Confessions of an Artist

Everyone’s favorite question for a child is “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Everything when you’re a kid is about growing up. You’re supposed to pick a profession and dream about how to become a teacher, a firefighter, a lawyer, a doctor. Out loud I’d say whatever I thought made me sound most interesting that I could stomach the idea of, but none of them felt right. Inside my head or later that night in my room I would whisper to myself, Artist. I want to be an artist.

– Amanda Palmer

I once wrote it down on a piece of paper. My confession. I folded that paper up into a tiny square and hid it away. At seven years old some part of society had convinced me that being an artist wouldn’t be good enough. I was also seven and had trouble reconciling artist when anything other than drawing & painting which I did not do well.

As I got older my artistry (which I was scared to explore explore) pulsed in the back of my mind pushing against my drive to be something great. It was like I was trying to travel down two roads at once, trees in between so that I couldn’t see they were going the same direction. It tore me in two, the girl driven to be successful (whatever that meant) and the girl who just wanted to make beautiful things and connect the dots.

When I was born one of my mom’s best friends, a ballet instructor, held me and told my mom I was going to be a dancer. Circumstances what they were I didn’t dance (much) as a child. There was that one month of ballet in first grade– where I had a traumatic experience trying to figure out if the tights went under or over the leotard– and that time I ended up dancing in a ballet of the Labyrinth (yes that Labyrinth. I got to be a Fiery, and goblin, and a ballroom dancer). But I never got to dance until college.

Throughout my teenage years I dabbled with writing, finding it was one of the few ways I could express and communicate the things I saw. Photography let me show others what I saw. Though because I was so bent on doing something, on being successful and somehow those words could not be combined with artist, not for me, it took me years to slowly come to grips with who I was. That just maybe, these things that I did to survive were something that I could turn into success (whatever that is) and great things.

I only recently stopped fighting who I was, embracing the fact that I need to create, carve out time to make the things in my head come to life instead of letting consume my thoughts on repeat. If I don’t pay attention to them they haunt me, making me feel incomplete.

I’m an artist.

And that’s okay.

I connect the dots. And if I touch just one person with the things I do, then it’s been worth it.

4 Replies

Life in Steps: 101 in 1001 v3

Since the house party I’ve been running around busy: two shows, an art project, keeping up with new friends & refurnishing my living room (more on that later). In the midst of it I realized I was coming up on the end of my 2nd 101 in 1001. Which means it was time to write another one!

I present to you list 3.

My attempt every three years to reorganize and reorder my life to do the things that I want to do right now… which oddly in doing I end up rendering some of them undoable or no longer on my list of things I want. I’ve yet to finish a list.

I think it’s because doing the things I want to do helps me be the person I wan to be. It makes things clearer. Helps me realize what I don’t want to be spending time on. Sometimes those things happen to be things I thought I wanted to do… but maybe wanted to do for all the wrong reasons… or maybe wrote down because 101 things is an arbitrary number of things to do in an arbitrary number of days (1001). It sounds cool, but really, it’s just about reminding ourselves to consciously work to be the people we want to be instead of just dreaming about it.

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This is what social media lets us do: Story of an Amanda Palmer Kickstarter Party

A year ago I opened my mouth on Twitter and opened myself up to an amazing opportunity in which I organized a house party with Amanda Palmer. I spent a year imagining how it could go, and honestly every dream, every imagining I had was blown out of the water by what did happen.

Sitting downstairs, almost everyone. New friends <3

I offered to organize a house party as a backer reward for Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter. It’s amazing what happens when you say yes. Fifty strangers offered me up money, with no guarantee that I wasn’t a psycho going to run off with their cash. One of them offered up her house. We came together, brought food, brought drink and made something magical happen. We were strangers, loosely bound together by the fact of being in roughly the same geographical area and being fans of AFP. Using social media we were able to connect, people who may never have connected in this way.. we connected, unsure of the end result but willing to give it a chance. It was an act of trust, of faith in humanity – which I wrote about how doing this restored mine. We’re a community, unbound by geographic restrictions.

