More on being who you are
Flipping through my old India ink drawings and M says I’m really a lot more interesting than I act. I say I used to act it out all the time, it was all I ever thought about: how to do more than simply make art, but to live it, every minute. How to be the story that needs to be told. It was palpable, my sense of who I was: it covered my space, dictated my dress, consumed me always. I was naive, a drama queen, but I was someone specific, someone intense. And now, I tell myself that’s all shoved in boxes, hidden in writings that no one ever read unless they were there, and there were so few people there, buried under my schedule.
But an artist, he says, doesn’t need to be an artist on the outside, she can look and act like everyone else, as long as she’s got it on the inside. The inside and the work are all that matters. I can have any mopey persona I want, as long as I don’t stop making things, as long as I don’t stop completely.
Just take one day of that 17 year old’s life and break it up into 2 hour chunks and live it out over weeks. In between getting Marian’s memory span experiment going and studying the properties of retinal ganglion cell receptive fields, I could still paint, I could still wonder about all the things I wondered about before I was so worried about all the things I’m so worried about. I tell myself it’s impossible but it really isn’t. That’s just something I tell myself, so I don’t have to think. Adulthood is all about making things go on automatic, and that’s the opposite of living.
It’s not that she’s producing incredible work that’s so amazing, says M about MJ, it’s that she’s producing incredible work as an adult.
And maybe it is true that you don’t realize you need to make a change until you’ve already made it. Maybe something has shifted and it’s only a matter of time. But no.. no waiting. Either it’s happened or it hasn’t. Or it’s happening. Is something different? I don’t know. Maybe. What if I just pretend it is? Is that enough?
One, no, two, of those India ink drawings, five years old, mentioned the word serenity. I wrote a story called Serenity only four months ago. (Four months feels like an infinity to have not done anything.) It is odd that we can have so many recurring themes in our lives without really realizing. A concept engulfs you and you feel like you’ve never felt such waves before, when actually the same resonance has lingered for ages, building up and backing off again and building up until the ringing is all you can hear.
And if I haven’t actually changed at all? If I was always, am always, okay?
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