[from the archives]
‘You will not work hard for yourself if you don’t love yourself. You will not fulfil your dreams if you don’t like the person who dreamed them.‘
It’s a good title, this one. It already sounds like it belongs to what I’m about to say. This is the first time I’m writing about the artistic identity I’ve been working all my life to develop. But bear with me, this is a post meant to mirror you, the big bad brave artist.
Crying, grinning and crazily craving intensity — to feel, document and pin like a dead beautiful tropical butterfly in an insectarium — I was always shy in the face of people who wanted to know what I am. I never knew how to define myself. Who are you? and What do you do? have always been met by an awkwardly formulated response, somewhere along the lines of I’m a journalism student, I’m Romanian, I… kind of write, stuff.
Sure, there are lots of things that supposedly make me me, but what they really make is the cage, not the bird. Deep inside where the wild and forgotten things live, I am neither my degree nor (much as I’d like to be a rockstar) my favourite bands. Yet I have always been very afraid to call myself a writer. Perhaps because I thought it sounds conceited and I was timid, or perhaps because I couldn’t support my affirmation with enough successful blog posts, but the fact remains: I have never, ever introduced myself as a writer. Not IRL, anyway.
I grew up knowing two contradictory feelings regarding this issue. The first was not having a voice of my own. Of course, I knew it was a lie all along. There have been small times when I collided with it, but somehow they never felt big enough to allow me to stand up and shake hands with it. Every now and again the world was mine and I was the brightest star. But most of the time I had to put up with the secret knowledge that I wasn’t ready to be a star yet, that I wasn’t loud enough, and that even if I was, nothing I said mattered yet.
One can’t quite be anything before they feel it in their bones, and I had no idea what my identity was. I was always the one who writes, but the idea that my identity might truly be an artistic one was pretty far from me.
Ah, but the other – that I did have a voice, and a terrific one indeed, now that was a damn delicious feeling.. Sure, most of us grow up thinking we’re special cookies, but I felt a strong, strange kind of certainty about it in the back of my mind. It was a voice that I didn’t know what to do with though, so I decided early to just keep quiet about it and also keep it buried until I figure out what it might good for.
And so, always afraid of it and the things it could do, I never really used my voice, because not yet, and all the things left unsaid and undone – but so untamed – piled up on my shoulders, feeling like the weight of the world itself. My world, at least. Then I thought it was time to let off some steam and write a blog, because everyone was doing it anyway, so there’d be no big deal…
When I first started, my blog was called Escapism. I still remember coming up with the title and believing it to be painfully perfect. I was thrilled. I had finally found a word to summarise what writing meant to me – a way to zone out and not feel guilty about my incapacity to be bothered with the life around me, because I was only escaping to write, after all. How productive, I thought. Look at me. All I wanted from the world was to let me escape from it. And so, when Escapism was born, I felt like I had finally found my place.
Fast forward to now and I find myself craving escapism less and less the way I used to. The day came when I looked around and realised there was nothing left to escape from, for there wasn’t much to begin with. I had focused all of my attention elsewhere.
There are no more monsters under the bed, only broken pieces to be put together with love and care. And that requires me to be present. It requires me to stop escaping. The world is not the dragon anymore; only I can be that now.
Life is a good, solid foundation, and whatever I make of it on the top. I know that, if I continue to escape it I will never make it mine. What my world needs today is not rebellion, it is presence of mind, fire of soul and all of my intensity, poured into it with love and respect for it, which really is, ultimately, myself.
My writing is no longer a means to escape, because what I have come to realise is how, in my futile attempts to escape, I only ended up slipping through my own fingers. I need bloody-minded, strong, intense this time — and, of course, a space to pour my imagination into. Intentionally, this time.
Something on your mind?