Art, and Other Social Disorders · 8:39pm Jul 6th, 2022
Because I’ve fixed a lot of problems in my life, I’ve got a clearer view of what was underneath them. Like when you clear off all the stuff on your bedroom floor looking for your wallet, and end up finding the unopened mail you forgot you were putting off. I mean, I assume, I’m never actually going to pick the actual clothes in my room up to find out.
Recently Zach Wienersmith, of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, wrote:
I’ve found that for me, a genuine peak life experience is a good essay by an author I like. Unlike on social media, I find when I read an essayist who’s skilled, I don’t obsess over whether they’re right or wrong. Rather, I enjoy the words and let them shape me. I enjoy inhabiting someone else’s brain for a little while before returning to mine. I don’t suspect I’ve given you a peak experience here, but if you did read this, and it gave you a way of imagining the world that hadn’t occurred to you, or simply had a few clever phrases, you probably had a more genuine, more enjoyable experience than most of the communication you do. If so, consider asking yourself why you don’t do it more often.
I think of my favourite books growing up, and they were works like My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, or the Country Vet books by James Herriot. So I’m giving myself some rare permission to just write, with that in mind.
I’ve got something else coming up, too, “One Must Imagine Charon as Happy”, but I think I’ll be hosting that a bit more privately. It’s a bit more personal, a bit more about how I solved the much bigger problems. Here, I think, I want to focus on the parts of my life shaped by… well, this website. What getting a little bit of fame here early in my life did to me, for me.
I’ve been asking myself, again, why I do art. Because the honest answer is I came into this with a very unhealthy mindset. I was raised on the idea that it doesn’t matter if you’re the biggest asshole in the room, as long as you’re the best or the smartest. And, being pretty disabled and neurodivergent, it felt like it was easier to be exceptional than normal.
Sydney, 4am
It was with that in mind that I first started writing, and it was probably the reason I became good at it in the first place. There was a ferocious hunger that got me through my first few stories which were, I’m afraid, awful. Truly terrible. I was an arrogant little monster, but that arrogance was armor. I knew that being awful was temporary, and that if I pushed myself, I could become great. The best to ever do it.
Central at Dawn
I don’t think that anymore, obviously. In part because it’s an absolutely nonsense idea. Is Kurt Vonnegut a better author than Stephen King? I’ve read and loved far more of King’s books, but the few of Vonnegut’s I’ve read were life-changing. I realized if I were Vonnegut, I would wish I had King’s output and audience. If I were King, I’d wish I had Vonnegut’s depth and profundity.
It’s not just that the grass is always greener. Whatever I can do will always be less impressive to me, because I understand how I do it. And realizing that made me realize that hole inside me was impossible to fill. Whatever I did could never be good enough, because it was something I could do.
Knowing that doesn’t solve the problem, though. It’s just the first truth of Buddhism. Dukkha: Life is suffering. Realizing that doesn’t do much on its own. That idea was worked out 2500 years ago, and it still takes people a lifetime to internalize and overcome, if they even try to.
Trespass of an Unfinished Temple
But growing up feeling like that, and doing well enough that it got validated - here, at least? That welded some wires in my brain that I really need to work through cutting.
There’s a feeling to me, now, that everything I do is lesser because it’s not pulling in the audience numbers that I was getting from my peak output, back in the golden age of this fandom. I want to move on to doing my own original work, but it’s terrifying. I have no idea how to put myself out there and start again.
For a while I edited for a streamer I loved, but the behind the scenes on that one scared the shit out of me even more. Even someone I greatly admired, who had made it before, couldn’t do it again. Couldn’t figure out how to keep what they already had. I’d always thought that it was a skill like any other, like woodworking, where as long as you practice it, you’ll always get better. Apparently it’s not. That external element is too random, fickle and… well. The longer you produce things the better you might get, but also you become less novel. You can’t just become better at what you already are, not forever. Refinement can mean stagnation.
Birds of Lake Burley Griffin
Which is where we get to the view of making art I most subscribe to; When asked what his least favourite part of making videos, I am sure it was Youtube Phenom Super Eyepatchwolf who said something along the lines of: I hate every part of making a video, the whole thing is incredibly painful to me. The only thing more painful is not making a video. It was then retweeted by Shaun, another Youtuber I greatly admire.
I don’t usually enjoy writing - what I love is having already written. Some authors I’m aware of probably think this is a toxic attitude, and they may have a point. For me writing is just the most direct way to achieve the thing I actually want, which is to be liked by complete strangers, and respected by people I admire. That’s one of those things you’re not supposed to admit, which is why I want to talk about it. Who else will?
If this were simply down to arrogance, I’d admit it. I already have. I don’t think it is, though, but I think it's easy to be scared of it being arrogance. For me it's not about thinking I deserve that attention, even though I hope I do, and want to earn it. I think it comes from a feeling of specific loneliness, an intense loneliness that can’t be figured out by actually being with people.
