The morning of March 16th, 2020, I was at a dance class in Brooklyn, when we got word that New York City was going to shut down entirely, effective that afternoon. There was an agitated feel in the studio as class ended, and dancers parted ways. The hub of streets near Atlantic Center had been getting emptier in the preceding weeks with many storefronts already closed. On a whim, I popped into a thrift store with open doors and spotted a pair of black pleather biker shorts with gold zippers. Motivated by my love of impractical clothing and the sense I wouldn’t be in a physical store again for a while, I said to the clerk, “I’ll take ‘em.”

I’m sure anyone reading this post has been through the fire and back over the last year. We’ve all lost someone we loved, known someone who’s gotten sick, and had some portion of a dream for ourselves destroyed. We’ve all struggled with our relationships and wrestled with finding work, being out of work, or working from home. We’ve all renegotiated our connections to our bodies, food, and time. We’ve all started or ended something that has redefined our lives. More than anything, we’ve all been forced to sit with ourselves.

In the early days of the pandemic, my partner and I took long walks all over our neighborhood. These walks didn’t have a destination or goal. Sometimes, we barely talked with each other. We just moved through the unfamiliar quiet of Brooklyn streets — our faces masked, eyes straight forward. It was on these walks that a Buddhist story I learned a long time ago kept popping up (involuntarily) in my mind:

A man runs from a tiger to the edge of a cliff. He jumps and reaches for a vine hanging from its edge. Dangling, he looks down and sees another tiger waiting for him, prowling in the ravine below. Two tiny mice at the cliff’s edge gnaw away at the vine in his hand. He looks before him and sees a slender stalk with a single strawberry just within reach. He puts the strawberry in his mouth, “Ah, how sweet!”  

I could not figure out for the life of me why this story kept popping up over and over again in my mind. I’m a performer for a living. So, in addition to the financial stress, I was working through the difficult acceptance that I may never perform for a live audience again or at least not for a very long time. Performing regularly has been in my blood since I was a teenager — the rush of the schedule, the visceral adrenaline, the intimate conversations. My body was grieving this physical withdrawal, and yet, unceasing in my mind was this Buddhist story.

Looking back on this year, I know a lot of people are eager to get back to “normal” life and consider this year a dumpster fire of terribleness better off forgotten. Despite the grief, losses, and days of endless crying, I have to admit I’ve learned a lot of very important things this year that I would never have learned if the clock of life kept ticking at its normal tempo.

As the performances on my calendar went from booked to postponed to cancelled and the future of all things began to look murkier and murkier, I was forced to redefine and restructure what truly mattered to me. What if there are no performances? What if there are no audiences? What if so many of the things I’ve worked so hard towards don’t even exist anymore? What if there is no one to impress? What if there is nothing to get?

With the tenor of everything in the world so grave, I found myself not really caring about so many superficial things that occupied my time prior to COVID. Doing things I don’t want to do? Nope. FOMO while looking at IG? Nope. Being concerned about what other people thought of me? Nope. Jealousy over professional achievements? Nope. Wondering if I was being “strategic” or if my life “made sense”? Nope. Concern over whether how I shaped my eyebrows made me look like Bert & Ernie? Nope.

The fact that so much of life as we knew it was ending and what was going to take its place was unknown became an instant priority checker for me. Everything I did, everything I invested myself in, everything I consumed had to matter to me and nobody else. As an artist-performer, a certain part of me always looked to engage and please others. For this whole year, I just asked myself what do I really want? I didn’t pitch or sell or promote myself. I found this strange new intimacy that I hadn’t had in a while, a place to be not my professional idea of myself, but whoever this new artist was and whoever she wanted to become.

Prior to COVID, I was already pondering the concept of the “reclusive artist” quite a bit. Given a string of emotionally exhausting events in my own life and career, I joked with myself, “I’m starting to get now why that’s a thing.” My own issues aside, it’s intriguing that so many spiritual practices around the world value self-isolation. Buddhist monks spend years mostly alone as a part of their training. A friend of mine who converted to Ifa in the Yoruba tradition refrained from group settings and covered his head to protect his energy from others for a specified period of time. Jewish mystics also have traditions of deep meditation and social withdrawal. Although it’s constantly reinforced that humans are somehow inherently “social creatures,” different cultures all around the globe have landed on the same exact concept that withdrawing from the social world is a critical part of getting nearer to the divine.

