We are in the last throes of Summer, and the great leafy branches that gently sway outside my windows are showing their first splashes of orange. The heat has been intolerable for several weeks. Last weekend, I repeated my ritual of taking a bus to Fort Tilden Beach and spending the day floating, swimming, and reading. After a week of suffering through my work days, I realized that I probably had sustained heat stroke, as I had all the symptoms, including dizzyness and confusion, profuse sweating, cramping and headaches. I even felt like I was going to disappear behind my eyes and fall away into the dirt a few times. Because I am accustomed to muscling my way through discomfort, it was not until yesterday at work, a week later, that I realized something was wrong. I left early, likely creating confusion and maybe even irritation among the other workers.
About three months ago, I began working at this design shop. The company is 4 years old and just moved into a new space - a sprawling panopticon where the boss watches us from his desk on the mezzanine when he is not mingling and facilitating projects. I know him through friends, and was delighted when he hired me. His staff is competent and talented, and I felt I could learn from them, be a useful part of the team, as well as eventually use the shop for my personal projects. Anyone who knows me knows of my abiding love of metal, and unrealized desire to have a shop of my own. I made the decision to work there instead of going back to union construction, as it allows for more flexible hours, a later start to the day, and a chance to work with people with whom I may have something in common. This rarely happened on union jobs and my loner tendencies were exasperated by conversations around baseball and strippers. Being useful, but more importantly, feeling useful is not only important to me when it comes to my employment, it is absolutely necessary for me to retain stability. At this stage of my life, I have zero patience for busy work. I have paid those dues way too many times after a lifetime of working job after job after job. My (mostly non-paying) personal pursuits easily occupy all my waking hours and trying to look busy when there is nothing meaningful to do is tantamount to torture. The paycheck barely matters, although I know it should. In a way, my last Local 580 job spoiled me, as my foreman, Bobby, always kept me busy, and I learned something new every day about the things I love - reading the drawings, doing layout, figuring out mechanical problems, and of course, the many physical challenges of rigging, climbing, and balance. At times when there was nothing to do, Bobby would say, "Just play the game, Marlene." I never learned to play the game. When I would make statements to my union fellows about needing the work to be "meaningful", they would scoff and tell me I was in the wrong place.
When I started at the design company in May, I did what I always do, which is to do my best. It does not take long for other people to detect my earnestness, as well as my ineptitude. I will always try, and I fail often. Within just a few days, I started feeling the crushing feelings of being useless and the time started to pass like molasses. Unbearable tension rose in my chest and spread throughout my limbs. Also, I had a few paying art gigs come my way which I chose to prioritize, so I took leave for several months. Additionally, beginning around this time, a situation with my family which had been a slow burn for several years reached a devastating crescendo, requiring all of my emotional strength. This left me enfeebled, and looking back, I am so glad I made that bizarre decision to leave a potentially highly beneficial situation. There would have been no way for me to be a functional member of a team during this time. However, one day about three weeks ago, I realized my gigs had dried up, and that it may be the wise thing to revisit this opportunity. I called the boss, and asked him if he still had a spot for me. He immediately replied that he did, and I felt a surge of hope and relief.
I graduated with my MFA last year. This was a long-standing goal of mine, and the people with whom I interacted probably experienced something of an art monster. There was no way for them to know what being in that program meant to me. At the times when I was failing, not academically, but personally, I did not manage it well. There was confusion for me about this degree ultimately being about expression, but over and over again meeting with situations where my ways of expressing myself were not only unfruitful, but backfired detrimentally. Part of the feedback that I absorbed not outwardly but through the process of interpretation, was that I make my problems into other peoples problems. This created a harrowing conendrum. How do you ask for help in a way that is productive? How do you win people over when you are crumbling? How can I be a true to my own expression when that expression is so often met with walls? My art was not the problem. I was told that I was "talented" repeatedly by my professors, and I think they meant it. I was the problem. Me. Outside of my art, but this is enough to stop my art from progressing beyond a very small enclosure, preempting many types of practical success. My people skills have always been poor, but the experience of being in graduate school highlighted them in a way that was so punishing and shocking. I always thought I would blossom in such an environment, and I did!- in many ways. My work and process expanded well beyond my expectations, and in surprising ways. I took every piece of advice. I ate slept and breathed my art and art history. I learned about contemporary artists with whom I had been unwittingly dialoging. The happiest moments of my life took place within the walls of my graduate studio with its towering ceilings, great sun-emitting windows, concrete floors, and shitty partitions that I could destroy with my installation experiments. My work with Local 580, technically an ironworkers union, was mainly involved in installation, and I acquired a great love of attaching things to other things in ways that are daring. The coalescing of my drawing, paintings, sculpture, and construction knowledge created an indomitable feeling in my chest that spread to my limbs.
It was, however, the loneliest time in my life. I liked my peers, but there were many divides. We were a random group, I was older, and I did not touch alcohol at all which precluded me from many bonding activities. I had put the kabosh on almost all of my New York City friendships when I realized that I was changing. There were always people to go out with on a Saturday night, but when I started to court my old friends as a different person, they seemed distant. The more I was reading and thinking about ideas that interested me, the less I had in common with people at parties and the less patience I had for small talk or being an audience. At the end of my first year, after a profound feeling that I was failing personally, I called my Mom and cried my eyes out to her while sitting in my car. She said that she wanted to make me "feel like a princess", and I yelled at her, "I don't want to be a fucking princess!" My angst was caused by a growing awareness that the unpopularity I had experienced for much of my life was never going to change, even when I was at my best. I slowly began to realize that I am just like everyone that I hate. Angry. Conceited. Self-absorbed. Pathetic. This was a horrible feeling. I began making my way down a rabbit hole that lead more and more to the divide between myself and my mother, that is exemplified in her well-meaning desire to "make me feel like a princess." We are two very different people, and I never questioned her greatness as a mother until that year.