I often have very low self-esteem about who I am, and what I know. But I can be genuinely proud of what I can do. And those little Pavlovian wires in my brain have trained me that work is where I get my worth. If I don’t do it for long enough, I start to feel worthless - like I can’t relate to other people. And, unfortunately, the small success I had here in ponyfiction has set a minimum speed on my hedonic treadmill above what I can keep up with.
It’s harder to be proud of that last music video I made, for example, because it’s got less than a hundred views on Youtube. It’s hard, in spite of the fact that it came out better than I feared it would, and there is no reason it would get more views. I have a novella finished that I quite like, Toque and Dagger, and I'm too nervous to publish it, because I know it won't do as well as my My Little Pony fanfiction. I’m comparing myself to myself, and that’s an unfair standard.
The Triangle Dusk
But here we come to a complication. If being popular was the whole of the end goal, then why focus on the work I have? Why not, as I had done at the start, focus on comedy? Shared readily and liked easily? Refine it down, and master consistent output. Even when I finish what I start, I’m painfully slow to do it, and quantity is the most important quality for this.
I think back to writing Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, a proof of concept that I could stick a bunch of sad tropes together and it’d be popular, and the genuine panic I felt when it worked. And it was panic, the better it did, the more my stomach twisted in knots, the more I wished I could take it back. Why? People liked it, people were saying I was good for writing it, that whatever my intentions, solid execution had made it legitimate.
I had said something I believed was false. And that was far more important than being told I had said it well. I don’t think that’s because I’m especially altruistic or noble, either, but I think it says something about the deeper need of expressing myself through art. It has to be about more than just being seen and liked, then.
I think there’s something here that carried me through so much of writing Wholesome Rage, thousands upon thousands of words and years of my life, written for perhaps a few dozen readers.
And I can compare it, too, to photography.
Pastoralism
I don’t really post my photography much, anywhere. Here, sometimes, but only because I’m not drawing attention to it. To Facebook, sometimes, to my immediate friends. I have an Instagram, but I purposefully never use it.
It’s replaced piano for me, something I used to practice for my own sake, for my own personal pleasure. But with piano I got frustrated that I never felt like I’d get good enough that I could share it, if I wanted to. Even in private, I began to feel too watched. It stopped mattering that I wouldn’t share it with people, because it felt like I couldn’t even if I wanted to.
Photography has filled that void for me much truer, because it feels like I can share it and be proud of it for stuff like this - where I get extremely personal, and intimate. My photography is intimate to me - it’s something I’m very raw in, self-taught and inexperienced. It’s how I express myself to myself, but it’s also an expression that I have some confidence in. I have to feel like I could put stuff in front of an audience for it to mean anything that I don’t want to.
Writing for this place, I showed my hand too early. The feeling of the audience follows me everywhere I go, to everything I do. What am I doing to earn that? What am I doing to be a person deserving of it?
But it’s also true that I chose this for myself, and I’m still choosing it, by writing this with the hope of publishing it. So obviously there’s something that makes that feeling worth having. I spend a lot of time feeling inadequate, but it fuels a need to be a better person, to keep finding ways to improve myself and what I can do. I can’t imagine how much worse off I would be, right now, without that drive.
Australian Gothic
I was taken to a special place called Nelson’s Monument. It’s this big piece of outsider art that’s just in the middle of a nowhere rural town in Australia, bizarre, unexplained. There are articles about it online, and they’re all wrong.
There are only four photographs on Earth of the creator standing with his artwork, and I hold all four. I know this, because the day that I was taken to see Nelson’s monument was the first day in over a decade that the creator had come back to it, after being chased out of town for it being too satanic.
Which is tragic because, according to the sculptor - I’ll write more about this on a different website, I think, and save searchable keywords for there - he described it as a psychic scream. Something to express the grief of his dad dying.
I felt such a profound admiration for him. I wanted to be a person capable of expressing myself like this, not because it’s how I want to be seen, but because I think that is an amazing person to be.
Nelson’s Monument
And that’s where we come back to that need for an audience. That brain fizz feeling really comes from the comments for me, not from the views. And I think this is where a mural or a photo is different to storytelling.
With photos, with a monument, you can judge your own expression. But storytelling is so much more abstract, so much harder to nail down. I think it’s only really possible to get a sense of your writing through the reactions of other people - either an audience, or from just waiting long enough that you become a different person. I’m led to believe music is more like this, too. I’m inclined to believe it.
There’s nothing like the feeling that comes from knowing you’ve expressed yourself so powerfully and been understood so deeply. The feeling that you can connect to people like that. It’s an impossible high.
