The Muse vs Mr. X

Meet the Resistance to your creative dreams

Mr. X

Mr. X image by @agologistArt

Mr. X is the opposite of The Muse, which I wrote about last Sunday, ICYMI. He is like The Demogorgon in Stranger Things, but for your creativity; he lives within.

He is the resistance to all your artistic dreams.

While we’d been meeting for many years, I got the name Mr. X more recently from Jonah Hill’s weepy therapy movie, Stutz, and his therapist’s description of Part X. I immediately adopted it, renamed it Mr. X, and felt it as truth.

I’d long known Mr. X, but hadn’t had a good way to address him. Thanks, Netflix.

Stutz movie poster, via Netflix.

“Part X is the judgmental part of you. The anti-social part of you. It’s an invisible force that wants to keep you from changing or growing… It wants to block your potential. It wants to f#ck up your sh#t… Part X is the voice of impossibility because whatever it is you think you need to do, it’s going to tell you that’s impossible; give up.” — Dr. Stutz

Dr. Stutz, a Parkinsons-suffering therapist to the Hollywood stars, likens Part X to a negative super ego force. In my model, Mr. X competes against The Muse in a battle for dominance.

I divide my muse into three parts: spark, work, release, and harken the three muse sisters of Greek mythology, Aiodē, Meletē, and Mnēmē, because creativity is a real battle and it’s better to visualize a whole cast of goddesses friends battling Mr. X.

While Aoidē, muse of creative inspiration, the spark, croons fantastical ideas, Mr. X slams the door and tells you to go fold the laundry, to watch TikToks about how to lose weight; he tells you that nothing you ever do will be good enough, that your dad is right, that everything you’ve ever done is crap, that everything you ever do will be crap.

When Meletē, muse of practice/work, sits you at your desk or your piano bench, he tells her she’s wasting your time. No matter how many hours you practice, you’ve got no natural talent, shouts Mr. X.

And when Mnēmē, the final muse in our trio, the muse of contemplation, memory, and release, tells you it’s time to share your work with others, to submit your film to festivals, to query your novel to agents, or to just click share on a personal, yet artistic Facebook post, Mr. X yells, NO. Don’t shame yourself! No one wants to see this!

Yet, while Mr. X is irritating to artists, he has an evolutionary purpose. His biological function is to keep you mired in human, basic needs. Stop daydreaming, or writing novels, or painting horses on cave walls, and go look for food, go make babies, go be more likable by your tribe—you weirdo, freak. He serves no other purpose. He is king of your lizard brain.

Mr. X is the enemy of the artist, who by nature, will never be liked by everyone, who will never fully fit into a tribe, but who is designed to work often in solitude, to capture and project ideas, to reflect the world’s terror, beauty, and ugliness, to channel the beyond, and to progress the evolution of society, but not necessarily their individual genes.

The artist may starve and forget to shower while working on their craft, but Mr. X doesn’t like this devotion to the imaginary realm one bit, and he will create resistance for you at every step.

Masculine vs Feminine Energy, Babies vs Art, Mr. X’s Special Toxic Attention to Women

I see Mr. X as Darth Vader, personally, but if the devil/Satan might embody Mr. X, and the Muse stays in the traditional Greek Goddess-like feminine form, we maybe can discuss these forces in masculine and feminine terms for reasons pertaining to fertility in both cases, though Mr. X is out to keep us in our biology, creating humans and not sonnets, while the Muse urges us to channel our fertility into non-human creation.

So, because women are the ones carrying the heavier burden of childbearing and rearing, Mr. X must come down hardest on women. This is my theory.

Since art evolves the collective consciousness, but doesn’t always engender the survival of the individual artist (hello, witch burning). This is maybe the truest for ovarian-bearing artists, and different for the sperm-carrying, who can thrive as artists while also fathering hundreds of children, but for women, when you are consumed with reproducing just one baby at a time, then rearing subsequent multiple babies, you can’t possibly produce as much art as someone without these responsibilities.

Thankfully, reproduction is now more of a conscious decision for women, but it wasn’t always, and Mr. X evolved in our brains prior to the invention of birth control.

I’m not saying motherhood and art can’t be done; women make families and art, BUT… it’s hard. Mr. X will strive to keep you, as they say, barefoot and pregnant, and even past your reproductive years, he will push you to serve as Grandma of the Year, Chief Babysitter of the Clan, before he lets you write that novel. At least one famous female writer described motherhood as a form of slavery.

Perhaps this is why Mr. X’s voice seems so loud to women. Or am I just making this up? I also see evidence of Mr. X’s weakness in men, because have you ever witnessed a creative man high on his own talent? Fearlessly expertising and mansplaining all over town? Just bold AF about his creative powers? Of course. We all have, but it’s not so common for women, though there are outliers.

Many women contend with extreme doses of Mr. X and Meletē. Mr. X tells us that we aren’t good enough. He says we have to do more domestic chores! Don’t be a bad mom, you art-slut! And Meletē tells us that we must work harder, harder, harder, harder on our art, AND be a perfect mom/wife/woman. At times, it’s impossible, and that’s Mr. X’s #1 goal.

″ If you’ve got a head, you’ve got a voice of Resistance inside it.”

— Stephen Pressfield, Do the Work

Author Stephen Pressfield also talks about Mr. X, but calls him The Resistance. The Resistance is what the artist must vanquish to succeed, to even have the chance of catching the voice of Aoidē, Meletē, or Mnēmē, because we can’t hear The Muse when Mr. X is screaming about the power bill or inflation or the baby’s soiled diaper.

You must do whatever you can to silence him. Sit at your desk or stand before your canvas. Put on noise-canceling headphones and blast Polyphia; do as Cheryl Strayed did and whisper to candles, because no art is getting finished unless you destroy the resistance.

Now You

Do you have an embodied Mr. X? What do you call your Mr. X? Is it a feminine, masculine, or gender-neutral form?

Have you seen the movie, Stutz? What did you think about it?

How do we shut up Mr. X, yet also respect him enough to put away the laundry?

I wish you luck with your Mr. X.

Thanks for reading.

XXXOOO

Charlotte Dune

And P.S. **Want more of this type of writing? I’ve written about metaphors from Stranger Things before. Like Greek Mythology, I find the TV series a rich breeding ground for metaphors on consciousness and creativity.