I’m uncomfortable with decomposition. When apples rot or veggies turn mushy or things start to smell, I’m out. Gross things disgust me. I think it’s a side effect of my perfectionism. Or maybe it’s my base human instincts, trying to keep me alive by warning me off of the murky waters or decaying fruit that has the power to kill me. Regardless, at times I struggle to accept the ugly bits of life, and of art. Art is not always pretty. Sometimes, the creative process is downright ugly.
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It’s so uncomfortable when I’m drawing and everything goes wrong. I’m quick to tear out a page and ball it up, or to shred a post-it note to tiny bits and cram it in my trashcan. I have an almost involuntary physical reaction to a drawing that is just not right. It’s like I cannot stand that this f*cked up drawing is in existence. I’ve realized this has to do with how disconnected I have been from my own intuition in recent years. I got so accustomed to ignoring what I felt that for a while there, I wasn’t feeling much at all, unless it was a total meltdown. My body has become accustomed to screaming at me, hoping that I’ll listen to what I’m feeling.
Now, I’m listening, and my feelings roar. They rush through me, banging all the pans and sounding all the alarms. My heart races as I stare at an ugly sketch, an overwhelming desire to destroy it coarsing through my veins, demanding that I remove the threat RIGHT NOW. This is the reality of living with trauma, as we all do. Sometimes the alarms sound for things they don’t need to sound for. Recently, I started resisting the urge to ball up my pages when I make mistakes. Instead, I keep working with them. And you know what? The art is better. It’s richer. It’s more layered. It turns out that when I tolerate the ugly parts, I actually come to love them.
I came across this series on Instagram of artists sharing “some truths I’ve never shared online.” I was astonished by the raw power of these posts. Here, artists share the things they don’t usually splash over social media. The ugly bits. The raw truths. The secrets. The things they usually work hard to hide. I found myself wondering what I would share, if I participated. I don’t have pictures of myself sobbing on the floor, but there’s been a lot of that this year. Divorce is hard AF. Selling your home is hard. Losing people is hard. Change is ugly. It’s also beautiful. No one ever said transformation was easy. It requires breaking down to build back up.
We see this all around us in nature. The constant cycle of change, of decomposition leading to new growth. It’s spring in New Jersey, and you can smell it. The rich undertones of rot, the wetness of cells breaking down into their very basest elements so they can transform into something else. Something new.
Some of you might recall that I’m a rockhound. I love collecting rocks. I often carry them in my pockets. There’s something soothing about holding them, feeling those coarse edges against your skin. I had a crystal that I carried around in my pocket for a couple of months. It had a really pleasing, waxy surface with just the right amount of sharpness to the edges. Yesterday, it broke. I am not good at having things break. Growing up, it was a big disaster in our family when something broke. For a moment, I felt a deep sense of alarm. Something was wrong. I had to fix it. And then my heart whispered: return it to the earth. So I went for hike and I tossed the broken bits of stone into a creek. A wave of tears rose up in me. I felt them, and kept walking.
“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.” —Edgar Allan Poe
Somewhere in the middle of my hike, I came across a rotting leaf shaped like a heart. It made me think of The Tell-Tale Heart. Poe had a gift for looking the horrors of humanity in the eye and allowing them to transform into deep, powerful meaning. Sometimes sitting with the ugliness in front of us produces great beauty. How can you make more space for the ugly parts of your creative process? How can you lean into them and value them more? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
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