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4:36pm July 27, 2013

I’m really glad I was able to just write what I wrote.

I often feel like I’m torn between two existences.

There’s the way I live, the way I feel most of the time. Immersed in a sensory world, both my immediate senses, and the way I can stretch out my senses into that world of gravity, movement and color.

Then there’s the way I write. Which is often much more idea-based than my actual experience of the world tends to be.

I was so glad when I learned to paint. I have no illusions of being a great artist. I’m good enough to make it into local galleries from time to time. But I have more creativity than technical skills and that limits me.

(Unlike some people seem to believe, however, that does not make my art worthless. A lot of people like it, because of the sensory world they see inside it.  You don’t have to have excellent technical skills or lots of training to make worthwhile art. And being self taught and believing your art still has meaning doesn’t make you an idiot who doesn’t know what Real Art is.  Great art tends to have both technical skill and creativity, but there’s plenty of worthwhile or even good art that is lopsided in one or the other direction.  I see a lot of more educated artists laugh at artists like me or roll their eyes at our existence. Not okay.  And I notice for some reason they always think it’s better to have lots of technical skill without as much creativity than creativity without as much technical skill. When each has its strengths and weaknesses.)

But one thing my art does that my writing usually doesn’t, is give a better glimpse into how I actually perceive and interact with the world. It’s much harder for me to write about that.

I don’t know what it is. It feels like my writing usually comes from one side of me. And my actual experience of the world comes from a totally different side. (One of my friends uses the classical elements to describe it: most of my writing is from air and fire, while the other side of me is earth and water.)

It’s really uncomfortable that when I use the internet to communicate with people, so often the communication isn’t actually touching the parts of me that feel the most real.

(And I think maybe it’s not a coincidence that my air/fire posts get more notes than my water/earth posts? Fortunately I don’t write for the notes. But it’s kind of weird.)

One of my friends told me a couple years ago that these parts of me won’t always be separated. That they’re likely to move together with time.

And maybe my ability to write about the earth/water side of me at all, is a sign that this is happening.

I don’t know. All I know is it’s a very uncomfortable situation, to feel split in two like this, and like people mostly know, and are most interested in the side I’m the least interested in.