A lot of the time I have no idea what I’m writing. I just looked at my posts here and some don’t make any sense.
I just returned from a trip to Ireland, and I think that a major confusion was resolved on that trip. It turns out that I am a creative person and that the best company for me would be with other creative people. I did not even know this for sure. A big part of my lack of making sense is the fact that I am completely isolated from other creative people.
I will reiterate. When talking to a large set of random people, the ones I find I have the most in common with are the ones who call themselves Artists. These people seem to have the same self-doubt and internal struggles as I do. Scholars, Doctors, Plumbers, for example, do not seem to have these struggles. While I am still not 100 percent certain that simply because I have the same struggles as artists that makes me an artist, all other leads seem to have more-or-less evaporated now. I do not want to live with or to have conversations with anyone who is not creative anymore. Because not being able to fit-in is, among the masses, the worst possible sin, I have also acted as if it was the worst possible sin. This was because acting my natural self was met with consistent rejection. It’s easy to be yourself if a sufficient number of people respond to your behavior as acceptable. But if NONE accept you, you must conform to the morality of the masses.
Artists, and the mentally ill, struggle with this issue more than anyone else. In my life the problem is compounded by the fact that no one really cares either. I don’t mean to disparage anyone, but, just coming back from my recent trip, the absence of a real, persistent, genuine concern on anyone’s part seems obvious.
As I said, if you have even ONE supporting person it becomes possible to vary your behavior from the lowest common denominator of ordinariness, but with ZERO supporting people, you’re stuck. The climb up the mountain is that much harder. The thing is, it is in the area of being creative that one most needs to have the space and freedom to be oneself. Talking to creative people recently has allowed me to form that conclusion. The coincidence of the kind of self-doubt and introspection which accompanies people I talk to who say that they are Artists makes the evidence very strong that it is in the area of being creative that the freedom to be oneself is the most critical, in contrast to say, working a boring office job, in which the work can be performed rather easily regardless of whether the person is allowed to express themselves. The person may be miserable in an oppressive environment, but they can still do the work.
The question raised by my experience is not one of being miserable, but whether it is even POSSIBLE to do the work of being creative if one’s behavior is controlled and conformed from the start. My evidence is that it may not be, because the artists I talk to seem to have particular struggle with this issue, and it seems almost as if they simply could not create at all if they didn’t have a relatively accepting environment.
Therefore I realize that it is paramount that I find artists to talk to, and somehow, by some miracle, an environment in which I feel accepted. I certainly attained a semblance of this acceptance on my recent tour, and so the consciousness of it has been imprinted on my psyche. Since I know it so strongly, I will not let this fact fade from my mind, but will make it the first priority.
Streets Have No Name 