A Hard Week

I am torturing myself.

The few in my life who are close enough to witness beg me to stop. I would if I knew how.

I want more than anything to be one of those writers who, in the lowest depths of their agony, find their way to a page and write honestly, heart to heart, writer to reader. I cannot. Even now, when I’ve lost everything, and I’ve nothing left to fight for, I am too careful with the way I sound, how I write, like a woman who has had her heart torn to shreds and wonders, more than anything, how badly she looks crying, how her hair looks, her eyes. In the deepest pits of my pain, I am aware… self-conscious, quick to tidy myself, my words. But I want to let go. There is no chance for honesty otherwise.

I write with more rage than sadness. I’ve forgotten for what I waged this fight for in the first place. For what dreams? As if I stood a chance, a real chance in a world with just enough places for those who turn out well, ordinary, who fought well and defied their circumstances. What if I’ve lost the fight, and there’s no hope, nothing to live for? What happens then?

The worst part of it all is that I am still expected to function normally in the midst of all this. I attend meetings, present myself pleasantly enough, rise to my work table like it’s nothing at all, meet with friends. I get no writing done, of course. I am miserable and cannot find a way to be anything else. And still, I bury myself in work, or at least I pretend to, because when the work stops, the pain begins.

When I sit down to work, I don’t see images, ideas, words, creations. Instead, I see fog, thick, white, and heavy, like the kind I used to walk through in New Orleans.

I can speak truthfully as long as I am absolutely certain no one will hear it.

The hard truth is that I cannot go on like this for much longer. I cannot think of the days to come as an extension of this. I can’t enjoy the brief respites of love and freedom that come along the way, then slowly and painfully unravel in the long bouts between. If there is happiness and hope, I need it to arrive with permanence or not at all. It’s the brevity of the pleasure I receive that makes the endless periods of doubt, misery, and solitude all the more painful.

And there’s this feeling in my gut that’s killing me, a feeling like I am doing everything wrong, or badly. If I paint, if I write, if I see a friend, it is never the way I want it to be. Then if I avoid it all, I am still nagged at by that awful feeling. I cannot do what I want to do well, neither is there any peace to be had when I avoid it all together.

And what do I gain by admitting to the pain, the awful solitude, the inability to work, all of it? Nothing happens. Help doesn’t magically find its way to you, providence doesn’t suddenly pity you and re-write the pages of your life. Whether you admit to the need for help or not, it doesn’t matter. It remains with or without your acknowledging it. And if I trick myself into believing the pain is gone, I can live. If I admit to it, then the body expects something in return, and I’ve nothing to give it. What then is the point of this honesty?

I sound incredibly cruel, desperate, hopeless. It must be just as exhausting to read as it is for me to write. Still, I envy the reader who can close these pages when my thoughts tire them or drive them mad. But where do I go when I feel the same way? How can I leave her, who lives in me, whose voice keeps me up all night, who drives me crazy with her rage and endless monologues about how awful I am?

I can’t stand the way I sound writing this. There’s nothing transcendental about it, nothing beautiful or worth reading. No poetry in the pain. It’s just a person at the end of their rope who can’t find reason anymore. Nothing makes sense, nothing delivers hope. The silence feels like a chain around my neck. In place of the company I could have, a thousand voices from within me rise to fill the space with miserable, raging talk about the state of my life, my mind.

I’ve never written like this before. I’m afraid it means things have never been this bad before either.

My problem is that I have never been able to lie to myself. I can’t trick myself into a state of happiness. The other problem has been that I always harbored this belief that my happiness was just some yards away, not here, but close. When I was alone and miserable in the states, I thought if I moved to Palestine and married the man I loved, I’d be happy. Then, when things got ugly, I thought if I left I’d be happy. Then, when I felt stuck, I thought if I could build the camepervan I’ve always dreamed of having, then I would be happy. When winter came and it became too cold to spend time in the van, I thought if I traveled I’d be happy. Then when I fell in love with another man, then fell out of love, I thought if I could get my own place, anchor myself down somewhere, and give myself to my work, then… All of these things did give me happiness, but only briefly because I carried none of it in me. I followed it wherever I thought it lived. It would always take me in its company, but only briefly, then it would let me go.

On Loneliness

All day, I’ve been trying to catch myself off guard and bring myself back to writing when I’m least prepared. I want to hear myself speak. I want to hear the truth, with is nothing easy to listen to in the chaos I’ve made.

Too often I consider the possibility that maybe the man I loved has dragged me past any possibility of repair, hope, salvation. Someone weak, vulnerable, needy entered his life. He handled it well until he could not. He loved me until he did not. He never admitted it, not even to himself, but a woman knows.

