What Only You Can Do: An Intro

A kick-off! A look back, and a look forward!

To consider: what odd job taught you something that surprised you about yourself? 

I’ve been a working artist for the last fourteen years. And I’ll admit, when I first quit my nonprofit communications job at 22 to venture on my own as a recording artist and to assist my favorite band, I had quite the luxurious vision of what being a “working artist” would be. Mornings spent journaling by hand in dappled light; afternoons and evenings cozying up in a recording booth or stretching to prepare myself for stage; nights filled with beautiful noise and dazzling personalities, with nary a thought to an email inbox or my bank account. 

In reality it has looked like hundreds of hats – roles, gigs, hustles, deliverables, outputs – to patchwork together a livelihood. I ran front of house at a Michelin-starred sushi restaurant. I rented my apartment out on Airbnb. I taught after-school poetry writing circles and produced teen poetry slams. I wrote grants for arts nonprofits. I tutored SAT prep at a Sikh gurdwara. I tour managed bands, driving a Dodge Caravan across the country and back. I managed a recording studio in downtown LA. I designed virtual community engagement and grantmaking for city government during the pandemic. Plus a couple dozen other gigs I can namecheck… all while releasing nine albums independently across two different bands and finally a solo project, diving headfirst into producing indie music videos that would evolve into a deep love of filmmaking, and curating and producing creative spaces for others to connect and share their work. 

Despite very real self doubt and those ol’ imposter feelings, I’ve done a lot of things over the years to make being a working artist work for me. Everything, it feels like, besides ever being on someone’s W-2 payroll, let alone benefits and a 401K! 

For a while, I resented the necessity of being several different selves. I judged myself – if I were a real artist, I wouldn’t need to do so much – and also hid myself – people won’t understand me or find me legitimate if I talk about more than just my music, or will find me less credible as an artist. I found comfort in receding, letting disparate parts of me – the music self, the video producer and burgeoning filmmaker self, the social-change-driven strategist and curator self, the equitable grantmaking specialist self, etc. etc. – spin off into their own orbits. 

For many years, despite everything I was able to achieve as an artist, I felt scrambled, highly reactive, and unable to make sense of my purpose by being so thinly spread. It felt impossible to parse between anxiety and intuition, afraid the wrong decision between yes or no would be irrevocably consequential, and to truly trust that the road I was paving was the right one. 

Although I felt the pressure to reduce myself into separate and more palatable identities, the threads of each of my selves have always been woven together, informing and provoking one another, defying tidy categorization. I’ve had to strengthen and protect my creativity even if my self-belief was a work in progress, the flame kept alive by the intersecting communities of artists and activists I’ve been lucky enough to build, make, struggle, dream, delight and organize with. 

In this newsletter–What Only You Can Do–I am practicing my challenge I’ve given myself: to show up as an integrated self, and to share my work from music to film and video to my strategic consulting and curation, both what I’m proud of and what I’m working to find love for. I’ll share creative work, from books to cinema to music and beyond, that inspires and provokes me, as well as conversations between myself and working artists, creatives and organizers whose work and perspectives I want you to know. 

And for the first time publicly, I’ll share exercises I’ve developed in my decade plus of teaching artistry, strategic consulting and facilitation designed to help you better articulate yourself to yourself. These can range from icebreakers to writing prompts, kinetically-driven interactive exercises to deeper introspective dives. I’ll share these exercises in hopes to catalyze clarity, evoke unearthed questions, and pulse energy into the unsaids within you. These exercises can also be done within teams or among friends, to encourage your own sharing and dialogue towards collective understanding and generative collaboration. Some will be free for all to read, and some will be for subscribers only. 

My inspiration to create this newsletter comes from many touchpoints and quiet revelations. They include discovering the words and philosophies of Grace Lee Boggs, who believed that self-transformation and adaptability were essential for meaningful social change; working with a creative coach, Nina Beckhardt, who first pushed me to declare myself with a positioning statement versus the hyper-malleability of a “I’ll take what I can get” freelancer; and working through all twelve weeks of The Artist’s Way during deep COVID times and realizing the power of learning alongside other creatives, even when physically distanced. 

I’m excited to be a regular conduit for what sparks understanding and challenges me, and for this to be a site of dialogue and collective strengthening. My abiding hope is that this newsletter itself can inspire connections, creativity, community and collaboration. Besides the satisfying alliteration, it is what brings my life most value, and my dream for this newsletter is to consistently water the soil for the unlikely to blossom.

I invite anyone who sees themselves in the broad venn diagram of artists/creatives and community/social change workers, or anyone who is curious about how they can show up within those spheres. And if you’ve read this far and aren’t sure if this is for you, I’m willing to wager it is! 

Got anything you want me to write, reflect, or create exercises around specifically? I’d love to know! Hit the comments below or reply back to this directly; I’m standing by. 

<3 hollis