Pressure

I started attending kindergarten at age four, having already learned to read and thus ready per my parents for higher education. My report cards for that year showed a fairly happy child with a streak of stubborn, occasional marks for misconduct, and a warning that perhaps I was an overly confident child.

It occurs to me over 20 years later that this last is a pretty horrendous comment to make about a four-year old kid. And I wonder if such dire warnings came to us all at a tender age, and started us down the thorny path of "never good enough." While this road less taken can produce great art, it can also produce at-times deplorable living conditions within the house that is you. Think Hoarders, blood-and-guts style. You hold on to all this useless bric-a-brac--empty cardboard boxes of numbing effects; gaudy decorations purchased in the emotional outburst of an off-season sale; candy wrappers from when life was sweet--because some day you may need it for your art.

But what if you are not using your art all the time? What if you are undergoing a lack of art imitating life, so all you are holding on to is a body of life work that is ultimately useless in its ephemerality, and ultimately destroys you as it crowds you out of house and home, cuts off access to your heating and cooling systems, rusts out the well so it's run dry? Suddenly what is eccentric, quirky, unique, awe-inspiring, is now a problem of such magnitude that you must be dug out from under the avalanche of tchotchkes you have managed to collect over your years.

They are unconscious, these early acquisitions; they show up in your head before you even begin to call yourself a collector. It begins so idly that you haven't even a notion of what use any of it will have to you now or later. Perhaps you even inherit a cache of treasures, or receive some as gifts, and so it starts with innocent insouciance. You come into the game with confidence. Someone else determines it is too much confidence. You are asked to hold back, to hide your love away, to keep secret the knowledge that you are happy to be who you are, to let your freak flag fly proud over your head. You comply, because how else will you survive in the world at large? You store up barrels of provisions to see you through the long hard winters of their discontent, and you consider yourself lucky that they cannot starve you out. You hunker down in your fortress of solitude and dream of what may come as soon as you escape the ties that bind, never imagining that the damage may have been done and that everything that comes to you in lilac time will be a pale imitation of the life you were actually born to lead.

Do you spend a lifetime charging at windmills to win back that sweet far thing, not caring what anyone thinks or says is the proper way of going on, insisting that you are winning? Or do you accept the help being offered to you today, to clean up your act and shine up the surface, because conventional wisdom promises you will be more comfortable to live in, to live with, to live on the same planet as everyone else?

Which choice lets you reclaim that free girl smile, the one you started to lose that first time someone told you to go way back and sit down?