In this passage I see that I am essentially a creative person, but I’ve never been able to actualize more than a small percentage of what I was capable of. The reason is because of my mother constantly telling me “Don’t think you’re so great.” I had no idea how damaging that was, but I can see it here in my response to the little four-year-old running around, showing off her skirt. I was only able to do it at the Woman’s Way Retreat because I felt safe, and I wasn’t me, I was acting the part of a child. I also see how afraid I was of doing anything that might cause mother to “go away.” But that was how I was traumatized as a baby, mother going away and leaving me alone.<\/p>\n
From my journal for October 16, 1995<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been imagining an art project that I might work on.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019ve thought about covering the cardboard dodecahedron with collage \u2014 with a whole \u201ccarpet\u201d of cut & pasted images and bits of color.\u00a0 <\/span>I would need to reinforce the structure and I\u2019m not sure how to do that.\u00a0 <\/span>… [lots of ideas for similar projects] …\u00a0 <\/span>so that\u2019s a lot of possible cardboard-and-collage projects.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But I never did any of them.<\/p>\n
The important thing about the session with Karen is that I was forced to see the way in which I am unable to receive my accomplishments.\u00a0 <\/span>I trivialize them or go numb.\u00a0 <\/span>When Karen asked if I could celebrate what I had done in Shenandoah, I burst into tears and said \u201cNo.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>I have no sense of my contribution as being something valuable enough to celebrate.\u00a0 <\/span>…\u00a0 <\/span>Karen pointed out how I trivialized Shenandoah \u2014 well it\u2019s just a bit of community theater, not very meaningful.\u00a0 <\/span>Then I had to acknowledge that it\u2019s about a man who is anti-war because he really cares about his children, and Karen reminded me of how important community art is for the healing of the planet, for the future.\u00a0 <\/span>Karen also reminded me of the four-year-old who ran around at Woman\u2019s Way \u201cLook at my skirt!\u00a0 <\/span>Look at my skirt!\u201d and asked if I couldn\u2019t find that energy inside me.\u00a0 <\/span>But I can\u2019t, I feel like that was someone else, like she\u2019s dead.\u00a0 <\/span>Karen began to speak for her, and it made me very uncomfortable and scared.\u00a0 <\/span>I told her to stop and called her a show-off and said she was bad, but she wouldn\u2019t stop and I was desperate to shut her up and said \u201cSomething terrible will happen if you go on like that.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t have a clear catastrophic expectation, I don\u2019t hear a voice in my head, I just feel a chill, a thickening tension, a draining away of all value, inspiration, exuberant energy.\u00a0 <\/span>I think that what I\u2019m afraid of, what I in fact experienced that was so devastating, was the withdrawal of love, and that scared me so badly that I shut down anything that I thought might have caused Mother to \u201cgo away.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>And I know for sure mother wouldn\u2019t have been able to tolerate me feeling good about something creative that I\u2019d done.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This passage shows how my mother shut me down, and how I learned to shut myself down, in the fear of something horrible happening if I dared express exuberance.<\/p>\n
Woman’s Way was a week-long retreat working on psychological issues with a number of different modalities. At one point we were told to choose a partner, and then one of you would be the child and the other a mother for a time, and then you would switch roles. \u00a0As a child, I imagined I was four years old, and I put on a gold lam\u00e9 skirt that was among the many costumes available. The woman playing mother was very supportive. But now, away from that supportive atmosphere, I could only try to shut down that energy.<\/p>\n
I had an image of that exuberant four-year-old, in her gold lam\u00e9 skirt, at a vast distance from me, down at the end of a long dark tunnel, and I wonder about doing something in cardboard and collage \u2014 \u201cThe attempted murder of Tinkerbelle\u201d or something.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Needless to say I never expressed this image in art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In this passage I see that I am essentially a creative person, but I’ve never been able to actualize more than a small percentage of what I was capable of. The reason is because of my mother constantly telling me … Continue reading