Self Mythology

I've been on a meandering, semi-persistent quest to strip away some of my more destructive self deceptions. The problem I've found is that it's tricky to identify self deceptions from self mythologies. Let me 'splain.

In my best moments, I make this intuitive distinction about my potential. You know potential, that latent talent that most of your family and friends see in you. It's a funny thing to understand in a dissembling guy like me or psychotics. Okay, that's all harsh and everything, I know. But when does potential have to be downgraded to self deception? Or a kind of mass hysteria?

The question of when to stop has been my constant companion for the past few years. Possibly, it's the wrong question but I had to start somewhere. I'd not been happy with the turns of my life and I decided to dig in best I can. The process has been remarkably linear. First, calm my mind. Second, get stronger. Three, evaluate where I stand and what I like. Four, change change change.

Going well so far. By any standard, I've got a great job after a number of necessary failures. I'm a specific kind of calm which honestly I never thought was sustainable. I have a core of folks that I'm lucky to know. All good, no doubt. This is all massive, emotional hard-to-do territory and I've hung in there. I sometimes am pleased to realize that I am doing exactly what I need to.

That's it. Need versus want. The "what I like" step is trickier than I thought. I like plenty of stuff. A friend once suggested that I have a catholic sensibility and that's not far from wrong. I know that I've been too long vaguely intrigued by what others like to do. Part of me wonders whether that voyeuristic tendency was vestigial false politeness or overcaution. When less charitable, I'd call it fear. But I'm getting off course and vague.

What I like versus what I need. I've been thinking about this for a while, mainly due to the Rolling Stones. The intersection of what I like, what I need, what I want and my self mythologies finds it's best tangle in my quest to write. I've spent a ton of time writing, thinking about writing and learning to write in my past few years. Working in these disciplines simultaneously has provided unexpected lessons and parallels. Maybe I'll write about that someday. For now, I'm trying not to pull at the tangle. Maybe the knots will relax some if I leave them be. All this activity is based on the idea that being a writer isn't a self-deception but my grandest self mythology.

I am not alone in having an artistic impulse that is a struggle. It's common but conflicts with my current direction away from what brings me pain. I find some consolation (warning: I am not comparing myself to VvG in any way) from a line in John Updike's review of Vincent Van Gogh: Painted with Words: The Letters to Emile Bernard. "Writing came easily to Van Gogh; he confided to his correspondent that he found it 'restful and diverting' after a long day of struggling with the evasive nuances of portraiture."

At a future date, I hope that my blobs of paint are restful diversions after a long day of doing my own writing struggle thing. I hope that my self mythology (okay, self deception) will be about me as a painter, not a writer. I can't say that I've adequately explained what I set out to. No matter.

Now, here's a nice picture for you to look at.