Should consciousness be proclaimed the penalty for living a human life, I was born a believer.
On a macro level I am not happy. Articulating such things feels like screaming into a darkness, which will reach into my open mouth and consume me. I don’t know what needs to change, where to go, nor what to do. My hopes feel like an illness to me. I need to stop being what I am not, though I know no true place in this world for one who gets up everyday to think, research, and make art.
I realize I’ve been too close with my heart. I’ve been cocooning. Funny how the oncoming Winter should be the time I awaken to this dead limb of mine, instead of noting its unresponsive weight in the high of summer. I’m not sure what to do about it. It’s not as simple as cutting.
To approach those who bring me joy is a risk. I’ve been closed off to it for a while. I’m controlling of my environment, unwilling to move past these four walls, afraid to enjoy anyone lest they come with a price tag I am too poor to pay. Understandably my world has gotten smaller.
It’s not that I haven’t reached out here and again, tried to get closer with this person or another, tried to pick up old friendships within my new parameters of distance and circumstance. I’ve been heavy-hearted more than once, scratched my head when connection hasn’t come easy or declined to spark a flame. Throughout my stab at exchange though, I’ve been keeping my room too tidy. I help others organize their complex messes and knots, teasing my fellows’ human tangles out. I’ve made myself smaller, ignored my own needing. I’m feeling less dimensional.
In some ways, this makes sense. I am not the same person I was 20, 10, even 5 years ago; I’m not considering the same equations. I’ve traveled far, and wandered through circumstances many will never quite connect with me about, nor understand. I’m getting older, and with age comes new perspective and interests. I can’t expect to bring all of my friends with me.
Even in art. For most of my career I’ve performed many varied characters consistently, gender-bending my stage time away. I burlesqued and strutted my body before the audience, allowing them to see an unashamed, glorious, rouged-and-costumed version of me. I was confident on the outside, larger than my quiet insides. I had good and many friends with whom I shared this form of play. It’s a different journey I’m on these days. I’m transitioning my actual self, which replaces the place of my characters—those spirits I spent my first 40 years slipping into and out of again. I’m grateful for the years I had, flitting in and out of the bodies I could do something with for a moment. Character work allowed me minutes of release into something unnamed in my personal within, something I didn’t know how to claim more openly. Persona.
Current changes amount to a steadying internal strength—sweet and strange in melody. The ground I stand on these days is mostly without stage lights or an audience to explain my raison d’être. I’m quietly picking my way from the glorious, stage-painted outside to a joyful inside: complex, and dark at times. I am enacting a deeper, more vulnerable, discovery. Person.
Of course the art I make has shifted. I’ve always asked my audience to interact with me, share in play, and make grand gestures toward liberation. Recently I want our connection smaller and more intimate. Audiences are often comprised of one person, and these conspirators clap more quietly in a more personal way—still onward toward liberation.
I’ve been keeping my nose too clean (in truth, a concern I’ve had my whole life). I’m worried I don’t know how to make a proper mess any longer, to find the things that are bigger than my body and throw them about the room effectively. Can anyone see the subtle medium I am exploring? As I open up and agitate within the personal arena responsibly, how do I package this artistic state?
Perhaps I fear true intimacy. I thrive in deep moments with individuals (I suspect many of you know this). However, intimacy which extends beyond a minute, an hour, a scattering of days, I do not know what that creature might be. Do I want it?
In my youth I loved love, and the fairy tale of eternal relationships were unquestioned as my heart embraced this lover and the next, in full belief of forever. Years passed, and older, I started pulling away from the stories. I better understood others’ struggle with connectivity. I learned the people I loved were not always just like me, and gained a better feel for compatibility. I stood up for myself when the going was rough, and became a better (maybe just differently coping) version of myself. My heart still held on, but with boundaries and edges that had not been as cutting before. Love had a distance.
Lately my heart enjoys strings unattached—I might say I emphatically cut strings which try to tie me down (with very few exceptions). I do not want a fairy tale. I do not want a negotiated push and pull, bringing forth the inevitable self-repression I excel at, nor to do work when I don’t feel my companion busying themselves equally in the endeavor with me.
Clients are wonderful, yet I don’t only want clients. This form of relationship has taught me how beautiful mutual respect, observed boundaries, and actual value in exchange for my time and attention can be, and I’m grateful. I thank my subs and cohorts for being good people with priorities and privileges who effort to appreciate and feed my loving. It’s been defining, healing, and I’ve learned many, many things.
My Primary has always been my creative mind; I don’t know that this will ever change. I want to love people and be loved. I don’t want to be coerced, or for expectation to creep up the sides of my body and crowd my space. While I welcome critique, I won’t tolerate challenge to my being. I desire appreciation for the things I am, and think my love, my support, my heart, my mind, and my body are worth this.
I want to move forward fearlessly and without the mask of my characters emboldening me. I want to re-find my path in the great experiment called life, on terms which are mine. I desperately wish to survive this life gracefully, gaining wealth from my efforts (with additional to share). I want to coexist, teach, love, and learn from the place where I stand—to bloom—and I want (with less struggle of conscience) to lovingly, and loved, be.
Play On My Friends,
~ Creature
This writing takes time, research, and consideration. It is my art.
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