In this episode, I discuss my feelings about uncovering some old art in a storage unit that I was clearing out. Uncovering this art became an emotional bombshell because, for a long time, I felt it represented artistic failure.

In this episode, I talk about how I shifted that perspective and realized that old art is never abandoned but can take on a life of its own much later. 

I hope that what I learned helps you realize that the artwork and creativity you have locked away in a drawer or storage unit might have a second life in it yet.

Takeaways

• Forgive yourself for not achieving past artistic dreams, and change the narrative around your creative journey.
• Revisit old artwork and see it from a new perspective, recognizing its value and potential.
• Creativity is not linear, and the timing of sharing or using old work may vary.
• Consider repurposing or incorporating old work into new projects.

Are you on a journey of creative growth? I urge you to join me here as I share what I have learned so that it may serve you:

https://hypermemoir.beehiiv.com/subscribe

I randomly came across something difficult in my travels. And I wanted to share that with you because I feel like it's really important for any of you who have had artistic dreams earlier in your life that may not have come to fruition. So the story I have today is actually about a few months ago, we had a storage unit in Echo Park here in Los Angeles, and we had it for about 20 years. So I think we started.

For me, it was a little bit of a hurt because I'm looking at it and I'm like, this stuff was really good. Why didn't I do anything about it? So there's a lot of regret around it. And I felt that as I was going through this stuff, these notebooks, these pictures, these graphics, these designs that I made, I even had a full ass zine that I made that I never really shared with anybody. I never put it out there. So if I'm talking about stuff like creative journey and creative voice today,

it's maybe because of stuff like that. So let me get into that. I'm Chris Waldheims. This is the Hypermemoir Podcast where we talk about finding creative voice, amplifying creative voice, and ultimately becoming a better artist. So that's what I've been talking about. This is episode 33. Thank you to those of you who have been listening and giving me your comments and notes. I love it. I'm doing this mainly for my own entertainment, but I'm really glad that a lot of you are getting something out of it. I enjoy.

making this podcast, I enjoy thinking through these things, and I enjoy sharing it with you and hearing what you think and hearing how you respond, because I know that a lot of you out there are creatives like I am, and I know that a lot of you are creatives who haven't had an exactly easy journey. There's a lot of people out there who have creative goals and creative dreams, but haven't always been able to make them happen. I feel like I fall into that category, and I'm getting better at it, and I'm improving at it. This podcast is actually part of the process

really uncovering those creative gifts and making them more available to other people who they can benefit. So that's why I'm telling you this story. So as I said in the intro, a few months back, I think this was in October, we went, we had to empty out the storage unit in Echo Park that we'd had for 20 years. We used to live in Echo Park. We lived there for I think close to 18 years, or at least I did. So a lot happened. There was a lot of change in life. You know, I went from being just kind of this dude who...

all this stuff was really good. Why didn't I do anything with it? It's like this big creative regret. And I don't know if any of you have had that. I don't know if any of you had, you know, if you're my age, I'm 46, had, you know, creative dreams that you kind of put to the side and stored away and maybe physically put in a storage space or have an old hard drive or have somewhere else. But I really, it was kind of, it kind of took me by surprise at how good this stuff was.

And at the time, I remember not feeling confident about it. I remember feeling like, oh, this isn't good. It's too weird. Nobody's going to get it. There are all kinds of reasons why I kept it to myself. And I know I'm not alone in this. I know that there's a lot of people out there who are creating great things that they don't share. It's really difficult emotionally to share stuff. So I get that. But what I'm going to end up saying here is that for all of you who are listening to this, there's probably something that you have that you've

kept away, maybe for 20 years, maybe for two years, maybe for two months, that if you bring it back up and you look at it again from your older self, you're gonna find there's a lot of value there. And it might not be necessarily what you intended when you initially created that thing, but there might be something there. And I'll tell you kind of how I'm thinking about the stuff that I created back then and what I planned to do with it or how I planned to look at it or how I planned to share it now 20 odd years after. So...

The first thing that I do want to explain is that I'm 46 years old. I'm a father and my perspective has changed completely. Um, at this time, you know, as a young person, I was in my early twenties. And what I've learned since then is the importance of forgiving yourself for not getting everything right. So I think for a long time, I didn't want to look back at this stuff because I actually felt really mad at myself for not making something creative, for not becoming successful as an artist.

And I know, because I've talked to you, I know there's a number of you out there who feel the same way. I know there's a number of you who feel like you've done something wrong by not succeeding as an artist, by having to take a regular job, by being a parent instead of pursuing your art. And I, no, that's reality, that's life. Not everybody is given the opportunity to be a full-time artist or to get your artwork off the ground when you want to. Things happen at the time they happen, but I think...

