conversations with a friend: on rage & being free (pt. 1)
Sometimes I feel hot, white anger erupting below my ribs, tearing through me in flashes. Sometimes it settles for longer than I want, and it blinds me. In those stretches, I want to take everything I have ever known, everything I'm expected to be, and grind it to dust.
Why should I accept unfairness and the helplessness that comes with it? Why should I accept being told that this is simply how the world works? Why should I comply when someone tries to control me, to live their way, to take away my freedom?
Last night, I met a friend, a local artist, for a sketch session. I'm quiet by nature, but I talk most when I'm drawing. (My art has reached a strange in-between. I sway between details and abstraction, and I'm trying to build something cohesive out of the two). At some point, I confess: Sometimes I feel this hot, white anger in bursts. All he says is, I know. I always sensed it through your art.
Last year, another artist I admired gave me an assignment: Choose a word you keep coming back to, and let it expand through your art.
It took me a year and a half to find that word. Initially, I didn't want to be limited to a word. I wanted to be everything. It took me that long to understand why. I wanted to be everything because I wanted to be as free as a person can be. Freedom is the word I've loved for as long as I've been alive.1 Of course I am angry.
My friend is an established artist and has been mentoring me occasionally. His method is excavation. He digs and digs and digs. He throws our trigger words and half-stories to see which ones makes me flinch and ponder. When my pencil stops moving, he says, I know you're thinking of something. When it feels like I'm dodging his questions, he presses, There is something in you that you're trying to let out through your art, that you must let out.
It was 11:30 PM. We gaze at passersby - a group of teenagers, a mother with her crying child, a man with grocery bags. We marveled at how everyone had a life of their own, a story we'll never read. I bet one of these people has something I want so badly. I say. And I know I possess things other people must want. Laughter - Isn't life so weird?
Indeed, it was, and something ached at the very core of me, something ancient, unfurling and resisting and grappling. Nobody on that street had been handed a fair share or a free life. Each of them was carrying a want, and so was I. Will one person always have to beg for the right to want, while someone else gets to control them? Why does one person’s desire to be free always meet someone else’s need to control it, and why is that called order, or tradition, or just how it is?
God, how badly I wanted to destroy outdated tradition, self-judgement, and people's expectations, the permission to exist. How badly I wanted to resist, to defy, to go against what anyone tries to limit me to. I think my anger is also my freedom, what it sounds like when it's been restrained too many times.