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I’m tired, I can’t be bothered to hide my art behind filters anymore. Here it is, with apologises to @fkatwigs who inspired it. I did you no justice, and I truly wanted to make something great inspired by you.
The truth is that I am a “fair” artist at best. That was the assessment I was given by my York college art tutor when he looked at my laughable portfolio for the first time. I grew as an artist, but not enough, and that clearly frustrated my tutors (I had four for different aspects of creativity. Photography, sadly, was not one of them. I doubt I would’ve appreciated it at the time if it had been).
Why? I don’t know. Mostly because it was the only decent course I could qualify for that was highly unlikely to contain any of the horrible sociopaths who had made secondary school an utter living nightmare. And I was okay at it. Back then, you had to make as much GCSEs with Cs or above to make certain courses. I wanted to go for the holy grail: A Levels. Specifically English Language, English Literature. The other two would be Politics and Psychology.
After failing to achieve the desired grades (I was one C off), I took a year off trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I read through the entire Tolkien trilogy. Re-watched the whole series’ of Only Fools and Horses on TV Gold. I did basically everything I could to avoid thinking about The Future.
Then came the inevitable day.
I was given two options: get a job or work towards getting a career. Refuse either, and I had to leave altogether.p
I choose art. I came to like it.
But I love it more than I’ll ever have the talent to prove it. To prove my love.
And that’s that.
The artwork being discussed in this post. -
I really thought this would turn out better. But I accept it for what it is. -
I wish my personal posts could reach out to people. To make them feel even just one tiniest bit of what I feel. Just one. Or am I forever blocked away from everyone else by a great glass womb of ice, as I often wondered as teenager, in my anger and frustration at being unable to make sense and communicate with the world around me.
We had nothing in common, the world and I. Cats were the closest I felt to anything. And eleven they seemed frustrated by a world that took no notice of their signals when they wanted to be left alone.
Eventually, I tried to exit on my own terms. A failure. I didn’t know what I was doing: all I know was paracetamol killed people if you overdosed, so that’s what I did. I didn’t know the utter agony it caused as your organs shut down one by one.
What I did learn that day, as I got sicker and decided to confess, was what how little my life meant to so many people. My friends were lovely. My head of year sneeringly asked how bad a headache I must have had to take so much. The man I did all this over vanished. My parents yelled a lot. The bullies carried on. I gave up my fight against them. Reporting them made no dent. Neither did unaliving myself.
I had nowhere to go but down. Retreat into a world within me.
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When is an Impossible Dream a Dead Dream
I spent a good portion of this evening typing up my entry for the Impossible Dream collaboration. I will eventually post it, if only because I made the effort to write it up on Cheetah Corona (my Corona electric typewriter), to I feel I shouldn’t waste it. A lot of ideas of mine get abandoned and wasted, which brings me to what inspired me to write this.
While it is nice to vent my feelings on all that seems impossible to achieve in my life as an artist and as a person, I also found myself excavating some unpleasant thoughts that I try to ignore a lot of the time.
It was not a pleasant excavation.
The biggest discovery? As a creator (writer, artist,delusional buffoon, whatever you would like to call me), I feel my window of opportunity is, at best, nothing but a tiny crack lit by sunlight on occasion. I’m nearing 40, I have little money, no connections to open any doors in life, and my struggles with mental illness and – more recently – epilepsy mean even finishing a project is difficult. Depression tells me I can’t do it, that no one will like it, why bother because I am useless. Anxiety is the sane tune played in Paralysing Fear of Mockery. Epilepsy is often triggered by stress, which all of the above bring on.
The best I can often manage are a few mediocre drawings of people I admire and abstract vent pieces. Writing happens in dribs and drabs. Most of it remains hidden.
I create so little of value, and I feel my dreams are dying along with whatever skill I may have posessed once. But I have nothing to move on to. I already know ordinary jobs are like being trapped in a cage to me, a cage that drives me slowly mad. No matter how good my coworkers and boss are, it feels the same.
I’m stuck here in a hole I dug for myself. I often ask what will happen to my work after I die. And the truth, save the few that are better than average, is they’ll be heading to a landfill one day. And that will be when I am truly dead.
Bloody Roses 