When I was a child, I wanted to be an artist when I grew up.
Specifically, I wanted to have an impressive handlebar moustache, call myself Pierre, and sell paintings off the back of a lorry. Admittedly I was much more interested in appearing to be an artist than actually being one - I posed for pictures in front of my easel, wearing a beret, but after painting a half-hearted yellow triangle I quickly grew bored and went outside to play in the mud instead.
In case it’s not immediately obvious, I was also very confident and very melodramatic. I shifted my ambitions towards becoming an actress, and at the age of 9 would regularly perform my own interpretive dance inspired by The Shangri-La’s ‘Leader of the Pack’, in which I would cry loudly and smack my head against the floor during the verse about the motorbike crashing.
Then I got older and attempting to be anything other than nonchalant around other people seemed to be extremely embarrassing and absolutely not worth the inevitable self-flagellation that came later.
But therein lies the rub;
When I look at other people I know displaying their personal creativity publicly, singing songs or sewing clothes or writing newsletters or producing videos or photographing strangers, I think they are brave and clever and interesting, and perhaps even powerful, for overcoming the fear that other people might think they are boring or arrogant or stupid or talentless. Maybe some people do think that. Maybe it doesn’t actually matter if everyone in the world thinks you’re a total idiot.
My personal photographs are empty and pointless and second-rate copies of better photographs made by other, much more innately talented people. I still don’t know how my camera - or any of my cameras - really work. My personal writing is melancholic and self-pitying, and when it tries to be anything else (intellectual, funny), it’s really just a facsimile or a poorly-constructed collage of ideas borrowed from genuinely intellectual or funny people. I’m consumed by envy and have no original thoughts.
If I tell you these things, you cannot use them against me. Even thinking that you might use them against me is evidence of my own grandiose narcissism, convinced that everyone is watching me, waiting to judge. Why would you even bother? I’m the protagonist here but that doesn’t mean I’m not an inconsequential background extra for everyone else.
Being inside my head is exhausting. I wake up every morning wondering if I’ve somehow done something embarrassing in my sleep, or worse, if the relaxed, introspective mood I find myself in after midnight every night has led to some intolerable, humiliating public revelation. Was it always like this? Surely not. I’d never have tried to achieve anything if it was, or even bothered leaving the house.
Imagine! Calling yourself an artist without doing a full-body cringe inside at how false and pretentious it sounds. Art is for other people, not those who got kicked off a Textiles GCSE course a month before the exam.
But perhaps - a very small, tiny, almost invisible to the naked eye perhaps - I can make personal things and show them to people, and the whole world won’t respond with a collective ‘yikes’. I won’t be publicly shunned, or have rocks thrown at me. What if instead, someone were to read something or see something or hear something I made and think ‘same’, or ‘that’s lovely’, or ‘I feel less alone’, or, best of all:
‘What if I did that too?’