we are in hell these past few weeks. this looks, i know, like I am about to drift into the usual “my lief sux” emo rant one often finds in blogs, but that’s not where this is at.
But we have found a turning point, a place where we are again challenged to deviate from the norm. i have spent much of this morning reading up on the psychology of the gifted adult, because this is something that is absolutely relevant to me–seeing as i am, in fact, a gifted adult. one of the biggest favors my mother may have ever given me was the educational system arm twisting she applied to the woodridge, il school system that finally resulted in their capitulation, their breakdown, their willingness to test me just to get her off their collective backs, and lo and behold and holy fuckatoodi, they discovered that i was a gifted kid stuck in a hell of boredom and underachievement. Few women of my generation and earlier have that kind of experience to give them an absolute and irrevocable certainty of their ability and potentials, because we are from an era in which little women got married and hid in their kitchens if they were good girls and were stuck being a secretary and a spinster if they were not good enough for some man. And you can say, yes, by the time I was tested (1975) feminism was in swing and blah blah blah, but that denies the very powerful fact that in the suburbs where I lived, with the parental and other cultural influences we were exposed to, and the stultifying, conservative nature of the suburban school system, the influences that were changing society were not felt in many lives with any kind of consistency until well after the 70’s. The school system identified my brother’s LD before he was 8, and they poured tons of tax money into helping him get an education, but all i ever got was tested, patted on the head with a gee aren’t you a smart little girl, and promptly ignored for the remainder of my public education. Because I was a girl, and I was just going to get married and have kids.
Thinking about this now, I even dealt with this in college, in the late 80’s and early 90’s, when my adviser told me that I should really go to alfred adler and get a psyd rather than any of the research-based phd programs, because women always like to help people.
Well, yes, i do, but I’d rather jump rats through hoops. I like research even more. I wonder sometimes if that was the conversation that broke me there at GSU. There were several there at the end, but that was certainly one of them. And I can’t help but notice that the tides have turned in the educational system in a way that is, as usual, absolutely worse: gifted girls are still invisible, and gifted boys are labeled as ADD and thrown on meds.
And now i feel like i might be giving clues to an emo rant that is also bitter, but that isn’t the road, either. No, it’s all a set up to explain this next bit. When I’m 60, I will want to remember why i thought and did what i thought and did.
One regular dark side for gifted individuals in their adulthood is the problem of restlessness. Of feeling like there could be more, of knowing yourself able to make it more, and wondering how this can be all there is. Research into this area suggests that many gifted adults living common lives live life in survival mode. Even if you get identified as gifted and get shoved into a challenging academic climate during your first 18 years, when you leave school in the United States, for most gifted adults, there is nothing. Go to college, get a job, and wait for death. Spend most of your time hiding the true depth and breadth of your abilities, otherwise, you become a target.
So I have spent years and years not being all I can be, Army notwithstanding. Some of it is fear of failure, some of it is fear of success, some of it is being too tired by all the things in my life that have to be done for everyone but me to have time for what I actually want to do. And I have this conversation with myself regularly–just like every other gifted person leading a common life.
My 10th anniversary of blogging is coming up. While I have been home sick, I went over to the old tripod site and reread some of that. And I reread some of what is still available on other sites, those things that someone else’s hard drive failures or inability to make bank with their site or whatever, whatever reason there is for some of my old journals and websites to have disappeared for all eternity, and this theme remains constant through all those ten years. Too much of my time is spent making things I don’t want to make and doing things I DON’T WANT to do and being what I don’t want to be, so that in those moments I collect for myself, I notice how restless and unfulfilled this all leaves me.
I used to be a gifted kid stuck in a hell of boredom and underachievement. Now I’m an adult stuck in that same place. Nobody says, hey, I’ll pay your bills and you just go achieve shit.
The SCA used to fill that hole. I like my job, and if it doesn’t challenge my intellectual capacity, well, okay, this other thing did. But my interests have diverged pretty significantly from the general SCA culture, and while I still love the SCA and will still participate, there isn’t room for my interest, and so I have to find something to fill that void, or commit to a life of survivor mode in a hell of underachievement. The “what’s next” moment is absolutely here, and it may take me away from everything. It’s been on the horizon for some time, but there is no denying, as I have traversed through the travail of the past few weeks, that it’s absolutely here.
I consider myself an outsider artist. I’ve said this before. There are those who love the idea of art brut as strictly the art of the insane, but I prefer the wider definition, the art of those outside the general art establishment, the art of those without formal training, without a lot of interest in the theory and brouhaha and practices of the formal artistic establishment–art for me, not art for l’academie. It’s only a label, in truth, and labels are not terribly important if you are not playing the game. Formal training is no promise of perfect art; I sit here and type this under what my mother, the artist with formal training, considered to be her best painting. It’s a perfect product of its time, its stylization definitely speaks of the era in which it was created, and its aesthetic appeal, while certainly there, is not predicated on its picture perfect reproduction. There are a lot of professional, trained artists who can’t draw a likeness, so training can not guarantee that your work won’t or will produce something that would be considered art by the masses–the example idea being that most people would agree that a recognizable likeness presented as a general portrait is art. No matter what your path, you have to be prepared for the idea that someone is going to think your work sucks. And you have to be prepared for the idea that what is valid stylization for one era will be considered absolute utter crap by another. Timelessness can not be produced merely by training. The ability to see perspective can not be forced if the mathmatics needed to draft perspective can’t be comprehended. And the need for perspective can’t be pushed past if the viewer can’t think in terms of symbolism or can not accept changes for storytelling and/or aesthetics. Art is in many ways a contract between the creator and the viewer, and not everyone is going to sign the deal.
My academic disciple is, of course, psychology. I’ve been thinking a lot about a cross disciple conversation between art and psych and chemistry–a marriage of all the things that our culture so loves to separate. The scientist as social commentator, the artist as healer, the psychologist as mathematician. What brain chemistry comes into play during the “bliss?” What story is told about the physicist who is compelled to study as he does, who understands the aesthetics of what he sees? Other things, a million things, all wondering about the connectedness of it all. Some has been studied, some hasn’t, but what more would be studied if hard sciences were not separated from social sciences, and social sciences not separated from art?
I have a vast body of work hidden in my house–literally, and as the dream symbol for self. Most of my visible work is, of course, the scrolls I’ve done for the SCA, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. And the giftedness aspect of my nature, of who I am, tears me a thousand different ways as I look at all that raw material–it could be this, it could be that. It could tell a story about my internal motivation. It could be an aesthetic catalog of my studies. It could be a mirror that shows you what you do or do not wish to see about yourself.
In looking through all the writings of my blogging era, I happened to find one experimental piece I did that I thought long destroyed. For a time, I experimented with expressing all facets of what I was experiencing as if each facet was an individual person. It lead to some interesting insights. The hosting sight imploded years ago and I thought it long lost. But recently, in these few days, I found a file that had most of the writings archived, and I spent some time reading it. I’d forgotten how much power was in those writings. I forget how much is hidden in me.
There will be changes, things will morph and grow. I’m inclined to discuss what I have in mind but I’ve already spent nearly 1700 words writing a background that may only be comprehensible to me. But I’m done with selling myself for other people, and ultimately, if i fail, the only person going down is me. Art is Chemistry is Psychology is Astronomy is Theology. You don’t have to understand. You just have to come for the ride.