The key and the thing that I would communicate, if you get one thing out of this podcast episode, is forgive yourself. As I said in an earlier episode, you're right where you're meant to be. So you've had experiences since you created that initial thing that might be able to feed back into that, that might be able to bring that thing back to life in a new way. So the first step though is forgiving yourself, not being mad at yourself. That's not gonna help you. You can't change the past.

I'm forgiving myself for all that. I mean, there was actually a time when I think I beat myself up. I'm like, well, you know, you're a coward. You don't follow through. I would say all these kind of terrible things to myself. That is not gonna get the artwork out there. That is not gonna get things completed. That is not gonna help anybody. And so I have to stop doing that. And when I think back to that time, as I said, I was a different person. I was going through a lot. And at the time I didn't recognize it. I think I tried, you know, I wasn't really as in touch with my feelings about my life as I am now.

But at the time I was going through a lot. I had lost my mother a few years before. I didn't really have a great connection with my adoptive family. I had dropped out of college. I was desperately poor. I was living in downtown LA. Before it was like gentrified, this is like I was living in the back of a warehouse, like barely making it, barely scratching by. I think I was paying like $300 in rent. This is in downtown LA. And it wasn't nice. There was no coffee shops or anything. It was like literally warehouses and the street. That was all there was.

Um, I felt like I was in this really precarious position. I felt like my adulthood, you know, again, as short-lived as it had been, you know, I was like, I think like 23, you know, 22 around the time that I'm talking about. It'd been only a few years. Like I'd only been 18 for a few years. Um, but it felt like a lot of disappointment and disaster. So for me, I was just like, how do I hang on? How do I actually survive? Everything in my being was towards survival and not creating. So while I was creating stuff.

the idea that I could ever become an established creator was so far from my mind. I was like, how do I get enough money to eat? How do I get enough money to pay my rent? That's what I was thinking about. And being a creative kind of felt like a frivolous activity. And I'm still actually unraveling a lot of that programming from that part of my life. So I'm just telling you this to give you context as to what I talk to myself. So when you're thinking about the time in your life when you might've created the artwork that you're gonna look back on.

Give yourself some compassion, give yourself a freaking break here because it's hard, it's hard to live. Living is really hard and being an artist is extra hard. And so you're trying to do two hard things and so it's not surprising that ultimately we have to at some point be sensible. I'm like, I don't wanna live on the street so I need to do things, whether that's working for money or getting a different career like I did, I need to do things.

that are gonna support me so that I don't die or starve to death. I mean, that's the reality of living in America and living in most places in the world. You gotta get out there and make the money. Like, let's be real here. So, as I was saying, we need to forgive ourselves and honor that journey, which is what I'm doing right now. There's no hope for changing the past. That past is pretty much locked in, but we can change the way that we relate to it. We can change the way that we think about ourselves in the present day, and we can change the story, the narrative.

that we've created over about our artistic career and artistic intentions. So right now, my attention turns to what can I learn from this situation? What can I make out of this? Is there something that I can make out of this? When I look back and I look at the graphics and the art and the design that I made, I actually have found a lot of things. And maybe I won't talk about everything. But when I think about it, I think I kind of look at it

All right, if I was a father, right, which I am, I'm a father, I have a teenage son who's also an artist, by the way. And so this is actually stuff that might be meant to be shared with him and inspire him to do something. Maybe it wasn't for me ever. Maybe, you know, the purpose of me making that art wasn't to be like, oh yeah, I'm putting my art out, but maybe it's for the next generation. I don't know. I mean, it could be like, this is all a rationalization. I'm just telling you what I'm thinking. But what I think to myself now is, you know, as I'm sort of...

thinking through all this or feeling through all this. I think to myself, what would I tell myself in my early 20s? What would I tell that artist who's 22 years old and just barely making it? I would probably tell myself a lot of what I'm telling you and myself, by the way, in this podcast. Things like stay with it, develop a point of view, develop a voice, don't depend on external validation, don't feel like you need to fit in. That's what I would tell myself. So as I'm telling myself that stuff now,

or telling other people that stuff now, because I lived it and had to learn it since then, that stuff that I can actually think about in relation to that art. Again, it doesn't change the past, but it changes my relationship to the past. And I think I've even talked about in previous episodes, the importance of owning your story, of taking control of the narrative. Like you can honestly, like you can have the past and you can tell that story any way that you want to. So for myself, and I hope for you.

What I'm trying to do is move from a place of, I feel oppressed by my past and I don't want to look at it and I hate it and I fucked up and I, you know, reject it all to, okay, I'm not perfect, nobody's perfect, I'll never be perfect, great, love it. We're gonna actually see what happens with that. That's actually gonna be creative power because now I don't need to be perfect. I don't need to do everything right. I can actually just kind of come at this from wherever I am.

