My little blog.

Paper3 FinalDraft

Writing is my Art

     As I sit here trying to determine the fate of this paper, this memoir, I can’t seem to glimpse back at an exact moment of my life that actually transformed my writing. To make matters worse, it feels like nothing has happened that changed my writing life that would reflect who I am now. Either I am a very boring, unappealing person, or I’m dealing with a loss of memory. All of this thinking though, makes me actually consider the few ideas and characteristics that I had never noticed about writing before, and an event sparks from this.

     My family wasn’t your typical family, of course. Families all seem to be dysfunctional these days. I was between three brothers and if that wasn’t hell on earth, then what was? My parents had their rocky relationship and it revealed itself too many times during my life at home. I was constantly aware of the feelings of my mom towards my dad and if that didn’t scare me, then the feelings that my dad had towards my mom definitely did.

     My mom is the undead hippie. She had made her own room in the basement of the house after an argument with my dad and that’s where she spends her time, still. My mom always seemed to find the greater good in a single person, but not my dad. She hated my dad. They are complete opposites and my dad is just too depressed for her. My dad is the sensible man of the house. He use to tease and joke with my brothers and I, but that stopped when we got older. He’s suffering from being bipolar and if you haven’t lived with that, consider yourself lucky. My parents were always so narcissistic as separate people and it was hard enough to be burdened with the incredible judgment they had towards each other than to just live with them.  I didn’t want to become the only person to hear their emotions towards one another but they seemed to just come to me, freely expressing how childish each other were, how inconsiderate and selfish they were. I wanted to ignore it. I did, for most of my life.

     I planned to ignore my parents for the time at home because if I didn’t I would mentally explode in front of everyone. I was incredibly grateful for the experience of college right around the corner. My first year of college was coming at me so fast, I couldn’t wait. I would finally be out of this personal hell of an embrace. I would leave the house, leave my unsteady parents, I would leave my unbelievably depressed younger brother. He might have been the only thing that I truly missed while away at school during that time. I began to think that being in college would let me escape from those people at home, still fighting until they got their own ways. I was wrong. I would get phone calls from my mom, mainly explaining the terrible things my dad had done earlier that day. I let her talk. I didn’t stop her. She didn’t care, I never seemed to notice or realize that about her. No one in my life had ever seen the enormous emotional build up that I had within, and I was really good at hiding my true feelings. I hated the fact that someone out there could possibly wait on me as I just spilled my heart out. That thought made me sick to my stomach. No one in their right mind should waste their time on my thoughts. That’s probably why I had become such a reliable source for my parents when I lived at home with them. I wouldn’t talk about anything.

     On breaks I would spend time at home, but that meant trying to find more creative excuses to use to visit with friends in town. The tension throughout the house had become threatening to me near the end of the last semester. We were sitting at dinner and the atmosphere of sheer terror and anger was so thick I could have used my butter knife to slice it in half. Before I had come home several events must have happened that my mom hadn’t shared with me yet, so I figured it would have to come out eventually. Later that night, it did. My younger brother and I were the only two siblings in the house now. My mom had pulled us aside upstairs in the dining room and finally exposed what she had been building up until now. She had asked for a divorce, and it came at me full force.

     Reading this you would think that I would have been perfectly okay with a divorce between two people who absolutely hated each other and had purposely hurt each other for the gain of themselves. I wish I could say the least. I cried, when the words spilled from her mouth. An automatic hatred for her washed over me and I couldn’t look at her. The state that my family was in was not a very good one during this time. They could barely bring money to the table for food and my younger brother was suffering from a manic depression, and he happened to be getting the worst of my parent’s childish behavior while I had been away. She made me sick, because once again she would be getting her way. She repeated so many times how she would make it work but…it wouldn’t work. My parents wouldn’t be able to sell the house and get a good deal because of the state of the economy. I knew that, my little brother knew that. I remember gripping at the couch in the front room, my teeth were clenched so hard I could hear a buzzing in my head and my mom was trying to grab my fingers away, to tell me that it would work out, with my support of her decision.

     Throughout my life I was constantly aware of my ability to pick up a pencil and just draw. Either it was the constant support of my mom, or the encouragement of teachers or even myself, I could always rely on my creative abilities through the arts to carry me farther. What I mean by this is that art was like a way out for me. I could escape to a different world, draw illusions for my head to trace back to. It was an escape from reality, more or less; it was my way out of the real world. Whenever I got into a difficult conflict that I had to face, I could draw out my emotional status at that point. My artwork reflects everything that has made me, me.

     I stared at my mom like she was absolutely insane. I wasn’t going to support her. I wasn’t going to support her, or my dad. They had both put me through this emotional turmoil ever since I was little! Why would I be okay with this? Why would this be a great idea after the conflicts my family had gone through countless times just to live? I remember storming down the stairs to my bedroom and the first thing I noticed was the one thing that had helped me express myself countless times before. My sketchpad and sharpened down pencil. I picked them up and before even deciding what to do with the blank piece of paper now in front of me, I began to scribble. Nothing was coming out of this. My emotions and my upset stomach wasn’t spewing onto the page like they had done before with other stupid things in the past that had affected me. I just started to scribble and make a large dark, almost black circle with my pencil. It angered me that I wasn’t getting the satisfying end of this emotional haze and I flipped the page over. A new, fresh, blank page.

     Then I began to write. I wrote down everything that I was feeling. I wrote down colors, feelings, tastes, anything that was coming to my mind. It became more of a jumbled scrap paper full of word vomit that didn’t make any sense what so ever. It was my mind on paper. I was hoping for a relief of emotion and it slowly came to me as I scribbled a few more words down. Sentences that I had been screaming through my head. I ranted about how my mom was a lunatic, crazy and egotistic. My dad was a stranger to me, a hidden identity that sat next to me at the dinner table.

Artificial, unreliable, self-absorbed, disgusting, pigs.

Help Me. Breathe.

     I have done my fair share of writing throughout my life. It was usually for the purpose of school work, or just plain creative writing pieces.  Something occurred to me just then, a closure swept over me and I had become infatuated with that piece of sketch paper. It was covered, smudged with writing of all different sorts and styles.

     I had never before seen writing as an escape route. I had always gone to my sketch pad, my artwork to advance my feelings and bottled up emotions onto a slice of paper. The one time I needed my artwork most, it didn’t help me. It complicated things; it made me frustrated because it hadn’t helped me. By actually writing out the words that ran through my head at that exact moment my parents had made the decision of getting a divorce, my feelings came out from my fingertips. It lines the paper’s edge with words that would just kill my mom if she ever read them. The paper now sits in a box under my bed, and that’s where it will stay.

     Considering it now, the event that had affected me the most within my life was the one thing that had triggered my greatest realization of how writing can overcome my artwork in quite a few ways. I’m a sophomore now in college and I declared as an English major upon my return to school. Not because I think it’s an easy way out, or because I didn’t have anything else to do. For English, I left my artwork behind me. My parents were shocked to find out what I had declared. Of course they have no idea what writing has done for me. I want to explore writing more now than ever.

     For now I have realized a true purpose for writing. A convincing generalization of low budget therapy. Writing has helped me grow; it has helped me emotionally connect with myself and others around me. Writing considered all of the deep and delicate flaws I had that had clogged itself in my mind, and turned them into strange yet beautiful pieces of words that illustrate the one and only me. Art could never compare to what writing has shown me, within the simplest of ways. I could always pick up my pencil and draw, but I can’t always relay the thoughts that emotionally stab me every day in that form.  In some ways, writing has become my art. It has become my artwork.