Mixed Feelings

When I launched my website last week, it was the culmination of a long period of indecision, learning and self-doubt followed by a short flurry of action. First, the trial, then the decision to purchase, the initial “design” followed by going public.

The big-deal-ness of the launch was purely personal; the world carried on, as it should, without registering another dot com. It was the latest point in a journey that started in January 2022, not even two weeks after moving into my new place. I can’t say I was optimistic, but what optimism I had soon faded away. That was nearly 4 years, and a couple of near fatal accidents ago.

Really, I was launching myself. Not a radical departure, rather a deliberately built direction based on nurturing those things that are good for me. Learning to actually love myself, not tolerate, not live in spite, but instead to live, because. Of course, it is a journey, not a destination. I am learning how to do life all the time. In fact, it was just this last week that I learned how to frame my love of learning. Until now, I had held the somewhat traditional view that education had to have a purpose, and it had to be a means to a financially beneficial end. In this model, I am a failure. However, if I look at learning as my favourite hobby, I am a success. Learning is my thing; it’s obvious, as my hobby, I am once again free to pursue a course of study for no other reason than I will find it interesting. This is liberating, to say the least.

I have inevitably hit my head against my own disability and chronic illness as limits. However, I have also found them challenging as elements of my story. My disability, my stroke, the subsequent health challenges and my ‘tism’s are all key parts of this. How do I include them without slipping into either fishing for sympathy or becoming inspiration? How do I avoid potted histories or justifications?

Somewhere, I am aware that authenticity while writing on the internet can itself slide into performative inauthenticity by the very fact of its existence. Nothing that can have an audience isn’t, in part, performative. Aren’t we all striving for connection? I want to know I am not alone; I, too, crave an element of validation. I am a flawed human who wants to feel that other flawed humans understand, that we could be friends even.

My batteries charge in quiet solitude, or time shared with a selected person, possibly two. When I am with those who give me comfort and acceptance, I can be as loud and gregarious as any extrovert. I want to live in a world that I don’t want to make go away, knowing that I will want any world, after a while, to do exactly that; go away. In short, a very typical introvert.

And so, as I move forward, editing, coming up with ideas, learning how to take the next steps, there are the doubts, the should I do this, will I find an innovative way to fail, will my body and health betray me on the verge of a breakthrough or will a person I have trusted step in an destroy what I have built and leave me with rubble. What would that do to me, physically, let alone mentally?

Then there are the creative questions that I have about how to be in the current climate and landscape. What is the best way to connect with like-minded people, what are the best strategies and importantly, what are the strategies that I, limitations included, can do consistently. Should I even use generative AI as a creative, does it have a place filling in my skill gaps, or should I just leave the gaps and accept any failure with grace and humility? What does using the tools properly even look like?

Questions, doubts, uncertainty; these feel like the zeitgeist in which I swim. I am not immune to the chaos, the threats to social stability, to the wellbeing of creatives, to those who stand out. The lives of those who are different are in real danger, and I feel that too. What is the point of art and creativity, of poetry in a world in collapse? Perhaps, I can answer; art can document and challenge the status quo, art finds a way to provoke and somehow connect people otherwise disconnected.

So even with my doubts, fears, scepticism and frustrations, I can be part of something bigger than myself. Which, I feel, is something so very many of us crave. Until next week, keep on keeping on, it’s more important than ever,