My Rediscovery of Me

I often joke that the purchase of novels should be banned from my credit cards.

I am an impulse book buyer. I read the back cover, flip through a few pages and throw a book next to a cash register.

I have four bookshelves in my one-bedroom apartment. They are full of paperbacks and hard covers — and journals that I’ve filled through the years.

But here’s my problem: I haven’t been reading the many, many books I own.

In the past month, I’ve started way too many books: Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums, Black Girl/White Girl by Joyce Carol Oates and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I haven’t read more than 50 pages in any of those books. So what do I do?

I go out and buy more books! Three, in fact. Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Main Street by Upton Sinclair and a combination Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.

And now I’m 30 or so pages into the Idiot. I’m toying with the idea of giving myself a deadline to read it. But I don’t think I’d meet that deadline. Instead, I’ll just commit to reading it. I won’t touch another novel until I finish this one.

And I hope that will get me back into the writing mood.

A few days after I first moved into my apartment last August, I made a trip to Hobby Lobby because I wanted to add some personality to the tall white walls in my 782-sq.-feet place. I ended up spending most of my time in the art supply section, looking at paintbrushes and canvases. In addition to my random home decor (some candles, some fake flowers, a hand-painted sign that read “Simplify”), I bought a set of acrylics, a bundle of brushes and a pretty big canvas.

The art supplies sat in my closet for months.

Well, now, I’ve pulled them out and I’m working on something.  When sitting through meetings at work, I often doodle this one image — half of a flower on the edge of a page.

With colored pencils

With crayon

I decided to paint something similar to this on the canvas. I drew a very rough sketch in pencil and just threw paint on the canvas. My technique wasn’t very sophisticated. I just picked up brushes and got going.

I am not quite sure how much I like it so far, but I’ll be working on it for a while.

This is what I have. I hope to make it look more like the colored pencil version than the crayon version, so I will be adding brighter colors to the center of the flower and to the petals.

But it’s a start. I’m trying to do something. I feel good about that. Really good, actually. I may not be a great artist, but I am channeling something within me — and maybe that will bring me closer to the person I was once.

So, I’ll continue to work on my half flower, and soon, I’ll hang the canvas on my wall.

And in a month or two, I’ll probably be moving. We’ll see.

I spent a lot of today thinking about inspiration. When was the last time I was truly inspired?

Two weeks ago.

(Before that, who knows?)

It was about 2 a.m. I had been in bed for more than 30 minutes, but I was nowhere near sleep. So many things were on my mind, yet I can’t remember any of them.

Suddenly, I sat up, pushed the light switch and grabbed my sketchbook and a pen. A poem just flowed out of me. Well, not a whole poem — oddly, the first line that rushed out was a simile, referencing something I haven’t figured out yet.

But I wrote and I wrote until the words stopped. It was so energizing, so powerful. It was a feeling I hadn’t felt in years, and I didn’t realize how much I missed it.

I think that piece of a poem is what led me to this emptying of my mind online. That burst of inspiration inspired me to get up and do something about my unhappiness. (Was it unhappiness? Maybe just discontentment?)

I have always disliked the statement “Inspiration is everywhere” (and all of its variants). It’s not true. Beauty isn’t everywhere, either. (My opinions here, of course.)

With good, there’s bad. With beauty, there’s ugliness. With inspiration, there are mental blocks.

I see beauty. Hell, I crave it. But I won’t call something beautiful when it’s hideous. And I won’t force inspiration. All I can do is want to be inspired. If I fight inspiration (and I think that’s what I subconsciously did for so long), I definitely won’t see any glimpse  it.

You know, though:

Maybe inspiration and beauty are everywhere and I just can’t see it. Maybe inspiration and beauty are everywhere in the sense that people see life in so many different ways. Maybe what I find hideous is another person’s beauty, and maybe what drains me is what inspires someone else.

–

I have fights with myself often. It is why I am such a horrible decision-maker.

From the Book

I remember at least a couple of times, when I was 10 or so, when my mom and I sat with notebooks in our laps and just doodled. My mom, to me, was a very creative, artistic person and I always hoped even some of that would make its way to me.

In middle school and high school, I could look at a picture or illustration in a magazine and I could replicate it just by looking at it. Most often, I perfected my sketches of Garfield or other mainstays of the comic strips. My brothers also enjoyed my copies of Dragonball Z characters.

The Second Book

When I was in college, I stumbled across one of those “Learn to Draw” books in the bargain shelves of Barnes & Noble. I thought it might be a good time to revisit my drawing skills, so I bought the book. It has jumped from bookshelves to coffee tables since then, but it was rarely opened.

Three weeks ago, I found another of these drawing basics books and, although I don’t know why, I bought it.

That night, I flipped the guide to a random page, pulled out my sketchbook and tried to recreate some of what I saw.

What resulted could never have been classified as art. I had forgotten how to hold my pencil. It was as if concepts such as perception and depth had never been introduced to me. After four or five sketches, I slammed the book shut.

From the Book

From the Book

From the Book

From Me

From Me

From Me

Maybe I shouldn’t focus so much on drawing right now.

One day I woke up and I was unrecognizable to myself. I couldn’t remember the last time I had written a poem that I enjoyed reading or the last time I drew a picture worth keeping. I tried to think of the last time I had taken my camera out just to capture a nice photograph – and I failed.

It scared me. My life was once overflowing with creativity. I had scrapbooks and journals full of my thoughts, my art and my life. I had rooms cluttered with markers, paintbrushes, scraps of paper and imagination. I realized that my space had become filled with emptiness – mindless thoughts and the growl of the television.

It’s unclear to me how long ago I had lost myself, but I began mourning who I was. After days of sulking and grieving, I pulled out a notepad, tore out a sheet of paper and wrote “Goals” at the top of it.

Here is some of that list:

-Get on a better schedule
-Do one creative thing each week
-Write letters
-Call home
-Spend at least 10 minutes of playtime with each cat daily
-Make one thing with the sewing machine
-Eat well

My “goals” varied in specificity and in practicality. Getting on a better schedule has always been a desire of mine, but it has never happened and I didn’t really see that changing. Eating well was a little out there as well, because I’m a lacto-ovo vegetarian who loves pizza, tortilla chips and high-calorie lattes. But doing one creative thing a week seemed like an achievable goal for me. So did the required playtime with my three kitties. (Mostly because it was something I already did.)

Three weeks later, I had doodled a flower in my sketchbook and made a window-covering out of an old dress. I hadn’t called home or improved my schedule. I was going out more and often missed the 10 minutes of uninterrupted playtime. My list was resting on a bookshelf, untouched since it was first written.

I was a mess. I convinced myself that I was hopeless, that I was doomed to a dull life of routine and to a perpetual state of monochromatic existence.

This blog is my attempt to prove myself wrong. This is me trying to appreciate the art in my life and to find the art within myself, which – I hope – will lead to my rediscovery of me.