2/30: Art is Self-Actualization

Have you ever not recognized yourself?

I know I have.

It was 2004. I was living in Omaha, Nebraska. I was mesmerized by my own reflection. I'd look in the mirror for an hour sometimes, examining my skin, my eyes, the ridge of my upper lip.

It wasn't because I was self-obsessed. I was 25, so I was certainly prone to that, but no.

No, it was because at that time more than any other, I didn't feel like the person I saw in the mirror.

After I graduated from college, I traveled the country looking for a job. I got my butt kicked. Nobody wanted to hire me.

I had wanted to get out of Nebraska, but my mission had failed.

After two years of sitting in a gray cubicle, here I was staring at myself.

I saw someone with promise. I saw someone who had something to offer the world. I saw someone on fire to create.

But that wasn't how I felt in my body. I felt dull, empty, mechanical. Safe, but not alive.

That was when I start my blog, kadavy.net. For my first bio picture, I stared into the mirror just like I normally did, and snapped a selfie. It was the same wide-eyed, stone-faced stare I had examined dozens of times.

I know now why I didn't recognize myself. What I saw in the mirror was my true Self. The life I was living wasn't true to that Self.

When we create our art, it's an act of manifesting our true Self. The voice in your head, the impulses in your body – they're constantly in conflict with the expectations of the world around you. Is it okay to do this? Will this make someone mad? Will I just embarrass myself?

This internal chatter is so powerful, we're so well-practiced in it, that many of us don't even notice it.

But to make art, you have to listen to that chatter. Not to heed its advice, but to tell it why it's dead wrong.

If we don't negate the chatter in our brain, we'll miss our true Self talking.

It used to be, whenever I was in a quiet library, I'd have a fantasy. I'd fantasize about jumping up on a table, acting like a monkey, screaming at the top of my lungs, then running over to the bookshelves and systematically clearing all of the books off of every shelf onto the floor. There'd just be a mountain of books by the time I was done.

Now I know, that was my Self talking.

I'm reminded of a story of a young Helen Keller. Blind, deaf, and mute from a childhood illness, Helen started acting out. First, she locked her mother in the pantry. Then, she locked her teacher in an upstairs room, and hid the key. Her father had to help her teacher down from a window.

In her book, The Story of My Life, Helen reflected on this as the time when her parents made sure to get her educated. She didn't have the tools to communicate her feelings, and she didn't even have words for much of the world around her.

All of that changed when her teacher, Anne Sullivan, was walking Helen down a path, where there was a spout of running water. Miss Sullivan placed one of Helen's hands under the water, and signed "w-a-t-e-r" into the other hand.

This was the first moment that Helen understood that objects in the world had names. She recalled, "everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me."

When our true Self doesn't get a chance to follow its desires – when it doesn't get the creative exercise necessary to arm it with a vocabulary in which to express itself – it acts out in strange ways.

My blog became a playground where I could exercise the desires of my true Self. Without me being consciously aware of why, I would work on it in spurts. I eventually learned that it correlated with how well I was getting to exercise my artistic desires in my day job. If I was working on a fulfilling creative project at work, I would neglect my blog for months. If I suddenly had to start dealing with a difficult coworker or domineering boss, sure enough, I'd start burning my evenings and weekends working on my blog.

Now that I've built a life and career in which I get to make my art, I no longer fantasize about dismantling libraries.
This brings us to Law #2 of art. Art is Self-actualization. You can either pursue your art, or your Self will revolt on you.

Except there is another force in constant conflict with the Self. It's the piece of you that naysays the Self. I'll tell you more about it in the next chapter.