enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

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Emerging. Epiphany. Sorry - personal.

You know, morning pages are a small miracle. They can do things that even years of therapy could not. (Maybe I trust words and paper more than people trying to apply theories to me.) Therapists have always seemed to want to focus on my father and my mother's relationship with men, e.g. her father. Which is interesting, but I think, for me, besides the point.

So I had a funny epiphany this morning. I know it seems horribly obvious, but no one in my real life has had the interest or ability (e.g. C., who has only known me for ten years) to state the obvious.

Or at least it's now obvious to me, which it wasn't until today. So maybe it isn't an obvious thing at all. :)

So here it is. I never write about memories from my teen years. That's because I don't have any. My memories pretty much stop at about the first two months of high school. I have a few scattered memories from the years to follow, but so few as to make them practically anonymous. My memories start up again in university.

When I was eleven and I was in grade 8, i.e. just before entering high school, my dad got very sick. So the kids and my mother went to live with my grandparents, and my dad went to live with his parents. My parents were planning a divorce at that point, which I didn't know (exactly). We spent the year with my maternal grandparents, and I continued to draw (I even won an art competition and had a piece in the local art gallery), sing, and play the piano and cello. I did lots of creative things.

And then we moved to the big city so that I could go to high school. There, we had no money (my mother had to find a job). I did not take piano lessons. I gradually stopped playing. High school seemed rather bleak, as I didn't know anyone and didn't fit in.

But here's the thing: the worst loss of my life occurred at that time as well. For whatever reason, my artist grandmother - the painter, the lapidarist, the historian, the one who took me to the ballet and to art lessons at the Roy@l O. Museum when I was a kid - cut off all contact with my mother and by association us kids. This was my paternal grandmother. I probably have told this story before, but the most painful memory of my entire life is not the night that I found out that my father had died and I had not been invited to the funeral (it had already passed), but the day that my paternal grandmother came by the house when my mother wasn't there, to pick up some of my dad's things, and didn't talk to me. I was 12. I still remember standing at the end of the driveway, paralyzed. I didn't hear from her again until I was 25, and then when she tried to make contact with me and wanted to put me into her will, her son threatened to kill me for "trying to get my hands on the family money" and went to court to have her declared mentally incompetent. Naturally, I bowed out. I never saw her again.

So it's no fucking wonder that I've been "creatively blocked" for nearly thirty years! Thank you, Artist's Way.

I don't think I ever admitted this to myself. I gave up visual art at that time. I quit my art class at exactly that time. I had forgotten. I don't know if I thought it would punish my grandmother, or if I thought I could punish myself because I was obviously unworthy, but I'd never thought of it before now.

More interestingly, I had a memory come up this morning that has not emerged since it originally happened. When I graduated from high school I received the high school English award. Apparently I wrote plays and poetry and suddenly I remember doing a huge painting of a Shakespearean stage, which I think was the only time I picked up a paint brush in that whole period. I can't remember these things other than in the blurry glimpses I had this morning, as I looked out at the snow. I remember thinking that the English award was stupid, that they had only given it to me because I was the best math student and couldn't yet have the "science award" because another guy took both all of the maths and all of the sciences and I did not.

Isn't that funny? My mom sent me a box of old school things a while ago, but I don't believe any of the writing that I did is in there. Maybe she removed it, the way she destroyed the photos of my dad and sold my grandmother's paintings and jewellery.

Anyhow. I don't think I was ever a very good writer. I never wanted to be a writer. Can you believe though that I forgot completely what I wrote? Or even THAT I wrote? I believe I also wrote for the school paper and yearbook, although I can't remember. Something rings a bell.

I can't remember much of anything from that time. It was lonely and terrifying. I think it is the time in which I learned to work hard, put your head down and do practical things. We stopped going to museums and the symphony and to art galleries and the science centre. I did my homework and babysat my brothers, and my mother worked, went to school and dated my step-father. It's how it was and had to be.

But here's the MOST INTERESTING THING I HAVE EVER REMEMBERED (sorry - to me, not to you! :)). I remembered, suddenly, that when I was in grade 8, my last happy year at school, when we were in the country and I had an old-fashioned English teacher, I wrote an essay comparing EM Forst3r's A Room with a View and something else. I can't remember what the something else was. It's going to drive me bonkers all day. Can you imagine? I was exactly twelve. I had never remembered this. I'd been wondering when I'd first read A Room with a View, but I couldn't remember. It was lost. It didn't seem sufficiently important to want to find. And then I was writing my morning pages this morning and staring out at the world covered in white, snow drifting down, and there it was.

Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. Florence. It's why Florence is my dream. I had Florence at the end of my authentic creative childhood, at exactly the point in which the real loss started to seep away my endurance and probably my self-belief. At the exact end of being exactly myself, as I was. Suddenly I feel as though I have a window into myself that I'd never known, and isn't it a grand comfort to know that the self, the protective subconscious has been trying to lead me out of the woods for quite some time now? What a kind subconscious! Seriously! I often think of our psychology - mine at least - as a cruel, taunting kind of a prison guard. But really it's the other stuff - the social, constructed world around us - that is the prison. The mind is a gift. The mind is freedom.

OK. Sorry for the rather personal and long entry. Gotta get into the shower. I have a plan to get to work early and try to sneak out early. I want to go to the gym and then come home and draw tonight.

XOXOOXX

7:58 a.m. - 2010-02-23

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