I am an artist in perpetual recovery. I don’t appreciate labels, but if I had to choose one, this would suit me fine for now. It’s funny how long it took for me to get here — and not funny, and not so long, all complexly-human things considered.
As artists, we look at the world and ask: why this way, and not that way? And then we do things our own way after assessing things in new ways. To be an artist is a matter of indulging in alternate perspectives. Often, our way is against the grain. We give ourselves ever greater, wider, broader permission to interrupt patterns we are bored with, or sick of, or disagree with morally, or artistically, or spiritually, or for no explicable reason at all.
It is a kindness to life itself, I think, to allow for the mystery to exist. To not impose our concepts of what we always thought was true onto what is true and real now, today, right in front of us.
And what is recovery, would you say? For me, it is a way of life that allows me to undo any other previous way of life I used to swear by, should I so choose. My hope is to recover into more beauty, awareness, joy, and freedom. I want to be creative in every way my spirit desires, outwardly and inwardly.
I have hung my paintings all over the walls in my dining room. It’s unruly. I’m going to keep going until my creations cover all the walls. It is more joyful than I ever could have dreamed. My home is becoming my home. My husband has started adding his paintings, too. In my previous life, the one where I thought I had to play by other people’s rules and keep up appearances, I would never have allowed this to happen. Homes were for entertaining other people and to be able to do that I thought I had better have as lovely a home as other people would expect (my expectations, projected onto theirs, were a bit too high, it seems).
If I put up my amateur art — what would they think?
But the reality is that I don’t entertain that often, and ffs I live here all the time. What was I thinking?
It’s not a given for me that as an artist I will show my work on the internet or to other people at all. I am so tired of input and commentary on everything we do or say or make or think or express. I am so tired of what other people think.
And the thing is, my aversion to commentary isn’t because I don’t like other people. It’s because everything in our online world has become nothing but opinions and counter opinions. You say this and I say that about it. A blog post has 87 comments?! Back and forth, endlessly. I’m so tired of even the quiet things scratching and clawing at the peace.
A true artist disrupts things. In an age of non-stop chatter about every little thing, I am noticing that being silent and off the grid has allowed me to disrupt the noise in my own head. The world seems so loud and intrusive online. Online only works if many billions of people force their way into the never ending chaos of who thinks what about this or that. Mostly for someone who is already paid too much to get paid more.
The chatter bleeds into everything. Because we carry it around in our heads. Because we expect it and allow it and entertain it and perpetuate it. And then we wonder to ourselves in any little sliver of solitude that might manage to creep in: who am I? And we feel really scared because we don’t know anymore. We spend so much time making up and demanding a million stupid trivial answers all day, but we can’t stand to sit with the starkness of a single big question in the dead of night.
Everybody is talking, but who is listening? No one can listen enough, there is too much being said at once. Most of it is just a loop on repeat. Point. Counterpoint. Cancel. Repeat.
I’m an artist in recovery. Hanging my own art on my own walls and showing no one. And my heart is joyful because I know I’m a radical all to myself. Because I know I can be my own closed loop and it isn’t about missing out on anything at all. It is so soft, elegant, and glorious to not force ‘community’ and ‘connection’ and ‘engagement’ on every goddamn endeavor.
My recovery from addiction has brought me this kind of peace. To not have to prove a point. To not need or want attention to validate my life, or what I do with it, or how I feel about it, or who I tell what about it. My recovery in many ways is about stepping away from the world to better know myself.
I notice that having a few precious, kind, compassionate confidants is exactly enough and more abundant and fulfilling than I ever before realized. ‘Community’ isn’t a race or a competition or even a huge deal. You might think it was! Everywhere you turn it’s another ‘opportunity to join a community or be part of a community or build a community.’
Jesus christ.
To commune only takes two people (actually you can commune with nature so another person isn’t even required, but I digress) — and the ability to truly see each other. Be present and intimate with each other. Honor and respect each other. How many of us can even do that without distraction, judgment, or manipulation? Without needing to be right?
Online isn’t the same as in person, human to human. Heart to heart, eye to eye, face to face. I know we want to pretend it is, but it isn’t. The world as it seems online is not how it is offline. People aren’t so bad. We aren’t so bad. Mostly we just need time to ourselves again. To mellow out. To quiet the noise and detox from the mania. To find out we are in some ways alone with ourselves in this life — and to find that deeply comforting. Instead of scrambling to post or scroll or ‘friend’ to try to make it untrue.