The day of Amanda texted me, stuck in traffic – this non Portlander will never again forget that the Seattle-Portland corridor gets massively backed up every afternoon and will warn every person who tries to make the drive. We texted back and forth for a while, talking about traffic and that night. But mostly how that week had been a tough one, and well, regardless of what had been happening, I was confident there would be a lot of love and friendship waiting in the party house. I didn’t really know how right I was. I had hoped… but really, I’ve never felt so connected to people I’ve just met.

Amanda arrived, walking around the corner of the house to the backyard. A silence dropped. I got up from my seat and ran over to her, I’d promised a massive hug. There was a moment, a hug, a kiss, a thank you. A moment where all that mattered was, we’re here, we’ll make things okay, celebrate life, embrace the shit. A hug. A kiss. A thank you.

Amanda Palmer, Kickstarter House Party, Portland

Amanda Palmer: Laughing, misheard lyrics, “Cat’s got your soul”

You don’t realize how powerful eye contact is, how powerful touch is, how powerful simple words are until you find them (almost) missing from your life. Researchers say you need 8 meaningful touches a day to maintain emotional and physical health. I’ve counted days where I never touched another person. Every hug I got that day, every kiss, every moment of eye contact was a salve on my psyche and my soul. These strangers, many now friends, created this bubble of trust and happiness. I think for everyone. I don’t think I’m the only one who can say that last night changed me.

Amanda sang, and we sang with her, she read from Neil’s new book, we ate and drank, we played Mafia/Werewolf. I cried. I had too many feelings. I think mostly I cried because I was so fucking happy at what we had created. Fifty-odd people cuddled into a den, the only light a lava lamp. Singing sad songs, listening to Amanda sing. All. the. feels.

I got to have them because I trusted the people I was around. It was okay. People I’d only just met gave me their hands, led me their strength. We felt a gamut of emotions, collectively breathing in something bigger than ourselves.

Early on in the night I got to talk about social media, and how it really is just a tool, no more, no less than the people who use it. How I wrote a portion of my master’s thesis on studying how she did things. The thesis that landed me my job. Getting to hear Amanda tell me that I got it, that I understood was an amazing validation. Fighting the good fight got a little easier. Comrades.

I know I missed moments of brilliance shared between others. I couldn’t be everywhere. I hope everyone went home a little bit healed, a little bit happier, a new friend made. I made friends with another dancer. I sat on the floor with Amanda while we got back massages from some lovely people. A moment of release and contentment. I was told I was gorgeous by a lovely girl. I got to hug people. My friend and I were able to give someone a couch to crash on. Many made a concerted effort to take me aside, look me in the eye and thank me for organizing this. I don’t think I could ever really say how much that night could have been different if they hadn’t been there. If they hadn’t been willing to be a part of it. It was our party. I may have orchestrated a few things, but everyone there made it what it was. So if you’re reading this: thank you.

Last year I wrote: Sometime next year I’ll be hanging out with some new friends and our favorite musician, enjoying life because we all took the chance to trust a stranger and make magic happen. I don’t think I knew how right I’d be. We made magic happen.

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Remembering the Humanity of it all.

It’s a sad day when you realize that the cycle of Fear->Hate->Violence->Fear has so saturated our world that even speaking out in empathy or asking someone to remember another’s humanity calls into question the validity of the speaker, their ethics.

Good or bad we forget that every adult was once a child, full of wonder and curiosity, a life in front of them full of possibility. Every child experienced things that makes them who they are as they grow into slightly taller children who try to be adults but really ultimately are just an older version of the child-self altered by time and experience. Their experience, good and bad shape them. The ones who turn into beings consumed by hate and fear, how did they get there? How did we let that happen?

How do we let a child fear?
How can we teach a child hate?

Because that’s what happens. Every person who thinks they need to kill. Every person who bullies. Every person who speaks down about another. That’s what we’ve done.

We taught a child to fear.
We taught them to hate.
We taught them that violence is an answer.

We’ve forgotten to be mindful. We’ve forgotten to take a breath and think, to be a better person than our aggressors. Yes, we can have different opinions (and it’s good!), we should be able to say what we think. But when those thoughts are laced with fear and hate, when we let those emotions rule, we can hurt others. Expressing ourselves is a right and a freedom that we should only be allowed when it does not drastically encroach on another person’s rights or freedoms. I may believe that you are wrong, but I have no right to take your beliefs from you, just as you have no right to take my beliefs from me.

