what fresh hell is this...

on being happy and then sad

Hello cuties, booyas, and angels,

I’ve been really horrible at completing tasks. My solo show It Ends With Me went up at Ars Nova on May 21st and I’ve been in a real post-show slump trying to muster up any energy for other projects.

The show was part of the CAMP residency at Ars Nova. I received the offer to join this year’s cohort last October. At the time, the thought of accepting it gave me full body terror chills. For years, I’d told myself I wanted to be a writer and I became afraid that in fully committing to it, I would find out that it wasn’t actually what I wanted at all. We tell ourselves stories of who we are all the time. Sometimes it’s fiction and sometimes it’s truth and sometimes the telling of the fiction is what makes it the truth.

I think about the lies/stories/truths we tell ourselves in relation to something I’ve dubbed “the Pinocchio Paradigm.” The paradigm is as follows: say Pinocchio’s nose grows exactly one inch with every lie and his nose begins at three inches. Pinocchio could say “my nose is six inches” three times until his lie becomes the truth. It is a rare circumstance where a lie can alter reality to make itself true. But if you change the parameter such that every time Pinocchio lies, his nose grows a random, unpredictable length, the lie may never mold itself into the truth (this part of the philosophical supposition was brought to attention by conversation with someone. I regret to say I did not think of it all by myself.)

My question then became: when we tell ourselves lies about ourselves, do they become the truth in the manner of the first, predictable presumption? Or are we doomed to overshoot, undershoot, foul ball, (sports terms sports terms sports terms) until, by chance, it becomes the truth — if it ever does at all?

I am not a wooden puppet with dreams of being a real boy, but I felt the deep rift between what I was and what I wanted to be. Standing at the edge of the rift, I just hoped to God that the story I’d been whispering to myself was real.

I accepted the spot in the cohort and quit my job a few weeks later to start the program at the end of November. The first time I walked into the Ars Nova loft, where I would come to do many of the residency meetings and rehearsals, I thought about how beautiful the room was and how lucky I already felt to be there. A beautiful space would surely nurture a beautiful thing (in less whimsical moods that’s definitely not true, for example beautiful Catholic cathedrals and Catholicism as it’s existed culturally/historically).

We would meet every week. It was me, Allisha, Fernanda, Andrea, Nicole, Mahayla, and Matt (the only boy). We would all share and pitch and compliment and affirm and laugh and create. In the moments where I couldn’t discern if I was a wooden puppet or a real boy, they made me feel like a real boy :) I guess I had whispered my stories so loudly to myself they could hear them too (I was stage whispering).

I started working with my director, Preston, in March. We spent the first few weeks doing performance training and then began working with my actual material in April. It was around this point I felt certain that my story of myself had either become the truth or had always been the truth. In this assuredness, I also came upon something I wasn’t really expecting. I didn’t just feel like a writer, I was starting to feel like an artist. As it was happening, I wondered what the difference was.

Everything about writing and developing this show felt healing and fulfilling and enriching in ways I had yet to experience in my creative life. Up to this point, most of my energy had gone towards the infamous ““short-forms”” of comedy, which has often felt, to me, like fracking myself for content.

In the lyrical essay anthology Bluets, Maggie Nelson references Wittengeinsten’s work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In his lifetime of authorship, it was the only philosophical writing he ever put out.

“[It] clocks in at sixty pages, and offers a grand total of seven propositions. ‘As to the shortness of the book I am awfully sorry for it; but what can I do?’ [Wittengeinsten] writes to his translator. ‘If you were to squeeze me like a lemon you would get nothing more out of me.’” (Nelson, Bluets) (or however the f MLA citations work).

I admire this restraint. Squeeze me like a lemon and I’d offer my secrets, my desires, my blood and guts. At least for short-form content. Even though my show is personal, it really only ever shares what I’m comfortable sharing. This is the first thing I’ve ever written that really felt like my voice, like my intersection of smart and stupid, like me in entirety. To write that way, to have it received, to have meaning layered on by interpretation, to know my ideas could carry themselves in the world for at least an hour…it felt like the legitimacy I associate with artistry :)

*****returning to this Substack weeks after writing this first part^^^*****

As per my “I can’t finish any task” complaint that started this whole Substack, well, that is still true and I’m returning to this draft weeks after it’s been started and in quite a different spirit. In the recent weeks, I’ve been feeling sad. The sadness has settled into the quiet, gentle kind. The one that sits in the back of the mind and invites you to treat yourself with the tenderness we should probably always be treating ourselves with. It’s a soft invitation, though. An easy one to leave under the door. I feel saddest in the mornings, when the sleepy grog clouds are easily mistaken for other clouds, when Atlas has yet to hold up the sky again.

