So in today's attempts to go to a new psychiatrist and restart dealing with ADHD by means of extended release Ritalin, I got to bask in a moment of odd pride. After spending an hour and twenty minutes talking to this new doctor (older man that looks like he is stuck in the early 1960s, most fashionably, but from Chile!) he paused for a moment and said, "I haven't treated many artists, especially young, this is quite fascinating." For a split second my mind was swimming with who's-what's-where's, but then I felt such a swell in my chest when I realized I was the artist, am the artist, he meant and a fairly successful young artist.
That's so gross and boastful, but for so long I've just felt like I was gliding or floating in someone else's life; not even another person's life, just kind of present in the cyber space of real actual life. I had no means of qualifying who I was and how legitimate my career was, in a "playing house" kind of way, but then bam! There it was. The A-word. In reference to me. Cool.
That's how I felt when we got all those grants! The feeling of being *real* ...as if someone else has to determine it. It feels so internal all the time, and then somehow one word, phrase, or gesture from another person or organization recognizing your work as an artist makes you realize it's not just in your own head. You're living it!
ReplyDeleteYou are, too! you have hands, too? you have hands, too! you have eyes, too?...
DeleteMany people do not ever bring their inner dreams to reality and many others take quite a while to do so as life and it's basic needs get in the way. Believing in yourselves, having others who recognize your abilities, discovering each others validation of previously solitary inner visions... all important but ultimately whatever elements gestalted your launching precede you both chronologically. I suspect you were both children whose visions were ahead of your developmental abilities at times. I also suspect that each of you has spent much of your life growing into your visions. This compulsion has no doubt been the force of your collective years pressuring to burst forth into a world in which your thoughts and senses can be at home. It is a world that you both have created, a world that you both instinctively know. In observing this process I have come to believe that to be an Artist one needs to create an external world that can house one's internal world. Yes, you are living it...
ReplyDeleteThanks for this insightful paragraph.
DeleteI think my internal world has taken over my life, I'm living my internal world EVERYWHERE. But then again, I think that's what you mean.