Words used to come easy. But recent events really made me question how I communicate with people.
For the longest time, I believed that to increase my chances of being heard, I needed to school my discourse, make it more rational, articulate, and full of quotes by figures of authority whose opinions should be harder to dismiss than my own. Years later, I haven’t gained an ounce of legitimacy, my ability to show emotion is gone, and as a result, my despair has become even more invisible.
When this pandemic hit and life went from hard to near unbearable I thought: I’m tired of screaming into the void, and wasn’t the whole reason I enrolled at art school to see if an image-based mode of communication would yield more success? Since my initial idea for a graduation project couldn’t be done in lockdown, I whipped up this alternative and poured all my frustration, anger and pain into it. I would say, don’t judge my artistic skills by it, or my character by the tone of this paragraph, but I won’t be able to stop you anyway.
This seems to be the big lesson I have to learn: no matter how hard I struggle to change what people think of me, ultimately, I have no power over it. Therefore, might as well be myself.
So here’s to trying.
