished in their ability to play from the heart. My great-grandfather Abe Glickstein, a clarinet player, was known for giving Sunday afternoon living room concerts featuring his seven talented children for his immigrant neighbors at the turn of the 20th century, and for offering the services of a three-man klezmer combo (him and his two sons) to the community if music was needed for a wedding or other simcha. These great uncles, Max and Dave, went on to have notable musical careers, while their sister, my Grandma Jeanne, made her living teaching piano and recorder, and running summer music programs to spread the joy that fueled her life.
The curse of this story, as I wrote about extensively in my yet-to-be published memoir, Imperfect Pitch, was feeling that I had some sort of impossible musical bar to live up to, and I didn’t have either the patience or or the desire that Pop-Pop had to spend agonizing hour after hour at my instrument to achieve it.
But the blessing, which I think comes at least in part from my family constellation, is a love of the stage. Not so much for musical performance, since I’m still not as confident as I might want to be in that area. But give me a podium, and I’m in my happy place, whether I’m reading my poems or stories, talking on a panel about some aspect of writing craft, recounting my witness trips to the border and the Homestead Detention Center, standing up impromptu in front of a group of protesters on the street, or teaching the basics of classical argument theory to a room of bored college students.
There is something so magical about being listened to.
So, I get how disappointed my three-year-old grandson Manu felt when his parents told him they were going to take him to see the Tokyo Paradise Ska Band, which he has been totally obsessed with for a year, but, no, he was going to be on the stage with them, as he enacts when he listens to the videos, donning his sunglasses and strutting around his stage set of stacked mats, toy saxophone in one hand, mic in the other.
Because even though a seat in the audience can be a safe place, a time to relax, reset, and feel comfortably anonymous, there is something about getting out there on stage that can add a bit of technicolor to our often muted sense of self. Even if the journey there might feel like you’re standing on a balance beam above a pot of boiling oil, as I know it does for many who experience very real stage fright.
If that’s your story, I recommend, as my co-facilitator and I taught for many years in a course we developed called Public Speaking for the Terrified, to start small: read your work, share your art, play a song, or speak your heart to a trusted group of friends in your living room, making them promise that they will give you only praise for what they liked and what resonated. At some point you may be ready for a combo of both praise–never forget the praise–and critical feedback, but make sure to have a notetaker to write both of these things down. Otherwise, all you’ll remember is the criticism.
Whether it’s genetic or environmental or some of both, I’m grateful to my forbears for modeling not only their love of their art, but their passion for sharing it. And grateful that, for the most part, stage fright is not an issue for me. Perhaps some day I’ll take a more terrifying step and sign up at some large, anonymous karaoke bar. Or not.
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True confessions! I’ve been addictively following the NBA playoffs.
This doesn’t fit in with image I project to most who know me, or the words I might use to describe myself: writer, activist, gardener, nature-lover. And like most, I abhor the money that casts its dark shadow over this and other big sports events. $10,000 for a ticket to Madison Square Garden is obscene. Even $1,000 that Mayor Mamdani spent for standing room at the top of the arena is obscene. And unnecessary. Sports should be for the people. All the people. Not a commodity that can be manipulated to squeeze as much money out of hopeful hearts as possible.
Yet, every night of the playoffs, I’ve tuned in on my free-trial Youtube TV subscription (which I will cancel at the end of its 21 days) my heart with the hordes and multitudes at the watch parties in Central Park. I have not lived in New York for 46 years, yet, this doesn’t make many any less of a New Yorker. There’s a certain “Only in New York” way we have about how we relate that transcends our diverse backgrounds and brings us together. I still remember being on the subway in 1969 when the Mets were in the World Series. Everyone who had one had their transistor radios glued to their ears. When Tommie Agee homered in Game 3, the entire subway car erupted in cheers.
Photo by Mark Dixon from Pittsburgh, PA, CC BY 2.0
This is the kind of comeraderie I often long for, a swelling excitement and connection among strangers for a common goal. I hate to say that I’ve felt this more often at sports events than at peace demonstrations, but unfortunately that’s true. There have been occasional exceptions–The Women’s March in DC in 2017; March for Nuclear Disarmament in New York 44 years ago today on June 12, 1982. But I can often feel a more compelling swell of excitement huddled around a television with people rooting for a similar outcome, even if that outcome is random and doesn’t really matter in the wider world. Or maybe because the stakes are lower, it’s easier not to feel the thick of fear and disappointment one might feel in the wake of a devastating Supreme Court decision or a harmful act committed by our government or another country.
To put this all in a little more context, I grew up in a sports-dominated household. No one played, but the TV was always on: baseball, football, basketball, hockey…I don’t know if I would have survived my teenage years without the Mets and the Knicks to divert my attention from my own angst to something random that was totally outside of my control, yet–at the time–mattered deeply. Finding friends who shared that passion made it easier to stay away from experimenting with the wilder world of drugs and alcohol and sex. We could ground ourselves in the safer land of fandom. I guess we could have also been as passionate about other things that I might consider more in my bailiwick now, like music or art. But sports was what was offered in my house–and in my city–as a balm of connection.
