This day last week I celebrated my birthday. And by that I mean I really did allow myself to celebrate it. Just my birthday. Nothing to do with the fact that it was also Valentine's Day. It was just my day. And it was the one thing I kept missing out on for the past many years of my adult life. Because I had often been too carried away by the Valentine part, pressured by my own and other people's expectations, and molded by media and marketing. This year it sank in, finally, that there are two separate things and I am not obliged to take them as a package. Yes, that was a long time sinking in.
I have felt a definite shift in energy this year. Like something falling into place to set other things in motion. Another chapter beginning like in other previous years, but this one more marked than usual.
I cannot tell you the one thing that made it happen because it is a series of processes. But perhaps what I can tell you is that the most crucial process of my life so far that led to now -- was when I stepped out of all expectations and started defining things on my own terms. By this, I mean not forcing others to take my point of view, but simply living by example, if it can be called that. I have been told I have inspired others, I am happy to hear it. But I am not preaching nor prescribing. This is simply what worked for me, what made a difference in my life that is now both more and less ideal.
That particular moment when my current life took its own path away from my old one was when I decided that I am an artist, and began to shape my life accordingly.
It took me a while to realise and accept that the change will affect everything. Down to the smallest details of my everyday life. I thought at first it would be like revising bits here and there. No, it was a square one, total blank page beginning, with maybe a few tokens of random wisdom from the old life. The whole structure of how I live and why I live that way had to change.
This new odd difficult life poses questions that have no satisfying standard answers. I can only answer from my own experience. I cannot say that my process will work for all or for anyone at all.
Since my new year began, I started the draft of a book, painstakingly putting it together by hand. I write in my journal and draw in my sketchbook every day. I've found my reading groove again. I am painting a lot of new pieces. I'm showing up more often in the tribe community again. I have new music playlists (one of the ultimate signs that the magic is flowing well and strongly). I am showing up where I can carry the Impossible Garden with me to spread the seeds of story and magic.
But behind this seemingly idyllic artist's life is a heap of harsh realities. I feel a little bit more tired than usual because this is not the first year of explorations and experimentation with its novelty but the third year with its growing baggage of failures. Putting out fires every single day. Fighting through the defaults and the mundane. Battling with regret and resentment. Disappointments layered upon ever bigger disappointments. I've had many nights when I wished I would not make it into the morning. How much help can one ask for? How to justify asking for help in the first place? How many can comprehend the why of the decisions I have made for my life? How do I even begin to explain why I can no longer be what I used to be, or why I even needed to change?
Today I will juggle day job tasks with studio tasks. Used to be that I would totally push aside the art to do the day job. Now my routine has evolved (and finally without the feeling of enormous guilt) into something like: Start the day in the studio, do the day job in the afternoon to early evening, late evening in the studio. Before that, I would give the day job the prime spot of the early morning until the early afternoon which would usually leave me too exhausted for anything else after. (My secret dream is to find a day job more attuned to who and what I am now -- such as a job in a library, bookstore, museum, or book publishing house...)
What's especially new this year is that I find myself surprisingly calm. I am never calm. I may look calm but I am a catastrophe inside. But now my outside calm is actually reflective of a strange inner calm. Maybe this is temporary. Maybe this is a calm before a storm. Maybe I will break down in one way or another in some near future.
In reality, everything is shaky and uncertain at the moment, heart-in-throat tension, broken-heart kind of despair.
Comments