Week 3 with Dakota

“We are nothing without our memories, but sometimes they also make us less than we could be.” The New Yorker, How to Unmake a Memory — *“We are nothing without our memories, but sometimes they also make us less than we could be.”*
The New Yorker, How to Unmake a Memory

Searching for the right words in Virginia

I came to Virginia for stability, for silence, for reasons known to me, and for reasons I may never know. One hour, I’ve touched the borders of peace, gathered my thoughts, established a sense of familiarity, and the next hour I’ve lost it all. It’s a game, this hunting for something so elusive, so full of play and mockery, and yet so consumingly desirable. Without it, I can’t find any other life worth rising for.

I keep telling myself what is to come cannot possibly be an extension of this, which is to say, I am desperate for something else. But I cannot define, with enough precision for it to bare any effect, what it is I want to rid myself of, and what it is I want to possess. I confused purpose with success and pursued it with a sort of madness that could only come from mistaking my self worth for what it is not.

It is not something given, and I cannot keep begging my art to pull from others the respect I badly yearn for. Success may do it, but that’s not the kind of respect that interests me anyhow. I’ve offended my talent, distorted it, abused it, used it for what it had never been intended to be used for. I begged it to make me heard, to make me loved, and in trying to force it to serve this purpose, I nearly lost it.

A messy recovery

The artist is a child I am still working tenderly with. It will take a long time to regain its trust. For now, it gives me only a few minutes of companionship before it recedes inside me, into an abyss I have no right to enter. I can only wait for it to emerge, on its own terms, in its own time. I spend most of my efforts urging it to come to me. It does not always answer. And when it hides, I could stare for hours at a page at a canvas, a camera, a page. Without my artist child, all these objects become foreign to me. I do not know what to do with them. They do not know what to do with me.

*If I feel the urge to be loved and heard, it will not be answered at the expense of what is dearest to me.*

I am slowly realizing that I cannot go on writing and making art with the objective of being heard and seen. What needs to be said will never be written nor made if I take into consideration the audience I have not yet and may never gather. Each time I feel the urge to write, I tell myself, but who's listening? That purpose, not mine but one assigned for me, is killing the process. And if this question is going to keep me from filling the page my life was intended to fill, then I need to defeat the question before it defeats me. I need to make it irrelevant, as lacking in significance to my dreams as are the prospects of success.

The Bloc

I’ve been thinking about why I’ve come to fear what I used to love most. Writing art, traveling, none of these areas of my life have ever known fear before. And I cannot figure out how it happened. Writing has saved me, traveling has restored me, art has sustained me, and yet, I’ve come to fear them all. Maybe its that I no longer accept them for what they are, but beg them to be what I need them to be, to answer to subjects and styles that bore and tire them.

It’s as if I am trying to will myself to answer to a demand I only imagined I’d heard. I have the permission to write as I like, to travel the way I desire, at my own pace, with my own odd ways, to speak with whomever I want and paint however sensually and badly as I’d like to. But who, or what, has deprived me of the freedom each of these areas of life used to grant me?

What restrains me? What makes me so careful?

Coming home: A final undoing and a last encounter

Maybe I had to complete the breaking that began in Florida. The rest of what remained standing had to fall for the ruin to be cleared. There was an undoing that had to be completed, a final reckoning with the past, a disaster that had to discover its end. I had to to see what the worst looked like. I drove through it, I died a thousand deaths in it, and I came out of it, ravaged, starving, exhausted, but alive. I had made it, and if I ever have to, I know I’d make it again.

But I can’t understand why, at the height of my pain, I drove back to the place I had been so desperate to leave 3 years ago, where my ruin first began. I feel as if I’d taken a road I thought was linear and leading someplace else when I’d taken a road that led to the place where it begins. And where I left hasn't changed. The hell is the same hell I fled from, maybe worse, but I am not the same girl who left. I am not who I want to be, but I am not the girl who walked out of this door either.

Still, I haven’t answered why I’ve returned. Some parts of it are as simple and as straightforward as the fact that I’d simply run out of money. Over the years, I’ve abandoned the slavery of the minimum wage only to return shamefully and desperately back to it. I’d swear myself free, place my autonomy above all else, but with so little set aside, so little planned, I kept finding myself in the places and situations I’d sworn never to return to.

And I left Florida thinking I was going back to New Orleans, but halfway there I came face to face with the painful truth that I was not yet ready to return. So of all places, and being entirely unprepared for the sudden realization, I began to drive north. I thought that maybe with time, home had changed and expanded its capacity for tenderness. I could not imagine that the place I’d left could be any more deficient in kindness then when I’d left it. And although I never made it my final destination, I was mistaken in thinking that home could serve as a resting place on the way to wherever I had to go.

And maybe I wanted one final encounter with the past, however regressive it was. I wanted to sit inside it, to feel it again, to look at it from the eyes of someone changed, and maybe, find a place for it inside a room I wouldn’t have to open for many more years. I know someday I’ll find in me the will to do what I should have done years ago. I’ll close the lights, leave everything behind, and say my final goodbyes.

The next time I leave, the past won’t be leaving with me. But if I leave right now, with hurry, without preparation, I know they will leave with me too.