Warp & Woof

When I was a child, I wanted to be a dancer, an artist, a cartoonist, a photographer, an architect, a musician, a writer. I'm a creative person. I don't produce enough for those that judge to approve of me calling myself such, but all titles aside, creative is what I am.

However, I'm also extremely self-critical. For years, that's derailed most of my creative attempts. Part of the issue is that creative though I may be, in my own self-conception, I see myself as a copyist, not a creator in my own right. I see what others create and a part of me wants to reproduce that. A sense of discipline, of mastery of style and form, someone who can replicate perfectly someone else's dance or brushwork or words.

Perhaps in that, I strive to unmake myself and be recast in someone else's form. Perhaps I cannot view perfection and myself as occupying the same space, so I remake myself in the image of another, perfected creator, in the hopes of allowing space for perfection myself by showing self the door. I want to give up this me, this flawed me and reach for, grow into what I see in others, what I see as my own ideal. Eliminate my broken me, to replace it with my perfected me.

The problem, the self-critical crux, is that I am a terrible copyist. I have never got anything I've striven to create to look, to sound, to feel how I want it to. No matter how much I train, what I produce does not jibe with what I picture. And I lament that. For years, I've stepped away from the pen, the keyboard, the dance floor out of despondency. For long stretches I've struggled with, or been smothered by the sense that my desire for creative self-actualization is perpetually doomed to failure. There is a concept of the beauty of imperfection, called wabi-sabi. My copyist aspirations have no room for such stuff, unless I'm copying it from someone else.

So I riffle through the gardens others have planted for treasure. And if in finding and cherishing an object, a stone perhaps, I take it back to put it in my sacred pool, its appearance is distorted, it seems translocated. Water bends the light and changes the visual form of anything put inside it.

But that idea of this idealized future self blots out the self that already exists. And it's not self. It's a motley piecemeal of other people's performances. I may pretend it's self-aspiration, but I can't delude myself into thinking it's an accurate self-conceptualization, or a realistic self-actualization.

The sacred stone isn't my own. I take it from someone else's garden to put in my pool. So, why should it appear as I want it to, if what I want is for it to be as it was in someone else's yard? Over the last year, I've done a great deal to shrug off my self-criticism. But it's a hydra and self-affirming is full-time work. When I feel I've begun to make progress, I find that cyst of recrimination nested away somewhere new, using different rhetoric. I'm not down in the pit of self-hate. Not anymore, at least. But there's a long road ahead of me.

And new hurdles arise regularly. There is a wonderful dancer in town here, that I've said half-jokingly, “I want to be her when I grow up.” Not dance as well as she does. But dance exactly as she does. My dance does not look as I want it to. It's bent. My poetry is warped. My prose is distorted. My drawing is squashed—inasmuch as I want them to be like the paradigms I borrowed or stole from elsewhere.

And if they are bent, that begs a number of questions. What bends the “ideal” image into what it comes out as? What medium in this example is the water of the metaphor? Isn't it me that is the water? And not just water, but the sacred pool. So, the thing that prevents me from attaining my external ideal is my internal reality. I am that which prevents me from being other than me. The stone thrust into the water is an external thing. But I am the water. The stone may be lovely, but the lens that distorts where I want to see it and how I want it to appear—that lens is me. The distortion is the road map of the self.

Dark matter warps the paths of celestial bodies—in my own equation of orbits, I am the dark matter that pulls my ideals out of the perfect circles I envision them spinning in, into the parabolic wabi-sabi of me. Not my ideal me. My real me.

And so, it dawns on me that perhaps I am not failing at all. Perhaps the only way I yet falter is that I have not yet learned how to properly celebrate the way the field of my own gravity distorts external shapes into being an expression of what I am inside, perfected, being perfected, or otherwise. I bend that which I love. And the dent is me. Exactly as I should be.