I’d spent the last couple of weeks thinking about why I hid my writing from people. Why I hid myself in general. Why I hid away my creativity like I was stashing Little Debbie snack cakes on the lowest, darkest shelf of the pantry.
I had this image come to me, a cloak of responsibility made up of razor blades. Pointy, slashy, dangerous to wear for both me and the people around me.
I took photos of an exacto (xacto) blade from multiple angles, a shortcut to guide my hand in digitally painting the different shapes and shading.
I completed one blade. On the screen, it was dull grey, brown, and black. Not at all like the colors I usually use in my pieces. But it fits the vibe, I told myself. This isn’t supposed to be a pretty cloak.
The sun was on my monitor, that time in the afternoon when the glare makes it hard to see what’s happening unless I close the blinds. I didn’t want to shut out the sun so I started playing with this single blade.
Copy/paste - the single blade became two. Angle the second blade by about 5 degrees, line up the bases so they are stacked on top of each other. Copy/paste - angle another 5 degrees, line up. Repeat until what I’m looking at is a fan of blades.
Maybe it was the quiet of the room around me. Maybe it was because I had a nice snack and I wasn’t too cold or too hot. Whatever it was, my brain lit up the more I copy/pasted that single razor blade and placed it around the screen. No plan, no vision.
I needed to get rid of the ugly colors. What pops, what gives me a smile?
Something was still missing. I took my simple brush, picked plain vanilla white, drew radiating lines from each of the points of the blades. Wobbly, imprecise, overlapping.
A bit of distortion, recoloring, until that special ping in my center, letting me know the piece was done.
I sat back.
This is not the cloak of responsibility I envisioned. It looked more like a starburst flower. I walked away, leaving the art on my screen - frustrated. Not wanting to force it into a cloak but also not sure what this “thing” was that I created.
While doing my morning pages the next day, I let my mind loose on the page. My fingers typing and trying to unravel the knot of why this image, why did I turn a razor blade into a flower? Was I taking the easy way out because I didn’t know how to paint a cloak?
My fingers typed out, it looks like a badge, and then all the lights in my brain started going off and signaling me all at once. In Hibernation, I wrote about removing the badge of responsibility, not a cloak.
My fingers couldn’t keep up as my mind clued me in, misspellings and out of order words looked more like a jumble puzzle than coherent thought. But I understood.
The moment I decided to play, my soul took over and created what I needed to see. The badge of responsibility can cut and harm (it’s what razor blades do), but in my hands, with my intention of playfulness, I shaped it, transformed it into a beacon of light and loveliness and good energy.
My soul reminded me that burdens, or gifts, I shape things based on my intentions. She, my soul, reminded me that when a plan or path doesn’t match my vision, I can trust that I’m getting where I need to be. That playing is another way to listen to what the universe, and my soul, are trying to tell me.
Those were her surface level lessons. The important lesson, the one I was searching for was to come.
I move between reading, writing, and art’ing during my free time - turning from book to computer to tablet - letting my mind flow and play where it wants between the three. It’s my trifecta of creativity - little bit of nourishing (writing), little bit of playing (art’ing), and a little bit of resting (reading). I had written the above about the lessons but it felt like I was missing the big lesson. The ‘holy shit’ moment that kicks open a door for me.
I was reading How to think like a woman by Regan Penaluna and came across this paragraph...
The late philosopher Sandra Bartky writes that emotions are important features of knowledge, and that how a person feels informs how she interprets the world. Bartky argues that in society men and women learn different emotional responses to stimuli, which develop into different ways of knowing. She was particularly interested in shame, the feeling that others judge you to be fundamentally defective or wrong. The typical response to shame is self-censorship and social isolation: to hide and conceal from others what you think is shameful about yourself. Shame makes a person speak tentatively, blush, apologize, and cringe. (emphasis mine) Bartky observed that women experience shame far more frequently than men, because society constantly sends the signal that they are inadequate… The takeaway: to think like a woman is to be regularly ashamed of oneself.
Shame is the emotion that causes people to hide, to self-censor, to conceal. This is the emotion I didn’t know I was feeling. If you asked me if I was ashamed of my creativity, I would say hell no. I’ve said hell no.
I read The Artist’s Way. I talked about my block in therapy. I was logical, rationale and a complete moron who missed the basic emotion. Being so insolent and cocksure, I knew I couldn’t feel something as simple as shame. It had to be bigger, more complex, more worthy of having an outsized impact on my life. I was better than shame.
I’m not above it, I’m not better than shame. Just because I don’t want to feel it doesn’t mean it’s not there, working its emotional magic in everything I do, making me act all wonky.
My behavior doesn’t lie. I hide because I’m ashamed of being a creative person, ashamed of being the complex multi-faceted and abnormal delight that I am. I’m embarrassed, angry, annoyed and baffled that it’s taken me decades to put that into words.
I’m ashamed that sometimes chickens, bears, inanimate objects, and entities are more prominent in my stories than humans. I’m ashamed that I tap the dark and deep and say things so plainly that the emotionless tone speaks louder than if I screamed it and covered it in tears.
I’m using responsibility as an excuse to hide my shame of being creative, of thinking of myself as creative without any formal training or piece of paper or “authority” granting me the permission to call myself creative. Claiming responsibility as my role in life gives me permission to be rational, stabilizing, level-headed, and (though the word gets stuck in my throat and my fingers are trying their mightiest to avoid typing it)…normal.
I’m in conflict. My unashamed soul conflicts with my ashamed behavior. I have no answers for myself, no simple strategy for how to make them play nice. I do know that I’m on the right path. I do have knowledge and wisdom. I do know how to play and pull the stick of uptight out of my ass. I do know that eventually I listen. I do know that I will figure this out.
Putting this piece out in the world is my first step.
(Source cited in the book: Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), 90.)