2:37pm February 27, 2012

This guy at the opening.

This one artist at the opening talked about how he’d been an artist for sixty years but his brain injury completely changed the tone of his artwork. It made it cheerful instead of gloomy. He has no idea why this happened, it wasn’t on purpose.

I think it’s one of those examples of how even conditions that seem to only take things away can turn out to have a good effect on some parts of a person’s life. You lose that factor in clinical descriptions of a condition. Hell, a full clinical description of me sounds awful but I know otherwise.

I think he’s also the one who said that art is the only thing he can do without assistance. That’s very familiar to me. Even though I need some assistance usually – help setting up and help cleaning up. I still get the gist of what he means. It’s the only thing besides medical appointments that I leave the house for.

And that’s because the drive to create is stronger than self-preservation. Stronger than just about anything else in my life, really. It can feel like this intense inner force that’s going to somehow destroy me if I don’t make art of some kind. Probably the same force that powers my hypergraphia.

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