It's MY life.
I know that no one can save me from it.
no one can distract me from it.
even I know there is an end to this sitting in nothing.
not wanting to move not wanting to cook not wanting to go anywhere
not answering the phone
not to going to work
interviewing for new work
I absolutely am not looking forward to being in any new work environments
god I can't stand the thought of it.
and yet
this is what I created last year and the year before that and the year before that when I didn't take my own dreams seriously enough to see them through, waiting always waiting for something - some missing piece some missing person to come along
someone who I respected to give me permission- to say :" no, its okay- its valid to create a traveling circus -themed arts organization."
and now
its too late now. I know too much about myself to even go back there.
now I look at how I was half-assed in my career as an artist- in my pursuit of knowledge , technique or experience and now thanks to this year in Azania where i ''ve had the repeated experience of being faced with myself as I truly am: ie.. Other community member pointing out that for a self proclaimed artist I certainly wasn't making any, and certainly not sharing my "creativity" with anyone else either in their project, as they worked out what they wanted to be doing creatively.
After consistently creating situations where I wasn't being reliable - and not committing to approach my time with Captain Nemo as an adult caregiver who who was interested and impassioned enough to read a book -
one book- that was offered repeatedly by seminalson and darkdaughta as potentially grounding and helpful, darkdaughta asked if I would at least do prescheduled , time-limited art activities with CaptainNemo. I said yes, thrilled that I could now do something familiar and wouldn't have to have my" I can't be responsible enough to... (in this case) be a caregiver" script come into play.
I chose instead to once again use that forum as a place to work out my insecurities as an arts facilitator,(oh , but i've never worked with toddlers!) thus stalling and eventually blocking that extension to me all together. Extension as in "okay here is a community member whose been taking but not giving , bollocksing opportunities to engage in ways that are in keeping with what she says she wants to do- her issues are up front and centre and stalling everyone else's movement but she refuses to acknowledge that or seek counseling.... hmmm what is there left to try." kind of extending.
So i'm supposed to be an artist. i've been doodling consistently. i want to blow them up and paint them - or silkcreen them on to clothing. i sing and create full songs -beats and lyrics when i walk down the street. i have for years and it comes easily.
So,
Beyond my own good girl, soundsgood facade these are my words to myself about art; being a creative person has been an anchor to my identity for years.
maybe the key is that my mother handed me art supplies since i was a baby and sent me to art classes as a child . maybe i am not a "creative" person. i am simply someone who was in one more way told what to do.
now i know that my specialty is actually destruction of creativity and I hate art.
art is stupid. It's useless trash that doesn't help anybody, doesn't do anything. It's a waste of time. Everything about art is stupid useless garbage. Art making is for people who don't care about anything. Art is for slackers dropouts bums idiots losers people with nothing else to give. Art making is circular and self- congratulatory. Arts' value is fake. Art is garbage supported by an industry of spin doctors adding and minusing value not based on anything real or relevant. Art is not relevant. Art doesn't move shit. Art doesn't last. Art is not a real job not a real occupation. Art is not important. Making music is stupider. More indulgent wastes of potentially productive time. Music is brainwashing generations with bullshit. Its numbing hypnosis.its mass mind control.. On the creation side. Music for music's sake means I don't give a shit about living on this planet. The best thing I can think to do is hum a tune or make a beat. That's my big fucking plan. That's all I got. fuckingstupid crap waste of time.Being able to draw is a party trick that goes no where.it's a whole field based on delusion-like acting that you have talent (another piece of doodoo.) so. You can draw. Big fucking deal . So can a million gazillion other people and what's the point of comics and graphic novels what does it do. Nothing. Nothing. Trinkets . Postcards from an age. Here, a comix from 2006. Look how ironic we were then. Whatever. That's reproduced in so many other ways. At least movie making has an industry, a body of work that has clout and numbers enough to make some sort of impact. People see it long enough for it to mean something to them for a bit- a day or two or more. It does subconscious work. That's not nothing. But drawing. Who the fuck cares. TAZ. Drawing is over. Drawing is dead. Drawing in a fucking gallery. Forget it. Its over. LET IT GO. LET IT GO.I can hear Phoenix's voice here: Taz, you haven't been a working artist because you didn't want to be a working artist. That's all.oh wait there's more! there's also that i presented myself as a fellow artist to darkdaughta- someone who actually invested her art with her spirit- but me, as someone who has long been walking dead, with empy drawn figures, i found her art to be too real, her faces to be too expressive, probably disturbing to me.
yes her art made me uncomfortable because her drawn people seemed to be showing so much.
they were revealing they were clear they weren't turned in like mine, they looked like they were in the midst of doing something . oh and they were sexual beings too. not mine. mine are floating heads for the most part. lone floating heads with no colour and often no shade. ta da. welcome to my psyche.
so competiton was a very bad and ugly word to me at the time- particularily towards someone i claimed to like/love/ want to be close to. i thought it was something i could turn off and on.
but at this point i can join everyone else who has been saying for time that i am deeply competitive, that when i considered myself an artist i wouldn't share my art or add to our collective stock of art supplies. and that considering my art and darkdaugtas art to be like comparing apples and oranges doesnt mean that i didn't try to compare.
in art so in life. i valued my stylized emptyness over her texured and tangible vibrancy across the board. so here i am in my crumbling emtyness revealing itself to me for what it is.
and she, having long deciding that my destructiveness was not going to kill her, is living and mothering and gestating again.
