women in art

Spiritual Bypassing

There was a time in my life when I dated someone, and he read something that I wrote about my life, and I had published it online. With alarm he said, “I mean, what if my MOM reads this?!?!?”

And it took me more than a decade to realize how stupid this actually is.

But it stuck with me for years.

I made excuses for years, for other people, when I wanted to be so understanding and empathetic that I’d find occasion to grace the most uninformed, uninspired, ordinary, banal, meaningless, ignorant, childish, even abusive criticism or judgment with the benefit of the doubt. And for fear of many things, I would even self-regulate my creativity. But did they deserve it? And it took me nearly two decades

To realize how stupid that is.

The House of Mystery

“They took her baby away.”

He told me “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” was about an acquaintance of Leonard Cohen’s; an early hippie who was the daughter of someone important. “And she went crazy.”

“She was from an important family, her father was a senator or something like that. I think they didn’t want her to be the daughter who had an illegitimate child. They took her baby away, and she killed herself. She was in hospitals, and she blew her brains out.”

-“That’s horrific,” I said.

“The mental hospital, that’s the ‘house of mystery’ I think.”

-“Hm. Well I think the reason it’s so relatable, is because we all have that place, inside of ourselves. A house of mystery.”

“A place that no one wants to visit?”

-“Yeah.

-But artists do. Art visits. That’s what artists are good for. That’s why people like Leonard Cohen are important. That’s why art is important.”

Everyone loves Nancy now.

Everyone cries for her. Now we understand, Nancy

And we are sorry.