I am an Artist

I am an artist.

That statement seems like a bizarre thing for me to write. I am remembering parts of myself long hidden under fear, obligation, bills, and mountains of laundry. But the real me - my real, authentic self - is a writer, a poet, a singer and a songwriter.

This was recognised by Those Who Matter and at 3 years old I was put into piano lessons. I was encouraged to write. But the encouragement always came with conditions: I had to play classical music, and I had to write things that they liked.

I remember trying to write my first gritty drama when I was about 10 years old. It was hard work, unlike the creative writing I did at school. I sat in my parent's office in my school holidays, writing for most of the day over the school holidays. The heroine was a teenage girl called Juliette, who had a nose piercing and a boyfriend. I don't remember the plot but I remember it was winter in a city far away from where I lived. I remember the cool air and the concrete and something about a skate park, and even though I was living in the tropics when I wrote the story, thinking about it even now evokes the feeling of cold air stinging my cheeks and pulling a scarf up to my chin against the chill of the city. Something serious had happened, and there was angst between Juliette and her lover. I wasn't sure where the story was going to take me, only that I was prouder of the first chapter of that story than anything else I had ever written.

When I showed what I had written to my mother she pursed her lips and said briskly "Well, I think you should learn to spell, because that's not how you spell Juliette. And I don't think you should be writing about things you don't understand, like boyfriends. I'm not impressed, Natelle. I'm not impressed at all."

I didn't write another word of that story. And I never wrote fiction for my own enjoyment again.

The same thing happened with music. At 12, I let my mother know that I no longer wanted to play classical piano, I wanted to learn how to play with chords. Perhaps if I had been submerged in a family of musicians I would have learned how to do this on my own, but I wasn't. I was desperately missing the keys I needed to be able to accompany the songs I was composing in my head. My mother pursed her lips angrily and said in a manner I think she felt was poignant: "A winner never quits, and a quitter never wins." 

I was not allowed to leave my classical lessons. So I stopped playing. Unless I absolutely had to - like at piano lessons - I didn't play. I didn't do my theory. I didn't practice. Finally, at 16 years old, with my talent almost forgotten and my passion for piano dead in the water, my mother allowed me to stop. I have barely touched a piano since, and when my mother finally decided to get rid of my piano last year when I was 34, I was not in the least bit sad. In fact, to watch that instrument of torture be removed from my sight forever was a release. 

This is not a "blame" post. It's really not. I fully support the line in the Savage Garden song that says "I believe your parents did the best job they knew how to do." My family did what they thought was best: protected me from my own gifts. Essentially it was my choice to allow their disapproval to overwhelm me, and I want to state here and now that I take full responsibility for not being strong enough - especially in adulthood - to pursue my gifts with abandon and vigor. However, in order to move on, to start exploring my gifts NOW, I need to work through the reasons they were lost to me for so long. So, with deepest love and respect and understanding toward my family, I am trying to do this now. 

I could go on about why my gifts were lost to me: we were living in tropical North Queensland, virtually alone, with the rest of my family 3000 kilometers away in the Southern most part of the mainland. My brother was a scholar, my parents had responsible jobs and couldn't sing or play a note. I was the black sheep, even though in my extended family there is a strong artistic gene, making me far more "normal" than I realised. 

My maternal Grandmother - who I am apparently very much like - was an artist and a wordsmith, fiercely proud of the artistic gene. My Uncle has been a professional jazz musician for his entire life, and my cousin is a singer and an excellent writer. My aunt, although not blood related, is a music teacher. Had I grown up living close to these influences I think my life could have been significantly different. But I didn't. My father - a music hater and only child - saw their musical professions as an indulgent and irresponsible waste of time. "They should go and get a bloody job!" he would say. That's what they wanted for me: a university degree, and a real job. I was sent to a school with no music, art or drama program, chosen specifically for the fact that I would be unable to explore my artistic desires. Any discussion of studying music or writing when I graduated was duly crushed with ridicule, pointing out that a "Bachelor of Arts doesn't make you an artist!" Not getting a degree was absolutely not an option. And, desperate to make them proud, I tried my best to squeeze myself into the cookie cutter mold they wanted me to be, making myself utterly miserable in the process, losing all sense of self for almost 20 years. 