I can’t get that here anymore, and I don’t know how to get that audience again somewhere else. It’s made it harder to write original fiction because, well, it’s a complete gamble on what’s waiting for me on the other side. I’m scared that, in comparison to the rush I got from this place at one time, I’m going to feel like I am a lesser person.
A smaller mirror will give me a smaller reflection, and my dumb human brain is going to see that as there being less of me. That I’ve become smaller in an important way, either that I’m worse at expressing myself or that I’m just expressing something less than what I had before.
Escape
I’m going to have to, anyway, though.
What got me through Wholesome Rage for the longest time, I think, was that I admired the person who knew all the things that made it onto that website, could make that website, and I wanted to be that person. It was only after I’d become him that I began to feel stagnant, and began to feel like my nonfiction work was a scream into the void.
There’s nothing new to find about myself by writing a novel. I know I can write one, and have before. If I do this, it’s because I have that need to express myself again, a need that demands other people tell me that I pulled it off.
I think there’s a way to see that as fundamentally selfish and self-centered, which is part of what makes it so important to me that I feel like what I put out there is good, and true, and worth saying. I’ve got to give something for what I’m getting, otherwise I’d feel worse about needing it from other people so much.
I don’t think that’s the right way to see it, though. It comes from the same fear that it’s selfish to have a crush on someone, the fear that your friends don’t realize they’re too good to spend their time on you.
Everyone else I know that’s like this is an intense consumer of art. More than how much they take in, in how much they care about what they take in and how much they think about it. It can’t be a coincidence, and it goes a long way to explaining the contradiction that is spending hours of your life in focused isolation as your way of connecting to other people.
I think to even get the idea in your head, you need to have felt how strong it is to identify with someone’s work, to want the experience of it to change you as a person. Art has to have reached you in a way that other people can’t, or don’t. At least once. Even if it’s as simple as wanting to read books at recess instead of playing with the other kids.
Not to make any of this more profound than it is.
Juxtaposing Irony
This isn’t to put art on a pedestal, least of all mine. It’s not a heavy thing. Just a thought on where my art comes from, a feeling I've seen in the kinds of artist I identify with. From this view of things, writing light fluff feels like having friendly banter. Sometimes that’s what I really want. It’s a bit lovely. Sometimes all I really want to communicate is Flimsy Pretexts. This is more a thought about why writing Flimsy Pretexts is how I express that, even over maintaining flesh-and-blood friendships I could have that banter with.
I think that was a point of writing this, too. At least in this way. I don’t think this kind of honesty could have worked as a story, or in a story. It needs to come from me and not a character, because of the only rule of writing that matters: No cowardice. This is an honesty I can only have speaking to an audience. I probably won’t be sending this to any friends, anyone who knows me outside of my work. Frankly, I find the idea hideously embarrassing. Still, I stayed up seven hours longer than I meant to writing this, tightening photos for it, because I couldn't have slept tonight - read; this morning - until I'd said it.
This is the kind of thing I need to say, but I can only say it in a relationship that I feel is truly voluntary: I can't ask someone to read something like this, but I can leave it somewhere it can be picked up, in the hope that someone chooses to pick it up and connects with it. Which is the real reason it matters that my work is liked by people who would otherwise be strangers. I only realized how important being able to do that is to me, how true it is for me, by writing my thoughts out like this. Art is how I give myself permission to work stuff like this out. Making it presentable for other people? Well, as Vonnegut said: No fair tennis without a net.
My only problem is that, here, hope of an audience has become expectation. I need to let go of that, even though the point of this work is that it's done for other people.
This'd make a nice TED Talk.
Pretty birds and beautiful monument.
Those photos are jaw-dropping. I haul a camera around myself, and can take *technically* perfect shots, but you have the *eye* for finding how to make the images something worthy to see.
I'm no therapist, but letting the fear of dull reception hold back your artistic endeavors can't be healthy. You seem to be finding ways to channel your passions into photography, but if you really want some motivation on the writing front, why not a bit of competition? I literally just shared my latest original novel with the site, so if you prepared to launch your own novella now, we could go head to head on the hunt for readers. And since you're probably more talented than me, your story would probably find a larger audience. But it won't find any audience if you don't take that first step. If I can do it, then so can you!
5670653
I mean my real solution is that I'm training to be a nurse so I'm getting more of that fulfilment from healthier sources, but that's for the other piece.
5670656
Oh, cool! We always need more healthcare professionals.
Really interesting. This was a nice bit of self analysis and did make me wonder about my own motivation for writing.
I really enjoy these blog posts. Like ponies, they take me to a different world much better than the one I see every day.
The worst feeling in the world WRT All This is when you realize, little by little, that the community and audience you have found yourself surrounded by doesn't understand you. And it couldn't be them that's wrong, you're just not arting hard enough. So you proceed to spend years of your life obsessively honing your craft in increasing isolation because it can't be shared until it's "presentable", cutting off from the very relationships that got you here and that you're making art to forge in the first place.
