My Pronking Year
A journey of healing, focus, and creativity
“Did I do good?” I ask. My father takes the video while my mother lounges on the couch, smiling and laughing. I break into the song again, “Skinnamarink a dink a dink. Skinnamarink a doo. I love you!” My eyes dart to the camera.
“Did I do good?”
I was three in the video, but I was watching it back on my birthday thirty-some-odd years later. I thought I could distract my daughter long enough for me to drink a cup of coffee by showing her videos of me at her age. She loved them.
I had to stop though, because I felt disgusted. I was so unsettled by my feelings toward a little girl who was me that I couldn’t find my balance all day. Something inside me felt broken.
Getting Creatively Blocked
I have known for a long time that I hold myself back due to a persistent and unhealthy need for approval. Shyness, overthinking, and a sense that I keep things locked away inside have been my longtime companions. I just did not know until that morning how far back it went. Like most of us, I remember moments from childhood that wounded my developing ego and I figured they worked their dark magic as I grew, but at three years old?
It would be easy to read my reaction to the video as some sort of self-loathing, but there are a lot of things I love about myself. I am empathetic and principled, and I can identify actors by their voices in commercials or the small roles they played in the 90s.
I decided maybe not every weird emotional moment needed to be addressed. But I found myself thinking about that video as I saw glimmers of that little girl I was in the little girl I am raising. The unsettled feeling mixed in with the love.
This fall, my daughter started to resist trying new things in school. Her teacher alerted us to some negative self-talk. My brave girl. So imaginative and vivacious. What was happening?
Then, mid-December, I had an awful mental health day. A breakdown of creative frustration revealed to me a place where I am stuck as a person.
Going Pronking or, Let the Wild Rumpus Begin
One of the more whimsical things about alpacas is a behavior called pronking. A pronk is a gait in which all four of the animal’s feet leave the ground at once. Like Pepé Le Pew. Not just anyone gets to see alpacas pronk, though. For them, it’s a playful behavior they engage in at dusk. Often once the alpacas know we’re watching, they stop. No one really knows why alpacas pronk. The common thought is that they do it because it makes them happy or that it’s a burst of energy before they settle in to rest. They just do it, as if moved by the spirit. Watching them pronk is the kind of delight that makes me hold my breath.
On that dark day last month, I intuited that I needed to pronk. I took my daughter to the Children’s Museum after school so we could play. The silliness lifted my depression a bit, but I confess that while she was distracted with another child, I checked my email, and I found an invitation to a New Year’s Rumpus at the Art Museum. The email felt like a nudge of sorts, the start of an idea.
In October, the two of us went to Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak. I wrote about the exhibit at the time1 but I have continued to dwell on Sendak’s work. He explores scary and vulnerable themes with a childlike wildness that makes me think, “I could never…” Julio got me the full exhibit guide, Wild Things Are Happening: The Art of Maurice Sendak for Christmas, and I have enjoyed learning more about the interaction between Sendak’s love of art history from William Blake to Beatrix Potter with his untamed creativity. He was deeply disciplined and knowledgeable but also knew how to rumpus, keeping in touch with the inner child. I think therein lies the reason why his work resonates so much. I can’t stop thinking about it. That partnership between discipline and authentic weirdness looks like a path I want to explore.
In working with our daughter, we all remind her that she can do hard things. We encourage her to try things, just try, and point out when she does something she did not think she could do.2 I need these messages too. Whatever was going on with her seems to have resolved, but I am sure it will not be the last time it pops up in her life and I want to be able to lead her by an example that is not my own bad self-talk. I am reminded of the line of advice from Cheryl Strayed:
"One of the greatest gifts I've given my children is the example of a mother who pursues her passions like a motherf*cker."
Getting Unstuck
So, here’s my plan: I’m going to pronk. Take some time to slow down, create and learn, just for the sake of doing it.
Alongside feeling like I hold myself back, putting up something like a block around my creativity through a people-pleasing mentality3, I also rush a lot, focusing more on results than process. I think these are two edges to the same problem. I resist sitting with creativity. I get an idea and I mentally fast forward to imagining the result and the reaction to it. I want to succeed badly, but I have a hard time releasing myself into the process of creativity and I unintentionally skip important steps.