And it doesn't matter what I want to do. It becomes play actually. And I talked about that a couple episodes back, or maybe even in the last episode, I forget. Creativity is complicated. And that's the thing. Sometimes creativity takes a circuitous path. It's not linear. Like you can make something now that might not see the light of day for a decade. It might be the most brilliant thing that you ever created, but it might not be the right time. It might not be the right time for you. It might not be the right time for the world. And it might come out in 10 years.

It might come out never. It might come out in 80 years. Your grandchildren might discover it and publish it. This happens all the time. We hear about artists who have works that come out after their death, don't we? That's actually a thing. So even the best artists in the world have this stuff that they've made that never saw the light of day. Either they didn't think it was good enough, the time wasn't right. I don't know. I mean, everybody has their own motivations and so do you, so do I. But my point is that...

Creativity isn't this linear thing. I mean, I would love to think I'd love to live in a world I'd love it for it to be so easy that I could create something today create something next week Go right create and next week have it out to y'all Sometimes that happens this podcast is that this podcast works like that. I mean, I just create stuff. I start talking Hopefully it's good. Maybe it is maybe it isn't I have a great time recording it Hopefully have a great time listening to it. If not, it's cool. I don't care. That's what we're doing

But everything has its path. So if we have a book it has its path. It doesn't just come out Because we want it to come out so And then also our perspective changes so things that we might not quite understand Why we made it now might become apparent later or they become an ingredient to something else by the way You can also take things apart and refactor them and re bring them into something else That's kind of what I'm thinking about doing with a lot of this old art. I mean there's stuff that might

you know, old artwork that I made that, you know, it's cool. I might put it in a frame and it's artwork that's 20 years old, it's artwork that kind of tells part of my story and that might be the move. That might be what I'm doing here. So I think the ending message to you who are listening to this is if you have stuff in a drawer, if you have stuff in storage, if you have stuff in a hard drive, I encourage you to pull it out and take a look at it. And the reason why I'm saying that is because I know it can be hard to do that.

I really do think that I didn't look into that storage. And by the way, I just like crammed everything into that storage and kind of left it there. And I knew it was all there in the back of my mind in my unconscious, but I also knew that it would kind of hurt to look at it because for me, it felt like broken dreams. So it was this big emotional resistance to getting in there and looking at stuff, but I'm really glad I did. And I'm really glad that I went through that moment of fuck. Like, why didn't I do anything with this? Why didn't I become a successful artist? The shit that I made actually really fucking good. And I'll probably share it with you.

in a drawer like I did or in a storage space like I did. I mean, do it if you want, I'm not telling you what to do. But my point is, you might be surprised when you go and excavate some of this stuff. And some of this stuff might be like fine wine. It could have been before its time. I mean, if you're an artist, you're a visionary, you're a creator, you're seeing the future. So that future might not have been there when you created it. And it might be there now. And I'll be real. I said,

I kind of referred to this, it was kind of tough emotionally to look at all that stuff. It wasn't easy. I saw a lot of untapped potential. I saw what could have been. So you do have to go through that. But don't mourn the past. Don't stay stuck in it. And you know, I can see why I left it in storage because it was too hard to look at. But we're going to go back to it. I'm going to go back to it. And I would encourage you to do the same. So thank you for listening. I'm Chris Waldheims. And this is the HyperMemory Podcast where we talk about finding, developing, enhancing.

and honoring your creative voice. And I like to do this podcast. I do it pretty much every week. Some weeks I drop the ball, whatever it happens. But overall, I try to do this every week because for me, it's actually a really nice creative exercise for me to think through something and quickly put it out there without giving it too much thought. I don't like to agonize over this stuff. And I have a lot of ideas on the topic of creativity that I wanna share with you that I've kind of gained from my life and my creative projects. I have a book that I've written that I'm-

actually going to send out to a publisher, I think this week or next week, I'm starting to get that going. I wrote that book, that's happening. And the point of me telling you that is really just to say that I'm a creative person too. And my path to being a creative was very circuitous. I'm 46 years old and it's not like I came into the world ready to go as a creative. It's been a journey and that's what I want to share with you. Because again, I've talked to so many of you through this podcast and that's really been the...

benefit of me doing this podcast is connecting with you, hearing your stories, hearing how you relate to your creativity and your artwork and your stories. So, hey, if you have comments, please keep them coming. If you can, I know it's asking a lot sometimes, but if you could, take 10 seconds and leave me a review on Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever you listen, because it does help to get it out. Share it with a friend. I'm gonna, at some point, start doing social media, but right now I'm doing everything low key.

I do actually have a hyper memoir account on Instagram. I don't really post anything on there now. I'd love to do it, just don't have time. But if you like this episode, maybe you can kind of share it on social media. I don't know. Anyway, thanks for listening.