This may sound like blame, but it is not strictly that. It is a part of unfolding as an adult, experienced by some, wherein you may begin to objectively assess formative experiences and use new understanding (hopefully) as a tool toward progress. I began writing down all my memories and I called this collection Supermoon. I started asking a lot of questions of my family members so that I could create an accurate timeline of my life. My brother has a strong intellect, a memory like a steel trap, and is an alcoholic and an addict. I have rarely felt comfortable with him save for a few phone conversations where he was undoubtedly "up". My sister is a nurse, a mother of three, and has a symbiotic and very sweet relationship with my mother, as they live down the street from each other in Colorado. I pressed my mom with questions about my father and their relationship before I was born which made her bristle. I asked specific questions about different events which generated more questions. This questioning and some of the resultant realizations began to create a new picture of my life and a shroud began to lift. However it was not light that flooded in, but darkness. I noticed how threatened my family was by my questions. I noticed the gaps in their own knowledge. For instance, my brother and sister had no knowledge of the punishing bullying I had endured beginning with kindergarten or my selective mutism. My mom was particularly threatened by questions about the not talking, and her responses would devolve into "you were just fine." But I wasn't fine. I was 5 years old, then I was 6, then I was 7...very often coming home waling because of something someone had said or not said. I felt like the only kids who talked to me were the ones who felt sorry for me. I had no recourse except for gravitating to other loners which never felt real. It must have been very hard for my mom to see me that upset and I know that she tried to help. I think it must have drained her to have no answers. Overwhelmingly, I remember her huffing at me to "stop the theatrics." This is one of my earliest memories. When I tried to lean on my brother or sister while revisiting those memories, they saw it as a criticism of my mom, which it kind of is. She was a single mom working hard to support us, but her priority was always, very Irishly, food on the table and clothing on our backs. Granted, I view parenting through a modern lens. I see parents leaning down to their five year olds asking them to say what they are feeling and validating their every whim, and it makes me feel sad. I had lots of whims which were fine when it was quietly drawing, but beyond that I usually had to fight for and defend them - especially as I got older. More than one of my older relatives has confirmed, "It was always tough between you and your mom." This truth had become buried in the pile of woes that my poor mom endured as a single parent with an abusive baby daddy. These took center stage until a few years ago, when I decided to stop feeling sorry for her. I began to realize that my own woes barely had room to exist under her own. In the worst moments, I hated her for having children with an abusive ne'er-do-well alcoholic who we were taught to despise. In my adulthood, even before my own battle with alcohol, I started to see my father not as just a drunk, but as a human - wounded and struggling like us all with good bits along with the bad bits. I once told my mom that I felt like I wasn't given the opportunity to love him, and this was grounds for a good several months of silent treatment.
Another thing I remember my mom telling me is to "think before I talk." I wanted to follow her advice, as I did seem to have a problem with saying the wrong thing. But the advice was too abstract, and I did not know how to employ it. After all, one must think before talking right? Plus, a lot of people thought I was funny, and I began to live for this new kind of attention. It was, as good, if not more, of a way to get attention than drawing well. All it took was for someone to laugh at something I said, and I liked them. However, a lot of this dynamic is bound up in coping mechanisms that worked very well for many years. It still works, sometimes! However, the better coping mechanism, which I realize after all these years (good god, I am almost 47) is to simply, think before you talk. Are you being kind? Are you being honest? Are you feeding into what the person in front of your face wants from you? Are you being yourself? These are the questions I ask myself now, and have reverted into a kind of selective mutism, as this is a lot of thinking to do before responding. I usually am nodding my head to signal that I am listening, which must make me look like a bobblehead.
Shortly after crying in the car to my mom, I made a phone call to a "friend" who has seen me at my best and worst over the years, who never hid his disdain for me (certainly tainted by unwelcomed sexual advances), and who has a thorough understanding of people, especially women. I reasoned that if I am going to get an honest answer about what is up with me and people, this thing that I cannot see, it is going to have to come from someone who will be brutally honest, my feelings notwithstanding. He inhaled deeply and said, "Don't talk."
"What?'
"Don't talk. What happens if you don't talk?"
"You listen."
"Right."
Silence.
"You do this thing where you ask for help when you don't need it..." and his voice trials off into a little huff of not wanting to explain. "And...uh. I don't know."
"I say the wrong thing sometimes. "
Silence.
"What if I realize afterward that I said the wrong thing, and I want to apologize?"
"Don't."
"Thank you. I knew that you would...I mean, I always thought..."
"Don't. Talk."
Silence.
"You try, but you have to try harder. Let the other person finish. Let it get awkward."
Silence.
"You are very competent. I have seen you reinvent yourself many times."
Silence.
"You have a lot of potential. I am going to go now." Click.
So I am reinventing myself again. It is a mature iteration and with it comes a voice that does not issue from my vocal chords, but from my actions. I am learning to be the quiet sensitive person that I am, who is secretly, really really funny. It is also someone who gives a lot less of a fuck, or at least whose fucks are reserved for select items. One wonderful old friend, who I leaned on recently, comforted me. "Everything you do...is guided by a sort of integrity." It took me several weeks to take that in, and to accept it. I did emerge from graduate school with a few strong important relationships. These are based on sincerity, witnessing, and acceptance. The feeling that what I do and how I do it are O.K. is like an uncomfortable bra that I keep plucking at leaving those weird indents between my tits. The dent will go away, and my chest will feel fine, and a feeling of fine will eventually spread to all my limbs. This is the hope! I hate clichés, but there is one to which I must submit: If we don't have hope, we have nothing!
