Back to connection
first images are collected vintage lace doilies I’ve been collecting and hand dying/painting, then oil pastel drawing on dyed paper towel, the last three are experimental photos combining the work with my environments.
I’ve been reading Old Mistresses; Women, Art and Ideology by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock since November and I finished it while on my trip to Massachusetts this past week. This is the first book I have completed in years I think. Reading became very difficult for me after having my daughter because I had reached a sort of saturation point where any further input at all felt like it could cause the whole house to fall down. I’ve always been a reader, and I’ve always struggled to finish books, which I now understand is par for the course for many ADHD brains. What happened over the last few years felt different. Like I was actually not capable of meeting the demands of receiving other peoples words. When I moved in with my husband, the same thing happened to music for me. He is a very constant vocal stimmer and always plays music so I found myself less able to listen because he was overwhelming me. For years, I stopped listening when alone. But slowly as I’ve unmasked, I’ve been able to take in more input because I’m no longer doing so much work to fake it all the time.
My brain now feels so full of responses to this text that I am having trouble just ordering my day. While reading, I had to have a pen in hand and the margins are full of notes. I had folded down so many corners I had to start folding down bottom ones as well to indicate pages where the ideas in the text and my notes felt very significant. This intellectual stimulation is wonderful for me but it also feels…dangerous, a bit unstable. I don’t know how to quite explain where my brain has been at but it feels for some time now that it’s been expanding. The expansion has enabled me to see a wider pattern of human behavior and history through a perspective I didn’t have before. It’s almost like my ENTIRE world view has been zoomed out to form a larger view of everything. No focus on detail has been lost as it has for me in the past when these sort of zoom outs have happened. Instead it’s a large res file I can go in and out of easily. In my mind I envision this knowledge as a net covering everything and I am walking precariously along the netting, finding the connection points on a 1:1 scale, but there is also another me, zoomed out above, watching the scaled down me on the net, that has the ability to keep the entire net and my place on it in view simultaneously. The net is not just my life. It’s everyone’s at all times. It’s everything. It feels like consciousness. And yes, I understand how this all sounds.
I’ve been here before though. You have to understand, I am a person that continues to evolve in real time. My husband is really the best witness to this, and some family members, but as my willingness to share and my audience has grown, I feel others have been watching long enough to also perceive this continuous shifting. When I think hard about how I have moved amongst others in my life, I can see a clear trail of skins I have shed in my wake. These skin changes paralleled life changes and stages that often saw relationships end. I had often worried that I was incapable of maintaining long term relationships because I lacked some component of attachment. During the 10 years I participated in psychoanalysis, seeing a therapist in New York three times a week, I often pondered whether I had some sociopathic elements. Again and again I was reassured that my empathy far outweighs any lack of general attachment and I move through the world with great care towards others. So, I am not a sociopath. But, I still recognize that it has been difficult for to maintain relationships and feel connected to others, it’s always been out of sight, out of mind. I’ve been unravelling this for some time and my mirroring and masking seemed at first to be the biggest causes; what I shed was what I was copying or pretending to be. That made sense. My unwillingness to actually show myself to others meant I never felt truly seen, perpetuating my feelings of isolation. I have known about this for some time and have been counteracting it with radical vulnerability and it has helped me establish relationships tremendously.
But, there is another major aspect I’ve only just now teased apart, with the help of some thought conditioner from Old Mistresses; I am a person who has outgrown other people who could not or did not want to keep up with me. I am willing and ready to shed what does not work for me, even if there was once strong emotional attachment, even if I once built my entire identity around it, I will shed it quickly if I am made to see the flaw in the logic behind it or its actual poor fit for me. This has always been true. There are plenty of things I cannot change about myself, but they are not the things I thought. In the past, when I have gained new awareness and my perspective widened, it felt as though the shedding of the old was done in an immediate way that spurred action or stemmed from reaction. There was an impulsivity to it, a reactionary trigger mechanism, the defining of self by saying what I was not. Like I had to try everything on first myself before I knew what was right. But now, it feels like a realization that I’ve been told to wear the wrong skin my whole life, that all people have, and instead of having to shed bits over time, I can now just remove THE ENTIRETY of what isn’t working and just simply BE someone new, the authentic me, without there being a hard process. The integration of the changes feels almost instant. Like I have learned a new language and what once felt like clumsy translation is now just masterfully flowing. I don’t know how to bottle this or give it away. I don’t really want to sell it but I want to spread it.
I told my inlaws in Boston this week that it felt like I had reached an integration of self that felt significant. We spent long hours doing nothing but talking and unpacking what has been happening both for my father but also me and us as a larger family. That macro worldview of mine just continued to expand the whole week until I felt almost overwhelmed. I had brought my computer on the trip in the hopes I would write, but I think it will be hard for me to articulate everything right now. It will be slow. I feel like I see our species and what we’re doing wrong very clearly right now and I want to be able to get it into words. Bear with me. And send me your editor contacts because I feel a flood coming.
I was just thinking about an image to pair with this post and I couldn’t help but think of the Keffiyeh and the fishnet pattern. Then I realized so much of my work is dealing with a net type of structure right now and I’m starting to understand why I was drawn to these materials to begin with and why this book I’ve just finished had so much meaning. It talks about women and the needle quite a bit. Everything is connected unless you choose to try to be the one who casts and control the net, thus removing yourself from connection. We need more people on the net strengthening connections and more people who see the whole net, not more vying to control it.