I grab my paint brushes only to find that all the bristles are stuck together as hard as rocks because I have once again forgotten to take them out of the water jar and all the water has evaporated. This has happened more times than I can count. Since the first moment I had access to a paint brush, I have been suffering from hard bristles, dried out markers, and paint hardened in the tube because I forgot to screw the top on. All indicators of my overall struggle to maintain anything I own.
As well as being a bit careless with things I’ve also been known to be incredibly forgetful. I have forgotten meetings, appointments and that one scarf that you lent me a year ago. My earliest memory is a deep panic of forgetting my recorder at home knowing that when music class comes I will have to pick one out of the disgusting incredibly unhygienic bin of lost and forgotten recorders. This would happen more times than I could count. My earliest memory of manifestation was me losing said recorder for the millionth time. My mom had just told me about “The Secret,” overall hyped book of the early 2000s about the law of attraction. That night when my sister had fallen asleep in our shared room I lay in bed visualizing the recorder in my hand. I thought about someone handing it to me and rehearsed how I would thank them and the relief I would feel. I did this till I fell asleep. The next day I had completely forgotten my little exercise, but was shortly reminded when someone came up to me and said, “I found your recorder,” placing it in my hand. I was so shocked I said absolutely nothing. Everything that day felt utterly magic.
A few weeks ago I proclaimed after a stint of smoking weed everyday that I would be taking a break for at least a few weeks, even maybe a month! Four days later lying in my bed and unable to get up, I decided to smoke some weed to get myself moving. I proceeded to have the best day ever, completely turning the corner on my writing that just a week prior had felt like a hard wall in my mind. It was such a good day that shined so brightly that I had no capacity to even berate myself for my complete lack of self-control.
I’m saying all this not to be self-disparaging, but because I really value intimately understanding myself. These perceived and even very real short-comings have been a part of my inherent make-up since as early as I can remember. I have tried to heal it out of myself, cure myself of such dispositions only to find myself exactly where I started. This time last year, in Costa Rica, during my brief season of working at a beach-side hostel, I found A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living.
Let me set the scene…
This lazy beach town where birthday parties at the bar across the street start at five and wrap up at ten thirty is the perfect setting for flopping around. This little town here is a time warp, a map with a set of locations, a cast of animals and characters each one more lively and troubled then the next. I have grown a sort of fondness for all of them, the people much older than me that can’t seem to grow up just yet, the vices they hold close to their chest and their desires to connect, to feel important, to have a slice of the good life.
Life here is deeply sensorial, at times it’s hard to reach much further past what is happening on the surface though I have been welcoming this. It is a sweet reprieve from many winters hunkering down into my subconscious, sinking into the layers underneath the snow where things are forming but not yet ready to emerge. Here, everything is just as it is no need for it to be any deeper. Everywhere you go there is music, birds calling to each other, people stopping to chat in-between a cigarette, the low rumbling of the waves. The manager of the hostel I’m volunteering at once said that people get stuck here, and I can see why. Even just spending three weeks in this rhythmic malaise feels like a lifetime and no time at all. It is the land of the lotus eaters. There are moments when it can feel like this little world is all that exists. The past seems to slip away, occasionally dropping into conversation when alcohol is humming in peoples systems, or in intimate conversations at dusk that feel few and far between.
In the land of vices, I felt a deep and palpable relief when I read, on a hammock nonetheless, “Do not give up your vices. Make your vices work for you.”
This felt like the truth of the matter, doing your best to not make yourself wrong if you had not hurt someone or caused great upset. How long have I spent with a deep underlying feeling that there was something deeply and inexhaustibly wrong with me. More and more it has proved worthwhile to work with what I have, all of my failings and all of my vices, using them to bring me closer to a reality where I experience happiness and creative fulfillment. It is silly to remind myself that I once thought that I could only achieve my dreams with a seven step morning routine, or that if I woke up late or went on my phone the whole day was over. All throughout December “work with what is available to you,” kept repeating in my head. It all seems to be pointing to the same center. I had to be loyal to my imperfections. They wanted my unconditional love, and like a good lover I have begun to walk beside them.
I felt a great turning point that day when after my failure to abstain from weed, it finally clicked that truly the only rule for a creative life is work. I had spent the whole month of January, and the December before that, and the November before that (so on and so forth) saying that I wanted to “work more” at my creative pursuits. It was almost comical to me that it took me this long to realize that if I wanted to “work more,” well, I indeed had to work more. There was no secret mystical process that would get me there. I could not think my way around this simple truth.
More, I didn’t have to be a perfect shiny example of a virtuous person. Art, like life, didn’t care about all that. It just wanted my hands. It wanted my active participation.
The drop of point: the boundary at the limit of language. Beyond it there is the ultimate nothing, but drop in and it will give you everything.
Sending my love <3
Yours,
Thai x