Art and something, I'm sure

I’ve gotten lazy with my dishes.

Right at this moment I am completely, absolutely broke. I have a little over a dollar in my bank account. Five dollars left on my credit card. Two dollars in my pocket.

What did I spend my last thirty dollars on? Music. It’s nourishment. It’s survival. I’m in debt, I can’t afford to buy music, I can barely pay the rent, I can only buy one coffee out a week, and yet, I’ll scrape together enough to by that Terami Hirsch cd, or, today, that Charlotte Martin cd. And as soon as I get my paycheck in my bank account, as soon as I put money on my credit cards, I have even more music picked out, all waiting for me to click “buy mp3” and enter those magic numbers.

Sure, I should have a job that brings in more income, so I can easily and guiltlessly buy as much music as I could want. But, if I’m working 8 hours a day in a job that doesn’t involve sitting in front of my computer and listening to music, then when am I going to be able to actually listen and love this music that I worked so hard to buy? A conundrum, yes, and one that is both easy to solve, and ridiculously difficult. I was blessed and cursed to have grown up in a house where both parents worried obsessively about money, but where one saved and one spent frivolously. Therefore, it means that my frivolous isn’t that frivolous, but I still have that impulsive streak. That craving for meaning through acquisition.

In my case, the meaning is found in the form of music, books, and movies. I do have a bit of a problem buying these things. I’m looking for that artwork of perfection that completely explains to me who I am, that shows me my experience of the workld back to me in a perfect mirror. Yes, I look for the truth of myself through the eyes of another. Which means that I will constantly be dissatisfied, since I’m guessing that there probably isn’t an exact reflection of my experience out there in the world.

I’ve been going about all of this the wrong way all these years. I’ve been looking for comfort and nurturing from the outside. I’m not talking about comfort as complacency, but comfort in the recognition of similarity, in the feeling of having friends and family and allies.

Music has been my closest relationship, my most intimate friend for about ten years. Listening to music was the only place that I felt as though I was experiencing reality, experiencing a level of truthfulness not found in my interpersonal relationship. I’m sure that art is the reason I didn’t completely wither and die during the very dry yet drowning season of the first 24 years of my life. Art as coping mechanism, art as my only means of survival. I saw reflections of better things, possibilities that were happening to other people.

Still, the major thing I was looking for in all of the books and music was an inability to function as a social creature. Isolation and alienation have been, and continue to be, major themes in art, but I never found complete examples of how I felt. Since our culture is nearly completely based on love stories, I couldn’t find anything that I could identify with about the total absence of love and intimacy.

I’m 25, and I still feel as though I’ve had very, very few moments of actual intimacy, whether they are emotional, spiritual, or physical. Intimacy involves vulnerability, and I’ve always been so vulnerabilty, yet walled in vulnerable, so I haven’t been able to let anyone close. I spent years getting angry at other people for not being interested in me, at myself for being so boring and wholly unlovable. If people didn’t want to be near me, then the obvious answer was that there was nothing about me worthwhile to offer to other people.

I still have no idea what I have to offer others. I’m essentially a broken, emotional wreck of a girl who has become completely undone in a very unfashionable and unpopular sort of way. I learned at a very early age that it was wrong to express my emotional life. Well, actually, I was verbally told that it was good to talk about and express emotions in an appropriate manner, but whenever I expressed them in a less than “reasonable” manner, such as crying or yelling, I was emotionally pubished and made to feel bad and guilty about expressing them. So, I continued to have my huge, massive emotions, I just kept silent about them ( good morning repression!).

I think that I actually came to believe that there was something deeply wrong with me if I had emotional reactions to things. People would tease me, goad me, do somewhat cruel or unaware things, and then when I’d react to them, they’d either get mad at me ( as in the case of my mother), or they’d tease and goad me even more. And so I’d keep it all inside until I’d finally freak out and have unbearable temper tantrums or I’d wake up in desperate fear screaming in the middle of the night.

Because of these explosions, I was deemed an unruly child, and told that my parents couldn’t deal with me. I was abnormal and horrible. I was wrong and broken and my own parents couldn’t even love me. I was a bad person because I kept my parents up at night since I was too scared too fall asleep on my own, completely unaware of what I was afraid of.

I was afraid that I would be alone, that I would be completely abandoned, because I already had been. I don’t know exactly when it happened. There are gestational theories about how the hormonal environment a child is gestated in reflects upon how the child experiences and perceives the world from birth. My mother was incredibly fearful and overwhelmed and stressed out when she was pregnant with me. So, it makes sense that I would be irrationally fearful and overwhelmed from birth, since I came into this world expecting it to be fearful and overwhelming, just like how my mother felt.
I can’t trace it all out, I can’t pull all of the knots out one by one, there are too many, and so many are attached to each other that I don’t know which is which.There is no way to untangle this mess and get to the complete root of it, to find the magical core, but I need to be in it right now, I need to come to a point where I truly come to believe that I don’t need to feel guilty for existing, that I’m not a useless person, that I’m not a failure, that I’m not completely incompetent.