I spent most of yesterday afternoon unable to get out of bed. The sunlight seemed oppressive and ominous. My projects (drawings, poems, an erotic novel) seemed pointless and absurd. It seemed to me that all my creativity in the past had been met with polite indifference by teachers, professors and audiences. It seems that my art just doesn't connect with people, and I felt an aching loneliness and despair. For if, as I told myself, I don't have the talent or the insight to connect to my readers/viewers, what else do I have to offer the world? I've been called "pathologically shy" and my writing and imagery is often the only way I know how to communicate my tumultuous inner life to the outside world. Indifference to my art is worse than rejection, because it makes me feel invisible.
I remember displaying seven watercolors at a garage sale when I was 12. I was asking five dollars a piece for them, but it wasn't money I was really after. I wanted someone to look at the images and want one of them - want it because it expressed something that was true about their own inner life that they couldn't express themselves. The five dollar transaction would just be a ritual of affirmation. "Yes," the five dollar bill would say."I feel this way too."
Again and again, adults walked by my display. "Did you paint these?" they would ask. "Yes," I would reply, searching their faces for some hint that the pictures had spoken to them - spoken to that same deep hidden place. But each person would just not curtly and say, "Very good. You're very talented." I did not sell a single painting. All I got, and it would become a theme in my creative life, was polite indifference.
Meanwhile, my neighbor across the street, a vivacious and outgoing ten-year-old, netted $22.75 selling lemon-aid and home baked cookies. Story of my life.
Okay, I realize that my paintings were, truth be told, a little weird. More than one middle-aged-woman seemed disturbed that a tween girl was painting nudes, both male and female. The faces were inspired by tribal masks (I had just seen a documentary on Picasso) and the whole set kind of looked (unintentionally) like a childish depiction of Eyes Wide Shut. At the time, of course, I had no idea how inappropriate the pictures were, or why they elicited scowls of mild concern and disapproval. All I noticed was that the adults seemed vaguely embarrassed to look at them, but only vaguely. They weren't quite inappropriate enough to cause a scandal, or to get somebody to report my parents to child services. Ultimately, I think they all just thought they were just... in bad taste.
So I went to sleep last night wondering if I would always be the weird girl with the slightly weird (but not quite weird enough) art that nobody wanted to look at. And if so, what was my reason for being in the world at all? If I vanished from the planet right there in my bed, would the world even notice?
But I woke up this morning feeling better. My body (I sleep in the nude) was covered in a thin film of sweat and ever pore and hair follicle seemed to vibrate. I felt a gush and shiver of excitement. It seemed to me that I was part of something larger than myself, something that filled me up with both horror and wild excitement. It didn't matter if no one ever understood the feeling I was having. It seemed as though I was made of stardust, and I myself was the universe waking up, seeing itself, feeling itself, and expressing itself in wild fit of self-understanding. I had to submit to it, and feel it tearing through me. Whether writing, drawing, or just seeing and feeling, I had to give myself over in supplication to this Dionysian ecstasy.
And if that sounds orgasmic, it was. And I'm not ashamed to admit it!
