THE GROOVE - Why Victimhood Quashes Creativity

THE GROOVE

Welcome to the 131st issue of The Groove.

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Most of us have had imperfect childhoods and experienced some sort of trauma or adversity growing up. It’s what we do with those experiences as adults that dictates our creativity, autonomy and self-reliance.

Our ability to bring forth our best ideas in business, in art and in life springs out of having full ownership of who we are.

Those who have a perpetual victimhood mindset tend to have an “external locus of control” -- they believe that one’s life is entirely under the command of forces outside themself, imposed by fate, luck, or the mercy of other people. With this attitude it’s almost impossible to come up with anything remarkable that positively impacts other people.

Ruth Asawa, who was born in Norwalk, California in 1926, could have used all the adversities of her life to stay stuck. Instead, she refused to see herself as a victim, becoming the pioneer of woven-wire hanging sculptures, the first woman to receive a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the first Asian American woman to have a major retrospective at a New York museum, a forthcoming exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art that opens in September 2023.

Humans engage in repeated behaviors for one of two reasons: to avoid a consequence or experience a reward. On some level, those who constantly operate from a victim mentality must fulfill one of these two motivators. The reward of a victim may be getting attention (albeit this doesn’t last long) and/or avoiding taking full responsibility for their life.

But for Asawa, the motivation was to experience living a creative life, free of the often endless loop of pointing fingers at others and blaming them for our misery.

In December 1941, when Asawa was 15 years old, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to declare war on Japan. The following year, more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including Asawa and her family, were evicted from across the West Coast and held in American concentration camps scattered throughout the country.

While incarcerated, she was introduced to three Walt Disney artists who had begun teaching art at the camp. Asawa readily took their drawing lessons and began to take her own talent more seriously. Later in life she expressed gratitude for having found these teachers.

The question is, what do we get from a sense of powerlessness that we would have to give up to take control?

Sometimes we are more afraid of our own success than we are of our failure.

Chasing our dreams requires a degree of vulnerability, resilience, self-confidence, and willingness to grow — none of which you need if you just play the victim card. And that requires reframing adversities and leveraging them in our favor.

Six months into their imprisonment in California, Asawa, her mom and her siblings were transferred to another camp in Arkansas, while her father was taken by the FBI to a different camp in New Mexico. She didn’t see him for another six years.

While many people would have stuck to their resentment to stay in victim-mode, Asawa said: “I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am."

True desire is the engine that powers change. Having graduated from high school, Asawa wanted to go to art school but was only able to get a Quaker scholarship that covered low-tuition schools, so instead she enrolled in the Milwaukee State Teachers College.

During her third year, Asawa was told her race was a liability - as a Japanese-American, she would not be able to graduate with a teaching certificate, and therefore could never work as a teacher. But friends encouraged her to attend a summer course at a school called Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, and six weeks after first arriving Asawa finally enrolled as a full-time student in the fall of 1946.

Asawa blossomed at Black Mountain and was mentored by extraordinary artists: Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage and Franz Kline.

Of her time there she recalls one of her teachers telling her to forego the past and make the best of her skills and talents. “And I think that was very good advice to me because I didn't feel that I was then a victim. I didn't want to be a victim of that, of being victimized. I wanted to be on top of it. So I think that attitude was very good for me to have.”

Attitude was so crucial in Asawa’s life and career, and she benefited tremendously from stepping into her power and seeing herself as a creative being whose ideas were full of value rather than the victim she could’ve been.

And after a trip to Mexico in 1947, when she noticed looped wire baskets being used in the markets to sell eggs and produce, she started using the same material for what became her iconic contribution to art history, her looped-wire hanging sculptures. These are as pioneering and revolutionary as Alexander Calder’s mobiles.

She went on to complete several important public art commissions in California, including the famous “Andrea’s Fountain” on Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. She was also instrumental in creating the San Francisco School of the Arts (renamed in 2010 to the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts).

Nobody is born a victim; victimhood is a learned state of helplessness. The antidote is self-efficacy; the belief that you can do something successfully in the same way Asawa did.

Self-efficacy is developed through resilience, cultivating an optimistic mindset, getting encouragement from yourself and from others who acknowledge your past successes and regulating your own emotional state. Easy? No. Worth the effort? Absolutely.

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HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD

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TEDX TALK

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