Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 478

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help," by Amanda Palmer.

People working in the arts engage in street combat with The Fraud Police on a daily basis, because much of our work is new and not readily or conventionally categorized. When you’re an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy. You have to hit your own head with your own handmade wand. And you feel stupid doing it. 

There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.

I wanted to be seen. 

That was absolutely true. All performers—all humans—want to be seen; it’s a basic need. Even the shy ones who don’t want to be looked at. 

But I also wanted, very much, to see. 

I didn’t quite grasp this until I had been up on the box for a while. What I loved as much as, possibly even more than, being seen was sharing the gaze. Feeling connected. 

I needed the two-way street, the exchange, the relationship, and the invitation to true intimacy that I got every so often from the eyes of my random street patrons. It didn’t always happen. But it happened enough to keep me up on the box. 

And that’s why stripping, even though it often paid way better, when I tried my hand at it a few years later, just didn’t do it for me. I was being looked at. But I never felt seen. The strip joint was like Teflon to real emotional connection. There was physical intimacy galore: I witnessed hand jobs being given under tables,2 and lots of legs and tits and more being covertly rubbed at the bar. I danced for endless hours, stark naked on a stage, and talked for even more hours with the loneliest men in the world while pretending to drink champagne. We strippers were experts in dumping our drinks back into ice buckets when the customers weren’t looking—it was a job skill you actually had to acquire working at The Glass Slipper. If I’d actually drank all the absurdly overpriced champagne (from which I earned a 15 percent cut) that was purchased for me on a good night by lonely men who wanted to chat, I would have consumed, in the course of my six-hour shift, enough to have brought me to a blood-alcohol level of approximately five-point-dead. 

Sometimes I would get home and have a nice little breakdown, having no idea what to do with all the loneliness I’d collected. I tried to capture it in a lyric, years later, in a song called “Berlin” (my chosen stripper name): 

It’s hard to work on an assembly line of broken hearts 

Not supposed to fix them, only strip and sell the parts 

People would look straight into your crotch. 

But nobody would look you in the eye.

And that drove me crazy.

Asking for help with shame says: 

You have the power over me. 

Asking with condescension says: 

I have the power over you. 

But asking for help with gratitude says: 

We have the power to help each other.

Not everybody wants to be looked at. 

Everybody wants to be seen.