A Slow New Beginning
Notes from the Shitshow (and Other Small Victories)
I’m sitting by a sunny window wishing I was out there. Inside the flat, it’s a shit-show, there are dishes on the sideboard, boxes of props everywhere from yesterday’s shoot, and the bin smells of day old sea-bass. It could do with sorting out.
But I’ve made a promise to myself to write. And breaking promises to yourself is a sure fire way of messing with your self trust.
Yesterday after the shoot I promised myself that today I’d write my first new Substack post. I deleted all my old posts a couple of weeks ago because the content of them no longer felt relevant to me– not even in a “sharing my evolution” kinda way. Reading the words and listening to some of the podcast type audios felt like listening to a long lost sibling I hardly knew. There was some familiarity there but a lot of work to do getting to know each other.
I sort of felt sorry for the old me in the deleted posts- She sounded like her entire life was a funnel for a coaching program she was running. She definitely sounded like she was trying way too hard to be successful; unnecessarily so. After all there was already so much she’d achieved that was a success anyway. She also sounded like she didn’t really quite believe what she was saying sometimes. Maybe she half believed it but she was just knackered from pretending to care about exponentially growing a group coaching empire.
No wonder she burned out. Burned out until all she wanted to do was stay in bed, cry and watch “Love on the Spectrum” in her pyjamas.
It’s tempting to make this a grand new beginning- but I won’t. There’s no need. You see, this is a quiet revolution happening in my studio, in the bath, on walk and in my mind. Unlike the writing and podcasts I’ve created before there’s no big plan or marketing intention here. I’m not creating a funnel to sell you anything. I’m just sharing from the heart what’s going on in my creative world. And of course you might end up buying my art, my book or working with me as a creative consultant – but it’s not the point of this writing. It’s liberating for the first time ever to feel like: Oh, I don’t really mind if you become my client or not.
It’s not that I want to be “pure” by being untethered to commerce or that being paid taints my art, quite the contrary. I believe that artists should be paid extremely well. It’s just that right now I’m already making money from my art, and this writing is a beautifully aimless experiment. That’s very healing post burnout.
The point of this writing, like all art, is also to bring what is internal, and make it external. The point is to transfer the experiences of the body out into the world to be experienced by other bodies.
The point is to live a thing, and then share what it felt like.
Sometimes I earn money doing that. And sometimes I don’t.
When I was trying to write a bio for this new publication it sounded something like:
I'm Ali Taylor Mapletoft - multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, creative director, writer, and all-around creative misfit. My proudest achievement has been building a life powered entirely by creativity.
I make art happen because I believe creativity is life. This is my real story: the beauty, the burnout, the mess, and everything in between.
Reinventions can be tiresome for everyone– especially people witnessing someone agonise about pointless detail. I spent 10 minutes flipping between “Ali Mapletoft” - my married name “Ali Taylor”, my very boring pre-wedding name, and then settled on “Ali Taylor Mapletoft” – which I used to sometimes use. It’s giving Helena Bonham-Carter, Sam Taylor Wood vibes which is entertaining (for me) and it will help people who previously knew me as a filmmaker to find my work.
I don’t know how this space will unfold. But there will be art. There will be voice notes with swearing. There will be moments of “what am I even doing?”
And somehow, it will all be art.
For today, I’ve kept my promise to myself, the sun is still shining outside, and it looks ever so inviting.
Ali
