I sat down recently to make yet another attempt at being creative and damn the Lexapro. Goddamn the Lexapro.
I even did some light research on how to navigate creativity when you're emotionally blunted on anti-depressants and the best I could come up with was doing things that are low-stakes and accepting that your creativity has shifted.
But GIRL--my creativity has LEFT THE BUILDING.
When I went through my divorce, I deeply struggled to find a medium that could encapsulate all of my feelings into a creative project. Thus, one never happened. Just little bits here and there. I thought that was situational but it turns out it's not. Maybe creativity is complex.
The other day, the best I could do was to work on an adult coloring book page. It felt trite at first but as I tried to accept the process, I realized that my creativity right now is inspired by mundane, every day, rote, routine stuff. And Lexapro has been necessary for helping with that. Pivotal even. I've needed routine to rework my life for many years now.
But things are starting to come together in my life and I have the entirety of the world to process, I always do. What am I to do with my need to creatively process when I can't freely access it when I want to? It's devastating.
But, for the sake of ensuring my anti-depressants keep me okay while the world burns right now, this is my attempt at breaking the monotony. I'm trying to feel inspired again.
The world - it is indeed on fire. I'm an existentialist; I've always known that. But the reality, the grasping at the future, the harsh truths, the singe of truth into my skin, my bone marrow, and its full revelation in my ancestral DNA as a whitey in America... it's not woe is me. It's woe is us. Always has been. This shit is ancestral. I've known that in my studies of generational trauma. But the reality, the undoing of it all... the rich islands of hell of it all... the classism of it all... the status quo of it all... the blind ignorance and willful ignorance of it all... the refusal to bear witness of it all... These are the things that keep me up at night.
And somewhere in it all, I have to hold my head up, go to work, and do it all over again. Everything feels curated; it's a great place to be for a dissociative person, the picking apart of reality on a mass scale.
The liberal in me is waning. Has been for some time. But identity politics aren't working, they're not sustainable. I want to find the shared humanity in all of us, not the identity that erases the complexity of the human.
There are times when I feel like I'm screaming into a void. OUR HUMANITY IS RIGHT HERE, LOOK NO FURTHER.
I simply don't know how to articulate something that is perhaps not meant to be articulated through the lens of Western philosophy. I cannot make an argument for an intuitive knowledge that we have with each other and with the trees and with animals and with the world. That's the humanist in me. Thwarting that process is the reason the world is topsy turvy.
Ancient wisdom doesn't need to posture. Hell, it doesn't even need words. Ritual, myth, symbol, consistency, safety, community, collective spirit, unity. I get what One Love means now. If you know, you know.
How the fuck do I explain that to another white person? Our ancestors made damn sure we don't know what One Love means. Fuck em.
When I think of myself as a multimedia artist, I think about trying to answer that question through art. That answer is the answer to damn near everything I need to know in life. It all permeates the personal, and that's white supremacy babyyyyy.
But how do I as a healer find expression for this, for my own sanity, not just the sanity of others? I don't fucking know.
All I know is that listening to music lately has been the answer somewhere in there.