There’s a lot more to my sports story, but even now, I’m self-conscious about nerding out on too many extraneous details people are unlikely to want to hear. In fact, due to some hard-to-shed embarrassment, I’ve been procrastinating about writing this since Wednesday (the day I usually blog). But I guess that’s a good thing, because then I wouldn’t have been able to end with the Knicks’ amazing comeback in Game 4.
playitusa.com
(And yes, I totally believe T jinxed Game 3. If only instead, he’d donated some of his billions to buy everyday New Yorkers some tickets–what a PR coup that would have been!)
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Now that I’ve been prescribed 40 minutes of physical therapy exercises every night on top of everything else I try to do daily (or, if not daily, several times weekly) for my physical, mental or creative health–not to mention my incessant compunction to at least try to do what I can to make the world a better place–I feel like I’m collapsing under the final straw of “shoulds” that broke the (clichéd) camel’s back.”
A differently wired person might approach this conundrum with a higher degree of rationality. Pick the 3–or 4, or 5–most important things. Focus on them and forget the rest.
But it’s all important! I argue. I might enjoy some activities more than others, but when I think about the overall benefits of the things I choose to do with my life: whether it’s writing or music; spending time with friends, family, or my grandson; walking in the woods; gardening or food prep; activism; or all my meditation/exercise protocols; there’s not a single thing I want to cut down on. And while I don’t like most other household maintenance tasks, there’s just so much I can afford to let my anxiety rise at the worry of leaving them undone.
So, instead, I’ve been experimenting with how I’m looking at the totality of my life and the activities and tasks that comprise it–a circle, that if anything, keeps widening rather than shrinking. For the last few days, I’ve set the intention to focus well on one thing at a time, rather than getting distracted by all the other “shoulds” that constantly ping like little cat bites on my ankles reminding me that they’re still here and need my attention. This has been somewhat successful–at least more successful than dealing with my cat, who really does bite my ankles all the time when he wants attention.
Photo: Shel Horowitz
It’s true that at the end of the day, the list of things I didn’t get to is still much longer than what I got to, but the “consolation prize” of feeling more happy and content, and ensconced in the minute-to-minute experience of whatever I’m doing, has definitely been a mood booster. And, as consolation to my perfectionist overachiever self, I can absolutely sense how allowing everything else to blur into the background while keeping my attention on whatever I’ve chosen to do has enabled me to do whatever I am doing much better and with much more satisfaction.
What’s also important to acknowledge is the immense privilege and gratitude I have in being able to lead the life I want, even if I might consistently want to do more than I’m able to achieve. This isn’t a consolation prize. It’s a huge way of shifting how I look at the whole Issue.
I don’t think I’m ever going to cure my “ADHD of the Soul,” nor am I willing to take any real or metaphorical drugs to taper my plethora of interests and desires. There’s just too much out there that begs to be engaged with. But any interventions I can employ to stop making myself feel bad because I “should” be doing more of it–if not all of it–are certainly worth trying. I’d love to from others about how you’ve addressed this all-too-common problem among those of us trying to live satisfying, meaningful and creative lives in a creatively challenged universe.
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One of my favorite days on our recent trip to Croatia was the day we went to Plitvice Lakes National Park, on an incredible three-hour meander with more waterfalls than I could possibly count. Some were the gigantic gawker spray-in-your face variety, while others were trickles of various intensity sheltered by rocks and shaded by trees that stretched out over the lake, often merging into a more significant outpour. Whatever their size or relative ferocity, all of them pressed the happy button. So much beauty in the sound of the spill and the patterns it creates: a glorious cascade. A day of glorious cascades.
At the same time I was reading a book, I didn’t want to finish because it was so good: Apeirogon by Colum McCann, a novel, about Combatants for Peace, a group of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost close relatives in the conflict and yet have been moved to embrace trust and mutual respect for each other, rather than fear and revenge. Based on real life characters, that was enough of a reason to read it. But what made the book SO exceptional was the way it was written, in small and larger bursts of intensely poetic but also clear and accessible prose, with some sections going on for a few pages and others compressed into just a paragraph or two, sometimes a single sentence. In every section, a cascade of images, emotions, history, context, and open ambiguity circled around and around in itself like the whirlpool of a fall once it hits the water.
