Hide and seek

I think art is a vehicle to come home to myself. Alot of artists are afraid of showing their art to others, not because of how others will see them, but they are in fact scared of seeing themselves.

I have hidden myself very well. I’m scared of someone really seeing me and being able to evaluate me as a person and I’m scared of them being right. For a long time I had to have my own opinions of reality. I had to be the only one believing that I was assaulted. My family didn’t believe me, and they judged me for the way I acted, when I was angry, selfish, arrogant. I remember feeling devastated that no one could protect me and all the energy I had to put into protecting myself. Every night when I would try to come home to myself, to my body and my mind, curled up tight in my bed to protect my vital organs, I never had enough energy left to believe myself.

I want to love someone and be loved but what if I try, just to find out that the burden of accusations I carried for years was true? What if I was a liar after all? What if it turns out that I deserved everything that happened to me, what if there was really something wrong with me that made my family turn away, that made everyone run away when I wanted to be held? I want some kind of proof once and for all that that’s not true, and it won’t ever happen again, but that means facing the chance it might be true. And I don’t think that anyone can judge this except me, and I guess I am scared of facing myself, seeing myself. I think every chance I got to believe myself and see myself, I’ve created some drama or some reason to get tired again, and feel anxious to the point I can shut down, so I’ll never have to look. I’ve never seen her before, I’ve never dared to look and uncover that part. I’ve never been her, that woman who really totally survived something. I’ve been so comfortable with being broken, it was an excuse.

Ironically it has nothing to do with the response of someone else. I mean when I stop expecting someone to respond well to me and react well to me sharing my longing to be loved, I actually give myself the responsibility to see myself, to see myself the way I want to be seen, and I think that’s real power. To be able to see yourself with both truth and fantasy: the truth of who you really are and the imagination to see the best in that. The truth of the horrors that have happened and the compassion to see my own humanity. It’s not something that innately exists, that’s what people misunderstand about it. People can take ideas like unconditional love for granted. The belief that humans are equal, we are all worthy and we all deserve safety is actually a modern idea. For most of history we have been alot more violent. At some point of experiencing true evil you realize that there are pockets in this world where we are not yet fully formed humans. And to shine compassion in those dark caves means to create soul and meaning and a human spirit where it never existed at all. To go sit in that place where love is not king, and to quietly demand my existence, this is to perform miracles, the miracle of me that I carry in my body by this vehicle we call aliveness. Was that what my desire to be emperor was all along?