How one light turns off; another one comes on…
Ominous title, I realise but it was during a phone call with a friend that I realised how badly I was overthinking things. I’m approaching 30 and all those benchmarks that ‘grown-ups’ told you were essential growing up have never felt accessible. No mortgage. But I have an education, a curious mind and load of debt.
‘All the Gear, NO IDEA.’ This small phrase sums up every single creative experience I’ve ever encountered.
Through rose-tinted glasses I truly thought that by studying, graduating a subject I was passionate about it would somehow warrant my ability to get a career in my chosen field, get a good wage and then ‘BE HAPPY’. It would be easier to dress up as Worzel Gummidge and wait for the Green Man to come and tell me off for moving from Ten Acre Field.
Life is just a series of obstacles that are preventing me from reading my pile of books. The main barrier is my incessant need to procrastinate during the day and trying to cram in all the tasks for the next day in the night previous. I am now finding that this extended new normal has brought about a delay in my now fuzzy mind. It feels as if you’ve switched on a Television set and the colour hasn’t quite had its brightness switched up all the way.
I remember watching The Wizard of Oz as a young girl and being fascinated by the moment where the world switches from the narrow view of the black and white Kansas to the technicolour panoramic view of the Emerald City. I was enthralled. In hindsight, I realise that empathising for the villain of the piece makes me a grown up and a full-blown critic. I can not switch off from analysing the making of any creative form.
I’d often thought of the way I wanted so badly to work on stories in a way that didn’t hurt anyone but I realise that there is always casualties in any type of creative work. You have to form an opinion from all the information you’ve acquired. I would pride myself on NOT becoming a journalist after a bad formative experience working on the local paper.
The struggle to pass the boundary of toeing the line or keeping your moral integrity seems to reach a sense of blurriness when you start to find topics that you find difficult to speak neutrally on. When I am passionate I feel that I could burst from the excitement, I have often found my voice difficult to control as it has the added setback that my learning difficulty halts the connection between language and active memory.
I have never felt more incensed by how the current situations have escalated the feeling of uselessness in me as an artist; how everything I write serves no purpose unless it has an audience. I think lockdown has made realise that my voice matters no matter how many hear it, as long as you speak your truth that it will always be important.
The recent call to justice for the nature of public safety has been an undercurrent of our lives as women for as long as life has been recorded. Bringing about change always meets resistance, but it will be brought about if enough voices talk in the same way. As we know, the entwining of safety with danger is a cause for concern.
I have to keep my head clear as the lucid nature of my dreams have tended towards the bad and this has led to broken sleep. I have never discussed my unconscious so much as through lockdown as it has helped to uncover new material for the tail end of my academic career.
I suppose we all have people in our lives that enter into it to give us advice that is pertinent to our self-actualised and internal struggles.
‘You had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself.’ This swirled around my head again and again like the twister that took Dorothy to Oz. Those swirling dark thoughts sometimes are amplified by being alone in those same thoughts for too long. But in that darkness, you have to find some sense of the light. I look for the best in all situations and now I will keep writing to ensure that it will get better in the long run.
With every failure brings new success and with the amount of rejection letters I have had over the last year I think my next ambitious success will be huge in means of an apology from the universe.
