BLOOMING THOUGHTS
Today I want to write about life, and love, and self-expression, and how the latter helps the first ones. Not only artistic expression, but any kind of outlet, that reveals the self to others. Emotions, passions, quirks of personality.
I'm including yesterday's drawing that reminded me to write this article:
Pen on paper, stage I, did this doodle when waiting for a video to upload on Dtube .
When I was a child, it was so easy to be open in my expression. After a while, there were some bitter disappointments and hurtful experiences, and it became difficult to trust parts of me to others. I started to shut others out. To build walls, shut doors. And when someone tried to knock on them, only some were opened. I had my closest friends I kept in touch with (and they are ever so dear to me), but I wouldn't let them know every bit of me. I kept all myself only to myself, I was writing and drawing, poured my feelings all over the pages of little black notebooks. To others, especially, those not close, there were other pages of me to read: the calm and collected clever girl.
The times when I stopped writing or drawing, or painting (these stretches of periods grew longer and longer), I shut myself off. First of all, from my self - my artistic voice, my passions, my love of poetry, and art, and culture. I began to feel apathetic, I lost the appetite to live.
I realized something - mainly that the person I was together with (back then) is dragging me back. It was love for a while, on several levels, but not all; it was incomplete. I refused to be completely open to him. And open to anyone. So many conversations never had, so many my emotions never explained to him. I was a mystery, as funny as it now turns out (without any intention of playing a role of the enigmatic femme). But it was not as if he cared to demystify me. He did not understand me. He thought all artists are pseudos, and fakes - that it's a face to put on (maybe that shattered my slowly sprouting confidence?). But it was he who put on a face to others - he, the pseudo-intellectual, lost in his way, confused about the purpose of his life (I'm holding not a bit of contempt towards him, it's just that it all becomes so clear now). His idea of living a fulfilled life was to hide behind a façade of the living-a-fulfilled-life cliché. The life that looks good. Not necessarily the one that makes you feel something. Back then, I did not see through him like that: I thought what unites us was aesthetics. But my aesthetics is also the beauty of everything living and vivid, and true. His - the pretty surface of it. So it seems to me now.
Something we had in common - the desire to hide. And I hid. Then, I did not think of myself as secretive. I just thought I had the right not to reveal everything about me to others ( I was cautious, maybe, not to get hurt?). I thought some parts of my personality - the overly sentimental and the parts filled with the thrill about everything that is art - those are private and belong only to me. I kept everything that now keeps me alive under a lock.
The time I realized that we have to end it, me and him were already not functioning together. Should I have realized it earlier? Probably not. Through this, I learned a great deal about relationships, life and myself.
It has come to the point where I have a need to express myself. When I suppress that desire, like I've done in my past, I can't be happy, I'm incomplete. The day I ended that stagnate situation, it was as if I broke free from that comfortable passive cage I was in for some two years. But this cautious crab has crawled out of that cage long ago. That day I found my voice back. Since then, I have been crawling upwards only.
It was like a second breath. My life was filled with fuel. I wanted to live. I started writing. Every day. Pages and pages, when I had free time in work, when on bus, in the evening. I took all my drawings and paintings, and scanned them. I considered starting an illustrated blog. I had tried quick dating, but grew tired of it really fast - the people I met on tinder, their interest in me was so superficial. Then I guess I understood that I don't want a person that cannot understand my passion to live, to breathe art, to express, to be thrilled about things.
Then there was a surprise message of a long lost acquaintance. Long texts. Someone that seemed so familiar to me even the first time we met. Reinis. You can read our story in another article. We're together for around one and a half years, and it is him who understands me the best. He has seen every side of me. Personality naked.
I am so blessed to have found him, my soulmate. He is the most inspiring, most curious, interesting, exciting, supporting person to me.
Now that I am expressing myself and advancing - I am opening up to strangers, I am happy more than ever. I am achieving the goals that are most important to myself - developing my sensibilities, understanding myself, and analyzing everything around me, turning my passionate interest in actions. Expression helps me become a better me. And my guy besides me inspires me to keep on going.
I've also found this platform, and it has made me go great lengths in my artistic expression, and I believe, self-development. The motivation to paint. The encouragement of others. The writing that becomes introspective. And the genuine human connections that can be formed online.
Understanding of each other.
Desire to reveal.
The opposite of how I had lived for a while before in my life.