Bonga Fish askes me from time to time what will it take for me to wake and move my life- and that the way i'm going now i'm going to wake up and find that everyone has moved and there is no one to build with.
i am choosing to get to the bottom of this depression. i am choosing it over pulling myself up and dusting myself off and saying this is what i did, now what can i do to remedy the situation. and jumping back into the things i had said i would do- even as repayment.
i had the experience of speaking to a non bio family non- Azanian last weekend. he's a 33year old dark skinned black man who reads like he's 25 or younger. he had expressed wanting to hang out after we read the NOW together some months ago. i told him my plates were full to capacity- sorry. he would pop in from time to time but other than saying he'd be in town for Christmas, never again mentioned hanging out.
He came in last weekend and i told him to hold on , my shift was almost done. for the first time i spoke about my context - in a community that exists despite me.
It's key that i haven't sent finished e-mails, or timely blogs to my woman centric community.but i spoke to this man.
The degree to which this is true is very new to me: I'm patriarchal minded and am primarily motivated my the prospect of male attention.
that sure flowed easy- but it was a long road hoed by said womancentric community members to get me to a place where i can say that.
so i look at this situation where a man is telling me that whereas he had found me "cool" and "interesting" that he was in the midst of that particular conversation finding me sexually attractive as well. so much so that then and there he offered himself to me sexually for immediate or future use in anyway i saw fit.
i was delighted. and appalled that it would complicate my life and have me have to think, to speak, to reveal.
i told him that i had wanted to live in community- that i had tried it in Montreal, amongst white activist and now here, amongst majoritarily darkerskinned peoples, and that though i had said i wanted community i had effectively destroyed it. i told him that in being in community i had seen the things i thought i was lived and modeled by others, and through much conversation and denial on my part, i could now tell him that i am repressed, conservative, sex- negative, that i'm manipulative, possesive and mongamous-minded even as i said i wanted to be polyamorous. i lie. i'm power hungry and controling. that i am intensely depressed.
i told him that i would take him up on his offer , but that there were people who had put a lot of time and effort into me - had asked me difficult questions in which i sat in near complete silence and have not given back energy-with whom i have not spoken or engaged with in months.
that i know now that i am unethical- but that i did eventually want to be an ethical person- and so i would have to practice. And so it seemed to me that i owed my community words, time, energy, before i offered energy to a man who wasn't about to ask me about what my relationship to men was.
that i had had sex with the man in this community, another gift, because i refused to be overt in my desires -then stayed shut down and proceeded to not talk about how i felt about it for hours keeping people up til all hours in the morning.
that i had presented myself as polyamorous , but would still flirt automatically even as i denied i was doing it when later confronted about my behaviour by both he and his partner.
he said "well first, what i'm offering and what you need to do in relation to your community are not dependent on each other. but it sounds like you've taken them for granted. it also sounds like you're not ready."
i told him "but i want to know why i'm not ready. why am i not ready?"
obviously he didn't know either
he asked me if i thought i deserved a chosen family like this community.because regardless of what i think, i presented myself to them . i inserted myself into this reality because it spoke to me on some level.
he added "maybe you need to experience the loss of what you say you want so much."
but i have been experiencing it. i don't talk to anyone. i see him at work and we don't say a word.
the conversation ended with me returning to where i am at presently. i need to be wholly truthful about who i am before i can say what i'm going to do. and in the meantime maybe stop expecting everyone else to wait for me to get ready.
i asked to see his place, a stone's throw from my work. he didn't want to because it was a mess. i said i wanted to kiss him and see his place. he paused. and eventually reconsidered.
i did everything that i said i would do, manipulated, powerplayed, invite him into obvious discomfort because his place was in shambles after weeks of being sick. and what's more i told him all about what i was doing. which is new.
so we kissed, i played his drum, he took a shower (having turned down my request that he should take off his clothes where i could see) and i wondered how do i incorporate that i want to destroy men into my everyday interactions with them. hi i'm attracted to you but i'm vengeful and want to torture you. i guess their boundaries would come into play- their awareness of what feel safe or healthy- my ethicalness also if i chose to cultivate it.
