Under Pressure

OK- it's officially 2 weeks until everything is due. Yay- the end. Bugger the work yet to do.

This year has stripped me bare. It has made me doubt the very thing I have ever really believed in in myself- my art. To learn, I have felt humiliated, stupid, scared, angry, etc. I came incredibly close to leaving before this last term. It's funny how if you're avoiding a place of work (because you are behind or don't understand what's going on), that place becomes a great, diabolical lair you would complete great missions to avoid even walking in the front door of.

The longer you leave it, the more that lair grows like a tumour.

Spiritually, being humble is a highly-praised attribute. The word, humility, may seem a meaning away from humble, but in seeing the similarities comes the lesson.

To be truly humble can mean facing humiliation- voiding the importance of what you may value in yourself- or have pride and even ego in. For eg.I have relied so much on the extent of my artistic abilities. In one way, to me, it excused so much...it has explained, to the condescendingly puzzle-eyed public, my validity. It gives my apparent madness reason and shafts me into a more recognisable category for easy reference- for it is often with great annoyance and frustration that the average flat-liner will frown as they attempt to glean logically computable information from all that I say.

It may sound like the very thing I am missing IS humility. We can not totally ignore and become unaware of our strengths and talents. That would be epecting brain damage or self-imposed ignorance. What must be done is moving out of ones safe little self-imposed throne to really be stripped bare- beyond the skin to the flesh, the veiny network, to stand in the harshest operating light, break it all down and start again.

For me, this has taken the discouragement of a teacher I really looked up to and believed in. He made me really question my whole approach in a way that few teachers really could. He inspired me and helped me begin conquer my old pefrectionistic demons- but in the end his acid stopped eating away the barnacles and it all just started eating me.

I accepted his help and, like de-fragging your computer; removing the precious identifying data enough to allow a total re-initialisation...albeit at the risk of losing all you were to begin with.

He did become my destructive negative drill-sergeant when my ex made my nights unsleepable and I was simply exhausted and broken. I still tried so hard, but nothing was ever good enough to warrant a positive comment and in the end it just felt like there was no use in trying. He left teaching and I returned, despite all self-compassion telling me that I well-deserved some recovery-time...,br.
But I did return and the end is nigh for my course. I am so glad I had the strength and humility to return. I now have the knowledge and skills, despite the memories of birth and i can actually begin to make my world mine.

Escape from Terror

I can not begin to describe what an ordeal this year has been. Once again I have fresh and profound injuries that are yet to break down from the rubied crust of recent pain...to crystallize and turn from an obscuring scab to an illuminating lens. I value my ordeal. I value the fear I feel of him and the pity I have evolved to experience.

Yes- to me he was real and terrifying and 1000 storeys tall...as attackers all seem to the individual and to no one else.

Some time has now passed and, yes, I am stronger- but the public is a barbed arena and his presence toxically fills the room. To exist within the same room is as to breathe excrement. But ultimately, I pull back the curtains on the phantasm. And to find there is no great and terrible Oz...only a failed shrunken soul hiding behind a terrifying veneer. No troops may attack the fort, but then no friends will come to feast.

I have taken my leave and in the arms of a golden-heart, I am finally warm.

In the cold, dead-skin greyness of his heavily-gargoyled fortress; he is a meagre frail old prisoner. Chains of the years have embedded within his thin, wrinkled membrane and his looking slits are milky and dull from so many years without light.

I walk now, stronger, clearer, wiser, away from the terror as I walk into the dawn's light as it falls upon the land and the deep, concrete night is at an end.