And finally, with something in hand you think you can be proud of, you look up from your misery pool. And everyone's gone. They left you behind. Not only that, but you've changed so much beyond it, come to understand yourself in such a way, that you know those people wouldn't accept you on principle even if they hadn't already left.
What are you supposed to do now?
That's my experience making music, anyway. To a different degree but in similar pattern, it seems to have been my brother's. It's corroded my ability to share my work with anybody to the extreme.
Edit: I kind of left this comment unfinished for several hours, and the train of thought was lost by the time I hit post. Anyway,
For reasons unrelated to the arts, I have amassed an enormous amount of self-worth compared to what I had when I started trying to produce music, and I do, at least, have three die-hard supporters. It's simply frustrating that I have yet to find the audience that will also appreciate my work (aside from my single fanfic; people seem to like that one and I'm grateful for that). To know beyond of shadow of doubt that you are an expert with engaging things to say, for want of a listener.
I can't help but wonder what the missing link is.
I'm struggling to write a response to this that doesn't make it about me... The struggle for expression, connection, and purpose is one I know well, in my own way.
Thank you for your authenticity, and good luck.
- I think I can agree with this but not following phrase. I still very much like to try and see if said thing actually true ..
Thanks a lot for your writing (including non fiction - I reread some of it just yesterday) , thanks for amazing photo art you posted here, and thanks for your ...ah, society-oriented trajectory.
I love your photography, particularly the night shots. Combining them into the narrative where thematically appropriate is an art into itself. Photo-essays they were called back in the day?
Please continue to share your non-pony endeavors with us, or at least link to place wil can get to them. I really enjoyed your Wholesome Rage essays. In the age of Twitter, such thoughtful and comprehensive pieces have a hard time gaining an audience, but that's down to current culture, not anything to do with the quality of the work.
Growth and forward motion is good, and you seem to have that well in hand. Recognition and fulfillment have such elements of luck involved that careful planning can only lay a foundation. All I can do is wish you the best of luck... which I do!
I wish everyone I know would internalize this.
Good luck.
This is an interesting one to me, because I would have agreed with it until the last couple of years.
I still agree life has pain, but I've learned pain does not have to become suffering. I can empathize with that feeling of 'I'm not good enough, others are so much better'...and what worked for me was finally realizing that was not just okay, it was kind of awesome, actually.
Knowing I am bad at almost everything means that there is an ever-growing number of interesting ways to learn and grow and become better, and I love doing that. Mistakes and failures aren't a bad thing, they are how we learn.
It's given me this sort of...comfortable zen, allowing me to do things without the same crippling fear of sucking or it being hard that used to hold me back. As a kid, I would try and then give up if it didn't click instantly, because so often things did and nobody taught me how to strive and fail and strive again.
Life is still full of pains and agonies, but seeing them as transient things that can and will pass - and knowing I am strong enough to go through them - is incredibly empowering. I know there are still things that would break me utterly - you know, horrific shit I hope never to endure - but I believe if I survived it, I could put myself together after, because I've already done it again and again and again, and each time I pick up the pieces of myself and re-assemble them, the me that is formed is stronger, happier, wiser than the me before.
Right now I'm searching for a way to take that and share that strength with people, because it's so empowering, but I'm still at the clumsy beginner stage where I feel like I'm flailing in the dark. I know how and why it works for me, but how do I take that flame and give it to someone else? The lack of answer is kinda infuriating.
I think you are on the right path with nursing - for me, it's the building/running conventions now. There isn't magic in the process, because as you say, I've done it and understand it - but I can be proud of that skill nonetheless, because I see how it contributes to creating a space for people like us to come together and blossom in a space they feel accepted, welcome, and safe, and that is invaluable to me.
So many people like us are caught up in the vortex of pain and trauma that life has filled them with, and it feels like so many of us fail to escape, fail to find our wings. The ones I've seen that do seem to have understood the key bit - it really is in serving and empowering and making other people happy that we find our own greatest happiness, or at least that's the truth I've found that is working for me.
Thank you for something this raw and vulnerable; it's not easy, but I mean...I have followed your stuff off and on for years, and this shows a presence of mind and self-awareness I haven't seen you express before, and I think there is something very powerful in that.
Thanks for writing this, and I hope you do more pieces in this vein.
Oh, just pointing out something or a mini-clarification. Dukkha could be more accurately translated as "Life contains suffering" rather than "Life is suffering", Dukkha is a word used to describe an uncentered or poor hole for an axle that results in a bumpy ride (hence the wheel of dharma symbolism) and like a shitty wheel sometimes you don't notice it that much or have fun despite being jostled occasionally.