Over the course of the past year realisations of life-altering proportions have shifted my self-perception and behaviour alike. Whether as a result of being blind to the painfully evident or deluded about the purpose I find, simple adjustments to my own definition of who I dare to be have unleashed torrents of release and the strength that stems therefrom. I have finally come to accept the artist within me and to award actionable agency to the poetry and prose I never took seriously enough. The conclusions that drove this shift in personal identification dawned on me through multiple dimensions, which I would like to share with you today.
The first conduit for such enthralling reflection lies in my current abode. In the base of the artists I am not only surrounded by opportunities to internalise varied forms of self-expression, but also find myself in the presence of individuals who have naturally adopted their creative personna as their main me. They do not, like myself, split their world between what must be done and what their internal fluctuation produces; they are and dare to be that which the rest may forsake for the vague fear of being labeled as having their heads in the clouds.
I suppose it is the variety of activities my roomies engage in that emboldened me to summon the courage I need. From Toms’ sax through Rebeka and Christian’s paintings to Charly’s audio / visual endeavors, what’s missing in this idyllic picture is a writer. But I digress – what I intended to share is that this range of creative bustle inspired me to look beyond the unimpactful formalism of academia and accept the affect of art. It drove me to perceive how the poet within me thrives in hyperbole, linguistic exaggeration and potent imagery. It lead me to understand that the output that flows most readily from me shall not be destined as a cash cow, but rather as expression through the medium of writing free in its purpose of merely existing. I now dare to liberate my creative process from the shackles of a daily occupation and render it unambiguously committed to artistic output. ‘Tis to live a cliché – I stayed in Berlin, ran away to live with the artists and in the process discovered the creative self. Perhaps the angst of the last 15 years and that unmistakable internal pressure which finds no valve can finally spill into this realisation, filling it with truth and prowess by sheer magnitude and force.
The second conduit relevant to this exploration is the space I have discovered in my solitude. I have read and read and read and have at last conceived that before one can dare to call themselves a writer, they must be a reader first and foremost. Through my literary explorations I was guided to develop the habit of journal keeping (thank you, Georgi Gospodinov) and of pragmatically ingesting formats that I may one day dream to call my own. All of this is exciting to a point of motivation far greater than the one encountered in a lacklustre attempt to make my master thesis publishable. More importantly, my newly-found habituality may represent a dim signal for the validity of my tweaked self-perception.
As a final observation I will briefly address Virginia Woolf’s conceptualisation of the artist that one encounters in a A Room of One’s Own. In her work, Woolf raises the hypothetical scenario of the existence of Shakespeare’s equally gifted sister who, like him, is drawn to theatre by her immeasurable talent. The outright mockery she encounters as a woman attempting to enter the art drives her to suicide as the unexpressed internal turmoil slowly pushes genius to insanity. Woolf appears to implicitly equate the artist to a human of grand emotional capacity which, if left inarticulate, engulfs the mind in a suffering that degenerates into surrender or abandon. In the early days of emotional exploration, I often permitted the tides of sorrow and confusion associated with my father’s passing to spill into my earliest poetry, a gate that sealed shut as teenagehood taught me the concepts of shame and capitalistic ambition. Now, over a decade down the line, I stand where I did so many years ago, observing how a room of my own and the small desk and solitude that go along with it have returned me to that same expression that not only keeps me sane, but also heals practices that bring nothing but ruin.
I must thank you, Charly, Rebeka, Christian and Toms (and might I mention Rory and Kate here, too), for illuminating the seriousness of art at its core, and for being stronger in your conviction than I ever dared to be. I continue grow as the artist within me is finally free to write what the mind chooses to write.
Yours,
Sia