One of my daughter’s teachers once asked if she was more Frog or Toad. In this regard, I am very much Toad.4
When I was a little girl, my dad brought home a kit to make a suncatcher. You moved little beads into the metal form with tweezers and then baked them until they ran together into something like glass. It was meticulous work. I remember Dad exhorting me to focus. Don’t speed through it. Maybe at the time the problem was just that I was a kid, but we were both frustrated. That rushing feeling has followed me my whole life, for no reason I can pinpoint.
This time four years ago, I got my first beehive. I wanted to paint it like a brick apartment building with bay windows and a fire escape. It would take patience and planning and I knew that I struggled with that. I psyched myself up. “Take your time,” I muttered to myself. “Don’t hurry.” And, you know what? I did it. “See, Dad,” I said to myself.5 I felt amazing. And then I went back to rushing. Often it feels like that’s what life demands. But haste makes waste. And I’m learning creativity doesn’t like it either.
For a long time, I lacked discipline in my creative pursuits. I have worked diligently on building a strong daily writing practice over the last three years and I think I have enough foundation to go on an adventure now.
So, here we go:
Pronking Practices
I am not trying to reinvent The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. But I am going to do it.6 I’ve started it twice before without finishing. I will also look at The Artist’s Way for Parents.7 I believe that doing The Artist’s Way will help me with some of the mental and spiritual blocks, but I am also incorporating additional practices to help with the specific issues of developing my focus and moving away from a rushing mentality when working on projects, writing or otherwise.
Each month, I will go on a Field Trip with my daughter where we can either explore nature, art, or both. It might be another trip to the Art Museum or a long walk on a new trail with a nature journal. These are separate from the Artist’s Dates outlined in The Artist’s Way.
Each month, I will practice a creative side quest8. I have a ukulele, but I do not consider myself musical. I have long wanted to start a nature journal, but I am crap at drawing. I will work on things like this anyway, getting used to being creative without hopes of being good.
I will also complete a project slowly allowing myself to take my time, plan, and execute. Maybe I will make a moss garden or paint another beehive or make a drip irrigation system or closely reread Mansfield Park9. The project might be artistic, literary, or practical.
Monthly, I will also read a literary magazine. I have an archive of issues I am behind on, as reading for Kitchen Table Quarterly took over much of my litmag time. This reading is a source of inspiration but also fertile ground for me to push back on the negative inner monologue about my own creative abilities.
I will report back, sometimes about the project or some research on the science of mental flow or mycology. I will label these dispatches “My Pronking Year” and you can expect the first one next week.
Maybe I will discover that I am not very creative or that I really am terrible at drawing. Even if it turns out that I have no good ideas, I will hopefully have also learned how to slow down, quiet my mind, and really try without holding myself back. And if I fail, I hope I will have shown my daughter, joyously, that it’s okay. And I will figure something else out.
Maybe we will go pronk with the alpacas together.
And if you relate, please, go pronk then come back and let me know how it goes!
You can read about our trip to the exhibit here:
They use The Magical Yet in her classroom and it is wonderful. Bookshop.org links are affiliate links.
If 2024 taught me anything, it’s that some of the most judgmental people I know have the worst judgment. And so, I think maybe I need to let go of a lot of fear of what other people think. I have tried so hard to be good and no one has loved me more for it. I have played it safe and I have not been happier for it. I have always tried to do what is expected of me, but the external voices, often imaginary, have never mattered more than those of people who love me most or that voice in my own heart. And right now, that little voice is strangled.
We love Frog and Toad dearly in our home. I genuinely think that I am both Frog and Toad and perhaps that’s why I am such a good friend to myself most of the time.
My father died six years ago, but if not for that major problem, I think he would have liked how the hive turned out.
This post by Laura Jean on “Gentle Creativity” was a good reminder to me as I set up this Year of Pronking that The Artists’s Way is a challenge.
I updated my post “How to Keep a Notebook” and included a bit about how Morning Pages differ from my ongoing monthly notebooks.
In an earlier draft, I wrote that I would do creative things I was bad at. Julio suggested I reframe that. “You don’t know that you’re bad at them; you’ve never really practiced them.” This post from Kate Kern Mundie on side quests came to mind, so I borrowed that term.
Long story. In time.
I like the idea of applying pronking to human behavior! (Came over from Claudia's and stayed for the alpacas and your story.) Subscribed. Thank you!
I love toad and frog