Wake Me Up, I’m Bleeding

Self-portrait 004: Don’t fight the darkness

I heard an interesting idea this morning about thoughts, and how the only way to consciously disengage with one is to engage with another.

That works for me, because I was long under the impression that I had to go through a song-and-dance in order to disengage with the negative, like I had to see it through, untangle it like a tangled up cord, and that otherwise I was repressing or shoving it under the rug. 

I don’t know why I thought this way.  I’m not sure where it comes from either.  And now I’m of half a mind to go through my life’s story so far and begin some kind of autobiography.  Sure enough, I catch indications in daily life suggesting I start it up.

I get nervous writing these things down. There are people around. I am struck by how strong and capable they are. I meet the surprise with a bit of resentment, maybe toward life or to myself, because their apparent suffering was always something that I put on my shoulders and even found to be my own fault. A result of my own negligence, inadequacy, youth and obliviousness.

How and why did this happen?  I am not one to think in a magic bullet kind of way, where I attribute a complex problem to a single cause. But I have theories as to where it begins. At least one place.

People have the tendency to make a quick association between being an only child and privileged comfort. In modern times, we’ve invented a syndrome that’s supposedly symptomatic of being an only child, which summed up basically means you think you’re the center of the world because that’s the cue you received from your parents. 

I never at any time thought I was the center of the world. And I most definitely did not have those ideals instilled in me.  Quite the opposite. People might say fine, I am in a minority.  Yet how would they even know that?  Has there been a survey? Or is the belief yet another half-ass generalization people put forth to try and look smart?

If this is where I were to start my autobiography then it would be a somewhat cynical and strange beginning.  I don’t mean for that, and I certainly don’t think myself a cynical person. Although these days I do prefer unremarkable beginnings.

Remove the pressure by just doing the thing. Just start, and trust yourself.

I was raised to think about others and whether by own reckoning or that of my surroundings, I probably took that consideration a little too far—to the point that it came at my own expense, the expense of my own desires and personal visions.

It was uniquely challenging because I always knew I wanted to pursue the arts, which requires no small degree of self-awareness. Yet even now I contend with an idea at times that being an artist is self-indulgent. That it’s not real work. 

This further creates an unhealthy relationship with the pursuit of money and specifically making money from the art, because at times it feels the primary motivation in me doing so is just to quell those voices in my head. Voices insisting that the work is never real otherwise. 

Of course it’s no way to view your passion and devotions. And it’s no way to live.

The money should follow the affirmation in the work.  It shouldn’t come to fill a void, to compensate or prove your worth and identity as an artist, much less as a person.

If you make music, you’re a musician. Period.

An artist needs to know that themselves. 

For those who remain in their life still giving them a problem about it, who don’t see it as something independent of monetary gain, well then it’s that person’s problem. And so the artist will either keep them in their life or let them go.

Circling back to the theme from this morning, discarding one thought only by engaging another, if you stay focused on the work, on what you want, then the negativity falls. After all, you don’t fight darkness, you turn on the light.  If you stay true, those other things not serving you will eventually have to whither away.

I wonder if the universe works that way.  Creation. It springs into being to declare itself.  And in that creation some things may be destroyed.

Personally I have no contentious relationship with the nothingness, with the void. Besides, is the non-self really that bad? Ironic though it may be, isn’t it the aim? An ultimate union between the self and the non?

Between the relative and the absolute.

Is it the uneasy truce?  Or a harmonious dichotomy that is essence of living in the first place?