Sometimes it feels like I’m a raging phantom wandering through life, wondering why no one will look my way, speak to me, hear me. Little things are unbearable to me. A phonecall. A trip to the grocery. A stop at the gas station. An errand. Speaking to people. It’s all exhausting,

If I choose to be alone, it is only because of how overwhelming it is for me to speak to someone, even with friends who have been in my life for years. We’ll be sitting, talking, laughing, and all of a sudden, I get this sick feeling in my gut. I start to torture myself by trying to guess what they really think of me, how exhausting and repetitive they must think I am. I do this even with my therapist. Kind and gentle as he is, I tell myself even he must be tired of me.

So I live in a perpetual hell: wanting so badly the company, the touch, the love, the tenderness, and wanting just as much to be left alone. In my own company, the hatred is unambiguous. I know how I feel towards myself, where I stand. With others, I never know. I panic. I try too hard, say all the wrong things at the wrong time. I must look desperate, pathetic. And what kills me more is that I never used to be like this, not to this extent. Something in me forgot how to be comfortably in the company of others, and I can’t seem to pull myself back to that comfort.

I wish my art could be enough. Somedays, when the loneliness gets so bad, I look at my notebooks, my paints, my cameras, and consider the possibility of losing myself forever in my work. But the solitude is often so exhausting I don’t even have the energy to test this possibility. And on days when I can get myself to work, I think, yes, I don’t need people, I am fine with just this. But when the work ends and I turn my head and find, to no surprise, that I am utterly alone, partly through my own doing, partly not, then, and only then, I admit that art could never be enough. It could never take the place of a voice, a body. Art is art and it’s my life, but it can’t be what I thought it could. It can’t fill every void in my life. But on days when I am desperate and I use it to do exactly that, I end up exhausted by the effort. And anyhow, it turns against me each time I try.

At my lowest, I look to others I know and ask myself why can’t I be ordinary and want ordinary things. Why do simple, mindless things become so incredibly complicated in my life? Every day is a year. Nothing about me or my life is ordinary, easy, simple. If I want to write, I have to consider a thousand possibilities for failure, all the ways it could go wrong, and it often does because I am aniticpating it. My hand moves across the page like it’s scared to bump into failure somewhere along the way. And because it feels it there, it often refuses to move at all. It stays safely anchored at the top, refusing to write, to speak.

I want to be ordinary. I don’t want to feel like the morning’s a brick wall over my body. I don’t want to have to delay seeing a friend for days until I feel ready. I don’t want to get up a thousand times from a desk because I’m scared the first sentence I write won’t sound pretty. I want to do stupid things and think nothing of it. I want to be able to say the wrong things, act wrongly, and not have to think obsessively about it for a week. In other words, I want to be human without having to apologize for it.

For an artist, I believe loneliness can kill, really kill. Sometimes, I can’t help but think it’s unreasonably cruel that god would order an artist to be born in the body of a woman without giving her the means to serve her purpose.

On Work

More than anything, I’ve been troubled by the idea of “work” and what it should look like. What is considered work? Painting for the sake painting, writing for the sake of writing, or painting to sell and writing to publish? Does the need for a professional, obvious outcome (an outcome imposed on the artist) declare one thing as work and another as play? And who gets to decide? The artist or the unforgiving members of her life?

In their terms, the work of an artist is defined by its potential to be something more than what it is. The painting itself is irrelevant. So is the poem, the film. Instead, it is what places they could be received by, the revenue they could bring in. So what if I spend a month working on a painting, and at the end of the month, I give it away to someone who likes it. Nobody sees it except for that person. It brings in no money either. Were those hours and hours of painting not work?

It tortures me, this idea of “work” and what it means, what it looks like, what is expected of me. Most of the time, I have no idea what I am doing, and if I have done anything worthy in the past year, it was only out of my hours of “play,” when I was working with no objective, no eye on an outcome or audience. Everything else I’ve made trying to “work” has been shit.

I think for most people, work is work, and it’s something done within a certain number of hours, and when it’s finished it’s finished and if it’s boring it’s boring but there’s life to think about it and if it brings in enough then it’s all right. But for many others, work is so much more. It is a desperate, slippery grip on life, a need to feel a sense of self-worth, purpose. For many, it’s an un-negotiable need for distraction. It is the last thing tying them to sanity, baring their depression from submitting to it full, un-satiated course. It is, for us, the last semblance of normalcy, the last game that still works on the mind.

But sometimes, work is torture. When a painting isn’t going well, a poem refuses to lend itself to an end, an idea stubbornly refuses to form into anything specific enough to get down on paper, it could be the thing that kills you that day. For the one whose childhood has been a endless stream of rejections, mockery, dismissals, a difficult day of work isn’t just a difficult day with work. It floods the artist with the same feelings that came in childhood, the same burning rage, the same feeling of inadequacy, failure, insignificance. The bad writing becomes so much more than bad writing. It is a reminder, a painful, suffocating reminder of all the times you felt worthless, small, difficult. Failure isn’t just failure but a surge of abusive, debilitating voices and sentiments from the past. For me, and many others like me, it is never, “this painting isn’t working,” but instead, “I am worthless, pathetic, a failure at everything… I’m going to turn out just like mama did…. I should have known better than to try.”