I’ve been waking up from dreams that feel like betrayals, my subconscious waging some kind of civil war against my scheme of affirmations and rationalizations and mantras and dogmas and whatever. I’ve often had dreams where I’ve been able to fly, but the flight is laborious, like I’m flying through ooze or goo or puss. (If you’re flying through ooze, you honestly might as well just walk or take an Uber.) During some kind of truce with my subconscious, I had my first dream of unlabored flight. I was staring out of the hatch of an airplane, wondering if I would fly if I jumped. When I jumped despite the uncertainty, I actually flew superman style, fists by my side, even faster than the plane. It was awesome : ) Waking up sad from a happy dream at least made me hopeful that the tide of my subconscious was turning.

One strange aspect to being an artist is that sometimes sadness feels like the beginning of a conversion, like it’s about to become something beautiful or meaningful. But sadness doesn’t always convert into the beautiful thing you intend it to. Sometimes sadness just relegates itself to sadness and to fail at this conversion feels like some kind of failure as an artist, like you failed to be a conduit for human experience, like you’re a 110 volt appliance in a 220 volt country. It makes the pain feel useless and, instead of getting rid of it, there’s a pull to live in the sadness a little longer, to dig the hole a little deeper in hopes that you will strike something solid, some rare earth metal that justifies all that pain.

“…he said that he wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, as if self-inflicted suffering and solitary confinement were acknowledged shortcuts to artistic legitimacy rather than signs of mental illness. Like most geniuses, he knew that the ability to transform inner turmoil into an external metaphor could make great art, the personal becoming broad and universal as it passes through the clean, refracting prism of a concept.” (Which as You Know Means Violence, Philipa Snow)

I’m doing my best to not jam my feelings into any prisms

“It often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional…[Schopenhauer] is the most direct spokesperson for this idea: ‘As a rule we find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we expected…Compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.’” (also from Nelson’s Bluets)

The tortured artist insists that pain is the only thing worth mining. In his obsession, he forgets that there is no animal eating him. He’s just in a corner gnawing on his own bones.

I don’t typically feel so inspired by pain. For myself, art is a self-soothe. For a long time, I thought I could spend months alone and isolated as long as I could read, listen to, and look at art . I felt that engaging with the creations of someone’s mind was equivalent to engaging with their mind directly. I thought writing and creating my own things felt like keeping myself company. “Art is company,” I’d say, thinking a solitary lighthouse keeper with calloused fingers from 12-hour strumming of his guitar was the most romantic picture of all. I still think that’s true, but I also think all art is self-indulgent. And if you only spend your time in self-indulgent company, you’ll get so caught up in the Great Questions about humanity and the universe you forget the Better Questions like asking your people how their day went.

My dear friend Amy recommended Pure Color by Sheila Heti. The book opens with the proposition that God is an artist who painted the world on a canvas and stepped away to see how this draft may live itself out. Some artists might see themselves as Gods by their association with creation, but if God is an artist, it’s not that artists are divine. It’s that God is rolling around in the gutter with us.

So what I mean by “being an artist” is I’m in the gutter rubbing mud on myself like it’s lotion all the while laughing laughing laughing calling myself a God…perverse…cinematic…

Anyways

i am feeling existentially ill… in a sort of new fresh hell (THAT’S THE TITLE OF THE SUBSTACK. *dicaprio meme*) where i try to understand and listen to myself but all my head is doing is static noise and musings…

Anyways

Through it all, I know I love being an artist and I love my mud and having so many of my closest people come to my show in May made me feel so very beloved. I’m doing the show again July 19th at BCC and I’d love once again for people to come :) Of course I had to follow my most vulnerable confessions with a self plug

for i am an artist