8/5/24

I am not my own muse. My sadness does not manifest itself into great art, nor does it have much to say. While great artists are often synonymous with their inner demons, and have a kind of sixth sense for how to translate such complex, gratuitous grief and love and loss into historic, beautiful, inspiring works of art, my sadness seems to linger somewhere between my energy and my creativity, feeding off of both simultaneously. However, for once, I do not intend on sitting down on a Sunday night and detailing to any readers the intricacies of my mental health, encouraging any and all to lend a sympathetic hand to the tale of woe that is Christian Reid's life, instead, I want to explore a thought that has been eating away at my mind for the past few years. 

There is a recurring theme within the art scene that requires sadness to stand at the precipice of great art. Van Gough, Picasso, Kurt Cobain, Alexander MacQueen, these people are so known, not only because of the publicity of their lives and later, their deaths, but because of the sheer emotion they carried with them into their work. Every depressed, mildly emo kid in high school had an artistic medium they attached themselves to. It happens again and again with more than enough people, in which their sadness, the strength of the feelings they keep inside of them, bursts into bright colors when pressed onto a page or screen. However, what makes this form of media so heavily consumed, and highly sought after, is the amount of community and, what's more, relatability that is lent when observed and shared. We see portraits of Victorian-era women and can get a sense of the sadness in their eyes, or a desolate diner in a city that, despite the lights and business within, lends an understanding of isolation and loneliness even when surrounded by pure potential. Female rage is a theme in modern media that has become so widespread and is discussed regularly because of the shared feelings of rage that the women who watched such films related to and saw themselves in. These artists use up their lives to give these beautifully inspiring and heart-wrenchingly sad works of art, but it ends up becoming a form of light at the end of the tunnel for those blessed by its viewing. And the assumption is that, if one is going to take the leap into an art scene, risking their livelihoods and exposing their innermost selves to the world, these are the emotions that they are going to be able to conjure. And then there are artists like me. My therapist once told me that, if we imagine everyone's baseline emotion on a scale of 50 out of 100, my baseline would be closer to 25. With that knowledge, and the extensive amount of time and energy I give to art and my "craft" on a daily basis throughout the last 15 years of my life, I expected, or rather, hoped, that that would translate into an ability to make something that would something; to anybody. 

My sadness sits differently within my body than I feel it does for others. Last semester was a particularly trying one. December was everything I wanted it to be. I had one of the best Christmases I had had in my adult life, I met a friend I had known for four years in New York City, I turned 21, I got drunk with friends on New Year, and then spent two beautiful days with my family in Disneyland of all places. Then I went home. My mom was no longer on the other side of my wall, my sister was no longer asking me if I wanted to get coffee, and my Dad moved even farther away, none of them to be seen again until July. It was at this time that Katie really found her footing in a fashion that she had been striving toward for years. She created a collection that was presented and shown to hundreds of people and spent more than class hours sewing and working and creating everything her heart desired. One day she asked me, at around 6 pm on a Wednesday, if I wanted to go with her to the studio to work on some projects. I, obviously, said no. Not only was the thought of returning to the building I had spent all day counting the minutes till I could escape from the least attractive use of my evening but most importantly, the amount of emotions eating away at me would simply prevent me from doing anything productive, let alone enjoying a single second of it. Her response was as gracious as ever, to which she added a comment that she felt the same way, and that is the very reason she wants to work so much. She is the kind of person to take her feelings and pour them into her craft until she is satisfied with the result. She likes the hustle and said that she works as much and as hard as she does so that those thoughts, thoughts that we are both having, don't eat away at her and instead sit and linger while her mind is preoccupied with other things. At the time I remember feeling worse after hearing this, as though there was something wrong with me for not having the same driving force behind my sadness that pushes me to get even more done. However, this thought has lingered in my mind for some time now, and it's clicked in a way that has allowed me to hear it in a much less harmful way. 

My sadness simply feels different. There are definitely times in which I feel a type of way, and the logical response is to distract myself as much as possible, however, my main issue - beyond sadness or any diagnosable ailment that may be currently plaguing the dopamine receptors of my brain - is the sheer volume in which I feel things. When I get in a headspace that requires a tear to be shed or a pillow to be screamed into, it becomes a mass in my head, consuming joy for previously joyous things, and halting any and all desire for anything other than non-stop bed rot until my body and mattress have fused into one. The reality is there isn't anything wrong with me or my coping mechanisms, but rather, my brain is simply built in a different way than the artists previously discussed. My pain and my sorrow, though spoken about in my art, are not my art itself, and rather stem from the more positive, constructive section of my mind, the same part that is able to detail these thought processes into writing. The pressure I put on myself to be like artists I am simply not adjacent to, was a moment in which I genuinely felt I had made a mistake; that I was, in fact, not an artist, and it was simply my lack of talent in any other genre of study that resulted in my career being what it is. In reality, my art and sadness are two separate things, things that feed off of each other but, unfortunately, not in the way that concludes in great stories of love and loss being told in the art itself. Rather, my art has a voice, one capable of telling stories but unlike the aforementioned greats who can pour themselves into the art. I use my art as a way to cope in the past tense, a form of reflection and almost meditation to better understand the feelings I had, and the feeling inevitable to come. 

I am not a manic pixie dream girl - I'm just depressed. I happened to make art, and for some time, I was troubled by my inability to make my sadness reflect something beautiful and translateable, figuring that it said something about my ability to make it. However, as life teaches me more things, I realize that the competition of it all is not all it is. While those who are able to speak a thousand words in a particularly sculpted garment, or tell a story in a painting have an innate ability that is highly sought after and rarely attained, my sadness requires reflection and time to digest before it can show itself. It does not say anything about me as an artist as I had thought it did for so long, but simply put, it speaks a thousand words about the amount of thought, time, and consideration those of us without such an innate gift are capable to achieving when our art reaches the world.