We need to take a conscious moment to break the cycle, to make the choice to be better than we were taught. Our culture teaches fear of the other, fear of the unknown. The only way to break the cycle is to make a conscious choice not to be a part of it.

“In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.” – The Dalai Lama

I’m conflicted when it comes to deciding how to stop people who refuse to play nice, play by the should be tacit rules of civil society. How to stop those who are bent on hurting others and stripping them of their rights. Yes, I think they should be stopped. Do I think they need to die? No. Do I think they need to be coddled? No. But they are human, and if humanity is to win out we’d do best to remember that.

It’s a fine line between stopping the people who mean others harm and becoming the people who mean others harm. It’s a very fine blurry grey line, the only distinguishing marks being what side your heart fights for.

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Poem 002: Since I’ve been okay…

Since I’ve been okay
My range of emotions has been stifled,
Squished down into a singularity.
Except when one bursts forth
Ripped from my breast at the speed of light
And for a moment
I’m infinite
But when I’m not
I’m numb
Since I’ve been okay.
Not quite happy, not quite content
but yes, but almost
but mostly not sad.
And unless an emotion has broken free
of this bondage of okay
It’s hollow and fleeting
A thing most easily overlooked
left behind
forgotten
Since I’ve been okay
I’ve forgotten
to feel infinite
Since I’ve been okay
I’ve forgotten to feel.

—30/3/13

The Thing About Things

i can carry everyone i love in one phone application
built to optimize the facetime with the ties i’m bent on making
actually i want to be alone
to mourn the loss
of what this cost
i collected you but now you are all lost

— The Thing About Things

Yesterday Amanda Palmer posted a song she’d performed for the first time last week. It hit me right in the feels and left me sobbing into my pillow. A tweeted at her:

finally listened to @amandapalmer‘s ‘The thing about things’ now I’m crying. Her songs are the words I didn’t know needed saying

7 April, 2013 8:00 pm via Twitter for Mac ReplyRetweetFavorite

@bluedance

Monica Sellers

It’s true these words. Some of them, are thoughts I’ve been struggling to coherently form. And others from the song were thoughts I’ve been needing to think. Things I didn’t know I needed. I want to tear my room apart and go over every little thing I’ve kept wondering why I’ve kept them all and cleaning out the things that aren’t real. The thing about things is that they can start meaning things no one actually said.

I could write for a long time about this entire song, but I want to really look at this one verse. It shows the triumph and the failure of being connected at all times. i can carry everyone i love in one phone application / built to optimize the facetime with the ties i’m bent on making. We’re always connected to the people we want to connect to, the people we think we might connect to, the people we wish we could connect with. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. We pour our emotion into apps and hope that something human comes out. We don’t sit in silence, we flick our thumb down the screen pulling the refresh from the ether. We don’t want to miss a chance at something great and while we’re glued to a 4 inch screen the world around us keeps going.

actually i want to be alone / to mourn the loss / of what this cost. We don’t look up. At dinner we’re glued to our screens, on the bus, in between meetings. We forget to see the people next to us. The connections we’re bent on making fizzle for all our efforts. We collect our memories, our ideas, our friends, our idols in our phones, in our computers, on our TVs and Xbox’s. i collected you but now you are all lost. We put things away, each in it’s own app. Organizing as to keep connected. And in forgetting to look up, to see someone, really have that moment where you say ‘I see you’, we’re connected yet lost. We lose.

Social media is a tool, full of potential. I’ll be the first to go off about how great it can be. I’ll also be the first to say I wish we could quit it because we’ve forgotten how to be human. So many people don’t connect their worlds across digital and physical worlds. We act as if they’re different places where we can be different things. And maybe they are, maybe sometimes it’s good to pretend so we can find out who we really are. But when we sacrifice our humanity, our connections to others, that’s where we fail. We try to keep connected, but in the barrage of media we become over saturated and we lose. For all our connections we connect less. We don’t look each other in the eye. We try to collect what we think is important and in holding on to things we don’t see what really is important.

this dance {in blue}

an adventuring Oregonian

Confessions of an Artist

Life in Steps: 101 in 1001 v3

Remembering the Humanity of it all.

Poem 002: Since I’ve been okay…