Now that I am crawling out of the artistic abyss I have buried myself in for so long - poking my head above the ground, squinting in the light that seems both familiar and strangely unfamiliar - I am seeing my youthful self in a totally different light. I thought of myself as void of any tangible ability in anything. I was average at best at maths and science - which were the only two subjects which mattered in my adolescent home - and I both loathed sport and lacked coordination. I was short, a little overweight and not particularly pretty. I am sensitive ("overly sensitive" is what I was told) which makes life complicated when you're also not good at anything deemed important. I was an oxygen thief, as far as I was concerned. Except that I wasn't, and I'm not. I am an artist, gifted in music and writing, sensitive because in order to excel in the arts, to be open to your creative muse, you must feel more than others feel. In order to create things that touch others, you must, yourself, be touched.

I want to qualify this post again by saying, I love my family. And I don't blame them. There are so many complicated, convoluted reasons things were the way they were and are the way they are. I accept responsibility for not doing what I needed to do to be the artist I should have been. 

I also accept responsibility for pursuing my art NOW, and for that I do not apologise. 

Her Name is Anxiety

For many years Depression was my homeboy, hanging around like a toxic friend who made my life miserable and wouldn't go away. I didn't notice his quiet accomplice - Anxiety - mooching in the background. I was on and off anti-depressants from my late teens until my late 20s, but I was 33 when I first met Anxiety on her own.

She is more subtle than Depression. Sly and passive-aggressive. Depression would whack me about the head with a baseball bat, stab my heart with knives, evoking inexplicable, palpable grief. Experiences which should have been small bumps in the road would throw me completely off course, small disappointments were magnified as enormous sadness, leaving me in the foetal position, weeping in what seemed like physical pain.

I knew Depression. As a teen, I knew how to ask for help from teachers and school counselors and Kid's Helpline. As I got older, I knew when to go to the GP or call a psychologist. But those experiences were so huge and all-encompassing that Anxiety was able to weave her black magic around my mind and my heart completely unnoticed, like smoke slowly filling a room without a fire alarm.

I didn't understand what Anxiety was or how she made me feel. I thought it was all me. I believed every lie she told me, every untruth she breathed in my ear while curling her long fingers around my heart, squeezing it, making it thump in my chest and the adrenaline course through me. She would whisper in my ear:

"Everybody hates you."
"You're such a loser."
"You have no friends."

And her favourite, used indiscriminately about anything I want to learn, or do, or try, every time I tried to better myself or step away from what might have been expected by my family:

"You can't. You're not good enough."

She kept me up at night, pacing the floors, drinking tea and crying. She was there the day I withdrew from University six weeks before finishing my Undergraduate teaching degree, too terrified to teach for my six week final placement. "If you can't do it for six weeks," she sneered, "What makes you think you can do it for the rest of your life?" She was there when I was offered a promotion at work to the Leadership Pool. "Everyone already hates you," she whispered. "This will only make it worse. Don't make your life harder than it already is."

She was there when I traveled to Europe, convincing me to hole myself up in hotels and lounge rooms of my extended family, too frightened to step out the door and experience the countries I had journeyed so far to see. She has been there every time my husband and I have decided to leave our home town for a more enriching life in the South-East corner of our state - where we have wanted to live for 13 years - causing me to panic so badly that he gives in to appease my panic. "Better the devil you know than the one that you don't," she tells me. "You'd never be able to drive there, you couldn't handle the traffic."

She's there every time I decide to quit my horrible job. She reminds me how lucky a loser like me is to have a job like mine. "You're nothing. You're lucky you've even got this job - after ten years you're still not good at it. Everyone knows more than you. You're so stupid. Someone will find you out if you leave. It doesn't matter that it's soul destroying - that's penance for being such an imbecile."

I recognize her now. I recognize the rising panic in my chest, the adrenal response for no real reason. I recognize her lies but I've been listening so long that I don't know how to believe otherwise. But I'm learning. I have to. Because I see her somewhere else now, somewhere that is terrifying but that also steels me with new resolve to beat her:

I see her in my son.