During the pandemic, I picked up the habit of listening to pro athletes (boxers, surfers, football players) on Youtube talk about their training mindset. In one video, a football player said he’s always stronger in the off-season, which was a fascinating concept to me. He said the regularity of his schedule in the off-season allowed him to train with better gains than his interrupted schedule during the playing season. I could relate. Being on tour and having constant deadlines often reset my schedule for days. The pandemic brought on a moment of (unexpectedly positive) stillness for me that I had never experienced in my professional life before.

Someone told me the other day that she doesn’t recognize who she is now after this year of isolation. For me, this year has been an opportunity to meet the person and artist I was already becoming and to let go of that old self, who was only being perpetuated by the daily churn of pre-COVID “normal” life. I came to understand that even without performances or awards or accolades, the artistic practice itself is a crucial source of life. I never understood the saying: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” Of course, it makes a sound. Life doesn’t have to be perceived by others to be real and meaningful. What you do alone can be as profound and amazing as anything you could ever do in a crowd.

As a way of creating structure and commitment to my practice, a week into the shutdown, I started to post 10 AM prompts (#CreativeQuarantine) on my social media to help other people make valuable use of this time in solitude. Prior to COVID, people often told me they wanted to write or create, but they didn’t have enough time. My hope was that by prompting people to explore their inner worlds that the deprivations of the outer world would feel slightly less painful.

It’s unlikely that anyone noticed this, but I designed the original prompts superimposed over abstract fractal patterns from the natural world. It was an intuitive choice, but perhaps my own subliminal way to remind myself that we are a part of this — the incredible design that makes these beautiful shapes in leaves and rocks and water and fruit. Life and the world are so much more than just the human social networks we’ve constructed within it.

Ultimately, I posted #CreativeQuarantine 6 days a week for about 3 months, which ended up being 71 posts. The thing about creativity though is once it gets going, it’s nearly impossible to stop. Prompts were popping up in my brain constantly, such that I ended up with 100 more. I tried to generate a mix of entry points to the creative process (tactile or sonic or memory-based or future-driven), but more than anything I hope these prompts can be illuminating, soul-searching, and even fun in building your intimacy with your own practice, no matter what the circumstances of the outer world may be.

The first post in the series is below. Click on the link for the Google doc with all 171 prompts and some guidelines to support your creative practice.

#CreativeQuarantine (171 Prompts) Google Doc

I understand now why that Buddhist story kept popping up in my head. With life reopening, I pray these “strawberries” stay with me far into the future. It’s a shame that it took something as dramatic as a global pandemic for me to pare down to what’s essential to my heart, but at this point, all learning is welcome. The clarity and perspective of this year also gifted me this comedic spoken word poem, “Dear Artist: The Lost Career Guide (Early, Emerging, Mid-Career, Established, Non-Established But Still Kicking, Alien, Etc., Etc.),” that I wrote and performed for a Zoom event in December. Before this year, I probably would have never been honest enough about my life as an artist to write it. Today, I hope to powerfully integrate who I am with who I hope to become to help build the world post-COVID…and I’ll definitely be looking for somewhere to finally wear those black pleather biker shorts with the gold zippers.

© Brian Shumway Photography

KELLY TSAI is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, dancer, photographer, and musician based in Brooklyn, NY. She is currently a member of Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective and a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Non-Fiction Literature (Memoir). As a spoken word poet, she has been featured at over 700 venues worldwide including the White House (under Obama), Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Apollo Theater in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, and multiple shows on HBO. Her work has been profiled by Forbes, NPR, New York Daily News, Huffington Post, NBC News, NY1 and more. (kellytsai.com, Youtube: youtube.com/kztsai, IG: @kellytsai_nyc, Twitter: @kellytsai_nyc)

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