..and he said as much during our conversation about what i had done with Azania about putting limits on just how long giving energy without recieving any back is sustainable before saying "so long" is the only reasonable choice.
or me saying what i am doing and continue to do is unreasonable. and because its a set up to make it look like the mean dark skinned folxs gave up on poor light skinned me and i am not coming out of inertia but going further in, the ethical thing to do would be to stop. and go.
i've been asking myself what would my time in azania looked like if it had been me working with men. if it looked anything like my one on one relationships with men i would have been cockdrunk and fully sharing resources like my life depended on it.
i have been thinking about the way i operate.
stuff darkdaughta had noted to me about how it's the little things i mention that are the biggest. Because i'm indirect-um. cowardly,i start with the outside and work my way to what's central.or mention little things in passing that are threads to the larger tangled ball of issues. As i have been reading Descent to the Goddess a book by a Jungian analyst i have been identifying absolutely with the authors descriptions of daughters of the patriarchy. how i relate to men and what the costs have been to my sense of self as a woman. i think to darkdaughta asking me about my compulsory heterosexuality, that i didn't seem to be questioning too tough, and in the months that i have been incommunicado at this house i have connected with a rage towards men (and women very soon after) that was an absolute desire to destroy them. i remember some years ago , during on of my many relationships with white men who i invited into lovership/working partnerships, watching the little girl we were doing art with give him attention to the point where she had to be taken off of him by force. i of course felt that to be most unbecoming.( that's my Victorian bitch talking right there- watch for her.) and later talking about the poor girlchildren who don't have father figures in their lives it occured to me- geez i wonder if the way i relate to men is influenced by my absent father.
of course i left it at that for another several years. i left it for darkdaughta and seminalson to try to yank some thought about it out of me seeing as how my unprocessed shit was making a stink in their midst. in their relationship, in our relationships and in our community.
Turns out being unmothered, by an unmothered mother plus a idealized absent father, mythologized emotionally distant uncle and distant elderly authority figure grandfather substitute is a prime set up for constructing one's life around getting and keeping male attention and presence and approval. even to the point where it is the motivating factor in my life. it's whats kept me in my jobs, or not, its what ensures i do the basics of self care- its where the majority of my brain space goes in any environment, particularily new ones where i am either to learn something, or i'm stressed. sometime interrelated.
but that desire to be with men as it stands now is undercut by the desire to destroy them.
and that as i am reading more about it, is also an off shoot of behaving appropriately in a partiarchy. the rewards aren't enought to address the fact that it can never be home. they can never be home, and try as i might to become them through sex and association that this nothing that i'm in right now. this awful inertia is the closest i've been to being true to myself.
this is my big no. the no i said to my mother and the fucked up school i went to. the no i've said to everything. the no said to azania when i presented myself full of yes. i dont know what i am and i dont know what i will do . i am saying no to everything i've said yes to thus far. everything in my life i've lied about because it was the right things to do- that somehow saying yes would get me what i wanted - what i've been looking for.
i say no. and it's not acceptible to me even as i say it.
it's never been thats why i've lied.
its not okay to be me. its not okay this is what i have and its enough.
to say look i have this idea and its a real idea. in of itself.
so ive created situation time and again where i've endebted myself because i thought what i had was not enough- that i could not make or not make my dreams real as i saw fit. and that be enought that i sink or swim by my own choices.
i came to azania to bypass choices. i wanted to hide in a collective so i would not have to make mistakes. i hated that i was still being asked to grow myself for myself. i didn't understand. i didnt want my individuality. i didnt want responsibility for my life and for my dreams. i wanted that to be facilitated every step of the way- done for me where possible. there is nothing more terrifying that i've encountered - an idea that stopped me dead in my tracks every time . i really am at the helm of my own life. there is no one else but me who can live my life. its an awful awful awful terrifyingly large image . a vast ocean a big ship and me.
i have'nt stopped wailing for the past hours i have been writing this.
i should eat
i should go get a doctors note for my sick days away from work.
i left a message with a councellor that i'd like to speak with her.there are three more on my list.
i need to hide from Phoenix. i still am not comfortable with saying "i don't want to talk". i don't want to front like i have life energy when i don't. i don't want to pretend anymore. all i ever did was steal other peoples' anyway. it was never mine.
so i know what this not ready is. it's me coming face to face with my own goddamn truth.
i am patriarchal, monogamous, unwilling to reinquish domination via lightskinnedness, or skinniness, wanting to live alone and not open- even as it saved my goddamn life- to being challenged in full view of a community of people who are experiencing or have experienced similar challenges.
i know there's more- i know there is beyond this. i know these words are off- there is something about that las tparagraph that is sharp and cutting. so i know it's truth- as- attack.
i'm in pain, i know that.
i should eat.
i should post.
taz.
photo by njeri-damali (campbell) of 
