London: day twenty-one

No pictures today, I’m afraid, and really no good stories either. I had my Shakespeare class today, worked on a homework assignment Tula and I are doing for our Thursday class (must come with questions and lead the class discussion on the book we read), and then she and I watched Sherlock. Really, that was it. I am also having a hard time thinking of something interesting to go on a tangent about in order to fill the gap…I really did not get much sleep last night, and my brain has been elsewhere for most of the day, trying to fill in the outline of a short story idea.

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I guess maybe that’s it then. Not the story, so much as creativity itself. I have noticed that my capacity for constructive creativity has almost doubled within these past few weeks. Being in a new place, especially one so close to my academics and my heart, has sparked a sort of curious energy – I want to see it all, and I don’t want to miss a thing. Even the tiniest thing. I want to sear this place into my memory in every single way that I can possibly imagine so that I don’t forget any of it, and I don’t forget how happy I’ve been here. I keep saying that “especially after this year I’ve been in great need of the break,” and I suppose there is truth in that, my parent’s divorce and the end of my relationship (which, in a way made me put my foot in my mouth about the divorce) were certainly not easy, and I won’t pretend that I’m perfectly fine after it’s all said and done. However, I have accepted the realities of my life by this time and am adjusting to the new form it has taken. But really, it is not because of either of those events why it is so significant that I am “happy” here. No, the problem that trumps all the others, is much older than anything that happened this past year, and it is within me and me alone – there is fault nowhere else. I’ve never been at peace with myself, and a cynical and jaded part of me believes I never will be. It’s been a long-running and severe problem that has become an all-out civil war constantly raging in my mind. It never stops. And it’s only gotten worse throughout the years. So really, the problem has been much older, and it is NOT that my parents got divorced or that my relationship failed, so much as it is my malfunctioning thoughts which buckle and warp when under pressure or not enough. The problem being that it is rare to find a happy medium.

So when I’ve said I needed a “break” – I don’t mean from everyone I love, specific life stresses, or my home, so much as I need the break from myself. Because back home and at UPS, I had fallen into a train of thought that had me trapped for a long time. But here, “the big distraction” has been a welcome change of context and has helped me break that vicious cycle. Rather, in this place, I find that I have a direction for my energies and there is not a moment of down time just to simmer in my thoughts. It has become crucial to spend my energy exploring, learning, discovering, and creating because I don’t know when I will get another chance. But probably even more importantly, this trip has given me a break from the norm in which I have immediately been utilizing to set up some (hopefully better) long-term habits. I have trained myself to write every day, have been working to develop better memorization techniques, have been exercising plenty by walking everywhere, am determined that I must always stay active, and have been more in tune with my creativity and inspiration than I ever have been before. And from that, I have been producing quite a significant amount already – poems, short stories, all these blog posts, art ideas, and so on. So I am happy here, and I need to keep that memory alive, because there’s a little voice in my head that fears I may expend all my energy and worries I may revert to old ways. But I am trying to be better. I want to get better. But I still can’t be rid of that creature that haunts the halls of my mind and tries to undo everything I work to create.

It may sound a little mad, especially because few will understand and I intentionally left much out. But maybe it is a little mad.

But then again, I am an artist after all.

And a poet.

And a writer.

Long story short, it kind of comes with the job description.

Practically a prerequisite…

 I almost stopped in my tracks today as I was walking back from NIDO; whilst following a similar train of thought, I glanced to the left toward a pile of recyclables. And there, in big bold letters about a foot high, on a piece of cardboard about six feet in length (probably for a refrigerator) was the word MAD. Likely, the word would have been “made” as in “made in china” or something, but the cardboard had been folded over so as just to reveal these three letters. I wondered if anyone had noticed. And I wondered if anyone had felt a similar pang of self-consciousness when confronted by the offending letters. And I smiled a little bit when the quote from Alice in Wonderland came to mind, “we’re all mad here.” In this city, amidst all these people, I do believe everyone has an element of it in them. The only question is whether or not your particular madness is deemed socially acceptable (or at least, deemed worthy of being ignored by the society). But also, whether or not you are able to use it toward a greater purpose – to turn madness into art. The artist’s redemption. So maybe creativity is no more than applied madness.