Every day, there is at least one thing that makes me cry. And that's on a good day. Sometimes it comes from nowhere and sometimes it comes from everywhere. It's a headline or a photograph or a book or a movie. I can cry out of sadness one moment and then be moved to tears over something uplifting the next.
It's not always a sobbing cry. I've gotten myself under an illusion of control. A lot of the times it's just a tear or two, the crinkling of the chin, a gulp inside that I either release or swallow.
Not that I mind a sobbing cry. It's good to cry. It feels good to release that energy, to have that ability to feel so much and to acknowledge that feeling, to study it and to free it and to watch it with your senses as it dissipates, a ghost shadow in the wind. But crying makes people uncomfortable. Because our emotions make people uncomfortable. We don't know what to do about them. We're told we shouldn't have them, that we should feel some other way than what we do. We're told they are a problem. We're told to relax, to be even keel. We're told not to worry. We're told to forget about it. We're told to be strong.
But those things are all wrong. The things we cry about are the things we should fight to remember. And we should cry. We should feel the hardness and softness around us. We should feel all the colors of the rainbow, all the music of the world. We should cry when we need to. The world would be a better place if we were all more comfortable with showing and sharing our tears, if we could understand sadness not as something to avoid but something to appreciate.
We're afraid to cry. And there are so many reasons to be afraid. What if we aren't accepted? What if we aren't understood? What if we're wrong? What if we tip the scales? What if we fall and we keep on falling? I constantly feel like I'm teetering on the edge of something, like I'm swinging high to low to high to low to high to low. What does that make me? How high can you go, how low can you go, how fast, how often, how long, before it isn't safe? Who am I if I can't be one person all the time?
Is anyone really just one person? The Optimist. Does this person actually exist? I'm optimistic from time to time but then I'm pessimistic sometimes too and I really prefer the term "realistic." The Realist. Does that person actually exist? What reality are we talking about here? For some people, there's always a simple answer and that's the answer. But I've never been that person.
It's rare when I feel understood. Sometimes I'm so conflicted about something I can't even understand myself, I can't even understand what it means to understand. Does it mean someone can imagine what it is you're thinking? Does it mean they imagine it too? Does it mean the way you put your words together makes sense in your common language, unlike this sentence? Or is understanding somehow deeper than sense? Does it make sense of the senseless? Or is it just a hope between two people? Understanding is a lot like love. It can mean so many things that it's both incredibly meaningful and meaningless all at the same time.
It breaks my heart to see pictures of toddlers being blown up by bombs in Syria, to know that they've been living with that violence for years now, that they were born into it, that they have never known another world outside of it. I feel so guilty just being here, existing in this safe place that it blows my mind that so many others, neighbors and relatives and acquaintances, would say 'I don't want them here.' My own guilt threatens to grow into a seeping frustration of self-hate for not somehow doing more, but then I read in the media that nearly half of us want to build even more wall, add in even tighter immigration restrictions, and I wonder: how is that possible?
Most of the time when I make art, it's an escape. It's a chance to focus my mind on my hands, an opportunity to get lost in what is right in front of me, an ability to forget about the world around me and explore my own world. I've trained myself to see the world in its best possible light, to manipulate it into what it is I wanted it to be, to imagine myself in some place that is better than reality. I do this all the time with photography. I'll see something and I'll give it an added beauty, something from within me or something from a dream, and I'll say, now how can I capture that? Imagine if. Imagine if I could just capture the sun rays pouring down over the highway after a storm, reflecting on the concrete just so. Imagine if I could turn a puddle into a lake. Imagine if. And I escape.
Art has saved my life. It's pulled me up from darkness and I've relied on it more than once as a crutch to keep me from falling into despair. But sometimes I wonder if it's dangerous to rely on a cane. What happens when you need to walk with your own two feet? My creativity does fail me from time to time — or I fail my creativity, allowing that voice that says 'you're not good enough,' or 'that's not good enough' to penetrate our friendship when I should know better by now.
I didn't mean to make this photograph yesterday. It happened by accident and by force, from starting with one thing in mind — focusing for self-portraits — and making it go somewhere, aimlessly for quite a while. Which, to be honest, is how I normally work: uninspired, without idea or vision. I just decide what I want to practice and then try to go from one idea to another, like I'm driving down the road without a destination. It works sometimes, when I'll see something beautiful or start down a rabbit hole that becomes something I'm proud of. And other times, it doesn't work at all and I get frustrated about having wasted time and I have to remind myself that the practice itself is important. But this was one of those times where the practice started going somewhere and I settled in for the trip.
I created a few self-portraits in my self-portrait focusing exercise yesterday, but this is the one I'd say is the most real, the most self. And I realize that that might be uncomfortable, because it's a sad-looking picture. It's raining and it's blue and it's gray and it's angry and I've turned away from myself. But it's also contemplative, raw, and open, which I'm proud of, because those things are who I am and who I want to be. And I am someone who sits in the rain. I'm someone who runs through the rain, too, someone who dances when it rains, who jumps in puddles after the rain, who loves the rain just as much as I love the sun. Or at least, I try to.