An ode to personal projects

are we choosing paint colors, or are we coming home to ourselves?

The Webs We Weave is a free weekly-ish newsletter on staying connected to ourselves, making connections in our creative work, and feeling more connected in the world.

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Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Three and a half years into our relationship, we moved into our respective houses: two separate structures that stood side by side, close-but-not-too-close, on a shared suburban lot.

My then-partner, who had just bought the property and was more than a decade my senior, would live in the main house while I’d rent the little white structure that sat on the front corner of the lot. The type of building a realtor might call a guest house or a mother-in-law suite complete with its own small kitchen, an oddly-shaped but usable living area, a bathroom, a bedroom with a small reach-in closet, and just enough space for a small desk in the hall.

My friends and I dubbed it The Dollhouse—in part, I think, to deflect our shared queasiness about the whole thing. Not just the separate houses per se, but the situation more broadly. This was a weird dynamic, right? To suddenly un-live with your long-term partner, not with shared enthusiasm or as a baby step toward separation, but by mostly-unilateral design?

Questions like these, along with my growing self-consciousness about the whole arrangement, swelled in the starkness of my new home. Even at less than 400 square feet, the place echoed with loneliness.

It wasn't until the familiar tangle of our next fight—a cursed double helix of my codependent leanings and his sharp edges—that I remembered the assignment from my therapist: "The next time he goes all stormy, you can offer him empathy, but then your job is to walk away. Leave, and go do something for yourself."

Suddenly I had the means to create that separation in a new, profoundly literal way.

Maybe this little house wasn't my sad place of exile, but a haven. My haven. In the words of the poet Maggie Smith, I could make this place beautiful—but to do it, I'd have to reorient my whole way of decision-making. Not toward the option I thought my partner might go for, or whichever was least likely to rock the boat, but inward. Toward the part of me that knew what she liked, who could pan beauty from mud like flecks of gold from a creek bed.

Decorating my first just-for-me home became a project I poured myself into with joyful fury. And somewhere in the process of filling Pinterest boards, assembling the kitchen stools I'd picked out myself and softening the walls with macramé, I started to hear my own voice again.

Last month as my sister-in-law and I shared a bench at Monticello waiting for our garden tour to start, she asked, "So, you're someone who always seems to be excited about something new. What are you working on these days?"

It's true. I've always been a project person. The draw is both visceral and instinctual, like a moth to a flame.

I love the thrill of opening a blank document and filling it with ideas, leaving myself breadcrumbs and notes, mapping out all the possible steps. I love the constraints of a project, and how they create heat. I love the seductiveness of a satisfying finish line, the promise of being able to point to proof of completion and whisper, I did that.

But the appeal of a personal project goes well beyond its tactical parts. I think as artists and creative folks, projects offer us pathways into new ways of being—ones where we get to greet different versions of ourselves, even just for a time.

🪴 Projects invite us to try on new roles

Starting a personal project can be like trying on a new character: we get to step into the role of whoever we need to be to see this thing through—focused writer, visionary decorator, ruthless editor—knowing there's a certain impermanence to the whole thing.

It reminds me of a woman I follow online who runs a memory-keeping business encouraging folks to document their everyday lives. She's known for running a handful of familiar projects year after year, and the thing they all share—the thing I've heard her say she loves about them—is that they all have a beginning and an end. If capturing my life in photos and adding them to scrapbooks indefinitely feels daunting, taking on the role of attuned photographer for a day or a week might feel manageable. Inspiring, even.

A project feels like permission to go all-in on a thing for a time, without the pressure to stay interested or play that part forever.

🪴 Projects bend time and effort in our favor

Something about viewing projects as containers, their built-in beginnings and ends lending shape and structure, feels generative to me. There's something about their constrained nature that helps our energy and our efforts go further.

For instance, I'm someone whose creative energy tends to arrive not in drips and drizzles, but in a downpour. Enough to fill buckets at a time. When I imagine pouring out a bucket or two into the Grand Canyon, I picture it getting swallowed up in the vastness, disappearing without a whisper of an impact. But emptying those same buckets into a bathtub feels like visible progress toward something.

🪴 Projects up our willingness to try

Committing to a project makes me bolder, in a way. I become more focused, more willing to tug on the thread and explore new terrain when I'm working within a container. Obstacles that might otherwise look like dead-ends take on the color of curiosity.

Similarly, a project that’s explicitly finite in nature—like a 14- or 30-day challenge, for example—helps me find my edge and stick with something past the point I might otherwise drop off. And inevitably, I learn something new about myself or the work in the process.

🪴 Projects can be pilgrimages in disguise

Starting a creative project means holding a set of unanswerable questions, the answers to which are impossible to know from the starting line.

What might this thing become? What will it reveal? How will it change me? What will be true months or years from now because of this thing, that I can't possibly see from here?

The great mystery of any creative endeavor—the thing that keeps bringing me back to the starting line even when I'm still wrung out from the last one—is the realization I keep having again and again: we can't know the true fate or value of any leap before we take it.

Instead, we choose the paint colors. We scour Craigslist for just the right dresser, we hang the art a piece at a time, until the day comes when we stand back to admire our work and see something else. Ourselves, reflected back to ourselves. The same, but different.

Until next time,
Michelle

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