Day 36: dating your project 💘

+ our weekly check-in

Hello, friends!

FIVE WEEKS!! Five weeks of making art, making friends, and making time for your curiosity. Big thank you to Anjelika Deogirikar Grossman for taking the lead the past week — it’s so fun to see how other writers and artists make the prompts their own.

You can connect with Anjelika here on Substack, check out her upcoming workshops at Case for Making or at the Georgetown Lombardi Arts & Humanities Program (AHP) where she is an Artist in Residence. Her spring and summer courses will be posted on their Eventbrite page soon. [Note: AHP has been offering free online art, creative writing, and movement classes since the start of the pandemic to help people around the world to de-stress, to feel less isolated, and to feel more in touch with their creative self. AMAZING. Should we all take one together??]

As always, wherever you are in your project is perfect. You are not an express train. More like a kid in an elevator who wants to press all the buttons — cannot stop themselves, really! — every detour is part of the adventure. If you’ve missed a few days, you can pick back up any time. If you’re having more fun than ever, keep going! If you’re bored of your project, use it. Just keep showing up. You’ll figure it out. I believe in you.

Let’s do a check-in.

• Use one word to describe the journey of your project.

• How does it feel? Do you like your “vehicle” or do you want to try the speed or energy of a different mode of transportation?

• What are you learning about yourself?

• What do you want to commit to this week?

Let’s make a Reel.

Did you see our Day 30 Reel?

dothe100dayproject

A post shared by @dothe100dayproject

It’s so fun to put these together and to see all of the incredible art from the community. You can still submit for the Day 40 Reel (vertical images only and videos <5 seconds, please). I also share so much art to our Stories every single day — if you’re on Instagram, tag your images or videos with our handle @dothe100dayproject.

Our theme this week is dating your project.

Curious? Me too! When my friend Tricia Fell pitched this idea, I thought…you know what? Hell yeah. Couldn’t we all use a little more romance? What would it be like to bring a little of that energy to our practices? In my part of the world, spring is springing. All of the sudden the world feels alive again! The people are READY. The party is starting. It’s mostly exhilarating, sometimes exhausting, and absolutely vulnerable to put yourself out there…just like art! Let’s get into it. Here’s Trish:

Hello, 100 Day friends!

I am humbled to join you all again in this year's quest for creative mastery/play/adventure/learning and feel especially grateful to Lindsay for a) all that she does in general to make this project run so smoothly and b) asking me back as a guest contributor. I am a Personal & Small Business Coach, writer, and mama to two incredible little souls. It’s so very nice to meet you here.

Truth be told, I tend to do best writing what I have lived, or am living. And right now, this season of life is a strange little experiment in reentering the dating world for the first time in twelve years…as a 40 year old single mother…who has never used any of the ol’ apps to meet folks before. Y’all, I set my age parameters as inspired by the bit in Ali Wong’s latest stand up special (about being divorced and dating at 40, no less!) where she proclaims it’s totally acceptable to date anywhere from 25 to 55 years olds in this special window of time….and it has been off to the races since.

So, I thought it would be fun to add our individual artist mediums to the list of potential suitors (partners? flings? friends with benefits? Only time will tell….) and take a spin at dating our projects this week!

One thing that I’ve had to be extra mindful of in the last five months since rejoining the singles-who-mingle world is my sensitive propensity to really want to be liked, and thus I’m having to practice the art of being wholly myself, regardless of what is reflected back to me.

Because ultimately, I do believe that:

You can’t say the wrong thing to the right person.

You can’t have the wrong job.

Or wear the wrong clothes, drive the wrong car, have the wrong likes, hobbies, interests.

Can you feel how liberating that is?

To understand, and accept, we cannot miss the train which was meant for us?

What if the same could be said for our projects?

To armor off and live more lightly in the space of this 100 day practice, we raise our energy and thus our potential creative possibilities. If we show up each day wholly as ourselves, what we “produce” can’t be wrong. It’s only a small part of the bigger picture on a path of growth, adventure and learning.

Swipe right on you, babes…

Food For Thought:

• What about your project is attractive to you?

• How has your relationship to it changed after these first couple weeks of “courtship?”

In Gratitude,
Trish