Sinew Me

This week I painted on a canvas for the first time in almost 12 years.
There was a time when I spent many hours, every day, with my art. I created and dabbled in all mediums I could get my hands on. Lived it, breathed it, skipped meals for it.

Creating was my lifeline. My connection to my unbroken self. My direct line to something deeper, more fulfilling and more meaningful than what I experienced in my other moments of life.

It carried me through the pain of the emotional abuse and neglect of my childhood and teen years. It helped me to dream of a future without those things and it removed them from me and stuck them within some immovable medium forever, where they would be outside of me, rather than carried within.

Important is not the word. Necessary, I think.
So necessary that it would come out whenever it had to, in any form immediately available. If I was in class it might come out as a poem written in the back of a book. In the studio perhaps a tangled sculpture of pieces torn from an old television set. The time and space for painting was a luxury that I almost struggled to know what to do with, so accustomed to the desperate use of any time and supply that I had.
Yes, creation... art... it was a necessary part of survival to me.

I don't know how it slipped away. Thinking back I can't remember a time when I realized that it was absent. I can recall a few times of claiming that I had lost my inspiration. A few more of making a joke that my talent had fallen out my ear one night while sleeping.


I think the truth though, is that I somehow lost myself, but not only did I lose myself, I completely lost any sense of myself. It was rather like falling asleep and simply not knowing that I was dreaming. Ironically, it is about this time that my lifelong bout of insomnia turned truly detrimental, often leaving me awake until well past sunrise and sleeping without dreams in a state of restless, unnamed anxiety.

I wandered around in this lost state, making cerebral and culturally correct decisions in a dreamlike reality that never seemed anything so much as far away. The years slipped by like a wormhole... distorted, too fast and too slow.

Sometimes I woke up... some part of me woke up and looked around, not understanding anything. How did I get here? Who's stuff is this? Why do I live like this?


This is not my beautiful house...

But that other part of myself that had been making the decisions shushed me back to a fearful sleep... Of course this is your beautiful house... your life... this is what everyone wants...
children in good private schools, money, cars, playgroups and ladies' nights out... you even have housekeepers for heaven's sake!

But the pain grew worse. The pain in my head, my heart and in and throughout my body. The pain grew and I shrank. The dis-ease grew and I slipped farther away. No rest for the weary and no help for the sick. It's the disease they told me... the Fibromyalgia, the depression, PTSD... we can try more painkillers... a new drug that just came out... therapies...

Who? Am? I?
Who is this person?

My house of cards was tumbling. Everything began to seem unreal... purposeless.... a sham.
The whole thing a lie.
The way we lived. The fake smiles... the whole charade.

But, at the bottom of the pit, something in me woke up inside that life... inside that body... and began to recognize it all. Then I began to recognize the same sleeping soul in those around me... unaware...
secretly miserable...
sick...
and unaware of the lie.

It was like waking up inside of a dream... Once you know you are dreaming you understand that anything is possible... that you can change anything at all.
It turns from a nightmare into a dream. A vivid, lovely, utterly real, worthwhile dream.


I am conscious now and beginning to heal the damage that was done while I was gone. I am recognizing how much of the nightmare is cultural... how much of our suffering is human suffering... suffering brought to the whole world in our own unconscious and desperate attempts to control and end that very suffering.
I also know that I am not the only one who's waking up. I recognize others... they have a different-ness about them too. Something in their eyes... their words.
Sometimes I am recognized too. Sometimes someone wakes up, stunned, in the middle of our conversation. I see the shift, the confusion, the uncertainty, but the all important recognition of something right!

The days still disappear sometimes. Sometimes too fast... sometimes too painfully slow.
Sometimes I know that I've fallen asleep but allow myself to continue, claiming fatigue... fear...
Sometimes I go much too long and nearly forget myself again, but I won't let that happen.
I am leaving reminders for myself now.

I am creating again. Leaving obvious signs of myself everywhere... paintings, decisions, friendships...
Who put this here?

I Did.

And I'm changing everything else too, so look out.

SinewMe.com