In his poetic cascades, McCann weaves through many topics that seem to be unrelated to the plot and theme of the book, but he brings them back beautifully again and again, showing how everything reverberates on everything else and nothing can be viewed without looking at it from an infinite number of angles. In fact, the book’s title, Apeirogon, refers to a mathematical shape with an infinite number of sides and vertices. And that’s how I felt when reading this book. Whether I was reading about birds, or a 19th century failed expedition across the Dead Sea, or the tragic stories of one man’s daughter killed by a rubber bullet shot by Israeli border guards and another man’s daughter dead from a suicide bomb in Jerusalem, I wasn’t asked to park myself in any given spot. I was just asked to sit and observe what felt like a beam of light bouncing off a room full of angled mirrors.
https://www.abebooks.co.uk/ servlet/BookDetailsPL? bi=30665233510, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org /w/index.php?curid=67793592
In my MFA program as well as in previous fiction writing workshops, lectures, and books, there’s a strong emphasis on the notion of scene. In very basic terms, a novel or a story should consist of a set of scenes where action happens based on what the characters do within these scenes. And these actions are motivated by what the characters need or want. There is certainly room for exposition, description, and (if one wanted, but it wasn’t required) poetic prose, but the basic questions asked at workshops were things like What’s at stake? Who are these characters? What do they want? We were warned, strongly, not to let our love of the written word go wandering off into nowhere.
I’m not dissing these questions and this approach. It’s definitely important to understand these basic fictional elements. And I also know that once someone becomes skilled in a convention, they can more easily and successfully break it. This book’s strength was in its exposition and description; yet, all of it masterfully flowed back to the main theme. It stood out from other so-called “experimental” books I’ve read that broke from heavy scene/character mold because each “cascade” was a mini-story that landed somewhere and I could be on its journey as it sheeted over rocks, or pooled in a corner, or joined another tributary and kept on swirling.
I’m tempted and inspired to see if I can write a selection of prose poems that works as story. Or a story in the shape of a heartbreakingly beautiful series of cascades. Perhaps some of you may be as well, but whether or not that idea calls, and no matter where you might stand on issues regarding Israel and Palestine, I highly recommend this novel. It will open your heart and your sense of what’s possible–on the page, and perhaps even in the world.
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Up until about a week ago, 2026 felt like an off-year for writing. I’d done my homework: 40 poetry and 8 Fiction/Essay submissions so far. However, nearly all of it, except for a very small smattering, was coming back with a no.
This is not a complaint or a boo-hoo moment, and, as I’ve counseled others, I didn’t take it personally. But I’d been used to a slightly higher (10-12%) batting average than what I’d been getting. True, I might have been skewing my submission strategy to a higher number of “reach journals” from which I’d be more likely to get rejected, but I still always made sure to include many others that seemed in my ballpark.
Until this past week, where three journals accepted seven poems.
It’s important to recognize that what happened this week didn’t start this week. Two of the journals that accepted my work were places I’d published before, and though I don’t know either of these editors personally, I was touched that they each went out of their way to personally solicit a submission from me. There’s little more gratifying to get an email out of the blue that says, Hey Dina, we haven’t heard from you in a while. Our next theme is __________ and we would love you to submit your work. I’m paraphrasing the wording, but it’s the implication, rather than the words, that matters. Your work touched me. It was memorable and I’d like to see more of it. And share it with others.
Wow! Do I really have a fan base? Part of me feels uncomfortable even thinking such a thought. I tend to bristle in spaces where writers and other creatives get too blatantly self-promotional. I know there’s a certain amount of PR that has to be done, but I can usually discern when people are a little too connected to their egos, rather than seeing themselves as merely a conduit for the work they’re doing. I know that is a highly judgmental statement, and I’ll probably need to unpack it–and apologize to anyone I might have offended. But I will continue to stand firmly in an aura of humility, rather than arrogance, though hopefully maintaining enough balance not to fall into self-effacement, as one Jewish spiritual practice, the Mussar, teaches.
And taking that significant step away from self-effacement, I’m glad to take this moment to affirm that it’s ok–more than ok–to acknowledge that somewhere there are people out there who love my work.
Retrieved from Open Access: grfpublishers.org
Which is why I do all these submissions. And write this blog. Because I want to expand my reach beyond the boundaries of my communities to others in the ether, whom I hope will be touched in some small or large way by my words and the messages behind them. Ultimately, what I want is connection, whether it’s through my words or (in the cases of writers/artists/musicians, etc. of whom I’d call myself “a fan”) theirs.
Note: this is not a quick process. It has taken years, and many, many rejections and disappointments to cultivate these relationships. Likely there are editors out there who will love your work once they become aware of it, but the amount of time this takes will try your patience and fortitude. However, it is a great way to feel connected–and to get your words out there to a wider audience. It’s also been personally gratifying to friend some of these editors on social media and get to know just a little bit about them as people, as well as to follow journals I like and get a deeper sense of why these editors have devoted so much time to the unpaid labor of love of spreading words into the universe.
So thanks to Katherine McDaniel at Synkroniciti, Michael Broder at Second Coming, Abby Murray at Collateral, Elizabeth MacDuffie at Meat for Tea, Nadia Arrioli at Thimble, Emily Perkovich at Querencia Press, Matthew Krajniak at Consequence, Hayley Haugen at Sheila-Na-Gig, Lee Desrosiers at Wordpeace and the Naugutuck River Review, Sally Zaino at Earthshine, and many others that I’m missing here for your dedication to forging connections between writers–and readers.
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