The Definition of an Escape

I think someone should video and/or interview me when I am painting or when I'm drawing. I sit and I listen to my own mind as everything that I've kept in suddenly pours out... Every emotion, thought and memory seems to run to my fingertips in an attempt to spill over some imaginary threshold in order to find it's way to the page acting as my canvas. This is the definition of an escape.

I have a lengthy track record of being inappropriate... and perhaps not in the way that people are usually inappropriate. My emotions never fit convention and often they're overwhelming to a burning degree of intensity - I can't help that I feel far too much. I can't help that my head and my heart are intertwined in never-ending fist fights and that they can never agree on anything. I bet the majority of people who know anything about me would be surprised at the amount of emotion and thought I actually end up suppressing. I don't even realist it until I have a quiet moment to myself because when everything is supposed to be at its most peaceful, that's when I hear the screaming at maximum volume. In the extreme silence, I am plagued by the noise that resides within me. That's why I need something to let it out without freaking everybody out with my mental insanity. That's why there is such a thing as a vice, an escape, a coping mechanism. I have many and have tried even more.

Being the psychopath that I have been labelled as, it is no surprise that I have experimented with vices that are not considered to be healthy. I tried the whole alcohol thing - it thankfully didn't work out for me... Sometimes I enjoyed the numbness but I hated the sense of not being within a solid reality... I wanted to find something that helped me within a sober reality so that I would be okay 'here', you know? I don't want to stay 'there' where alcohol can take you. I want to be conscious of my happiness and more importantly I want my happiness to come from my physical life and relationships and not from the haze used as a means to block them out. 

I tried cutting and that worked for a little while until it became an addiction and essentially more the problem than the solution. It was a means for getting attention, releasing what I thought to be unbearable pain and trying to convince myself that I deserved the punishment and self-mutilation... I hated myself - every cut was a hit, every scar was a bruise. My tears coincided with drawing blood. It felt like bleeding the little that I did was a way to let my life slowly seep from me so that it wouldn't be so harshly and heavily thrust upon me. With cutting the numbness came within sobriety so it did for me what alcohol could never do. The addiction meant that it became a tired act and its effectiveness was no longer in existence. It grew from being a vice for emotional pain to a regular occurrence on nights where I couldn't sleep or at times where I had managed to get a look at the eye-sore that was my body before I got into the shower. It was my form of self-punishment for every shred of mediocrity and futility that I felt resided within me. I wished to strip away the ugliness one scar after the other. I was so blinded by the somewhat enjoyable sting that came with my masochistic tendencies that I didn't see the horror in my best friend's eyes when he begged me to stop. I fed the fear for my life that built in the mind's of some of my friends. I couldn't remove myself from the mess long enough to see just how blood-crazy I had become. I didn't even recognize just how much it had contributed to my unhappiness instead of helping to end it. I was stuck in a vicious cycle that was characterized by hatred, suicidal thoughts, selfishness and cowardice. My addiction slowed and I entered what I view as a recovery period after I had hurt and lost too many of my friends to my insanity to remain in the cycle with comfort. I relapsed on occasion but I never re-entered the consistency of self-harm that I had experienced for so long. In fact, what has (up until this point) gotten me to stop cutting was not therapy or a positive support network... It was the callousness of someone who cared very little about me and knew me as well Thamsanqa Jantjie knows sign language (if this comparison is lost on you then just know that she had no true knowledge of me - she had an idea but knew nothing of substance). My roommate in my first year of university reacted to my cutting in a way that I had never before experienced. I was used to the reactions of my friends - the worry, the desire to get me to stop for my own sake, the care, the attention, the love. She reacted as though I was an escaped resident of a mental asylum who would, at any moment, cut myself and anybody else without warning. She made me feel like a bloodthirsty serial killer. She worried after her own safety instead of the safety the person that my cutting was most effecting - me. I was taken aback by her reaction and for a while I couldn't understand her selfishness... Until I recognized my own. I realized through that experience that I had hurt and scarred so many other people that I had not intended to. I saw the ugliness behind it and for the first time I understood it. It came to my comprehension that I couldn't be that person any more - despite the temptation of a blissfully numb experience within an all too vibrant and demanding reality, despite the relief that came with losing myself... Although I was originally hurt by the insensitivity of my old roommate, I really can't thank her enough for delivering the final blow that knocked me backed into whatever normality and sanity I could still cling to.

My realizations never took away any of the pain and it certainly did nothing to lessen the noise that crashed around in my mind like waves against a cliff face. I was just left with the dilemma of having no vice and the challenge of finding one that was not considered to be psychologically and physically unhealthy. I have always been a creative person, I have always enjoyed writing and painting and drawing. Even throughout my experimentation and addiction phases, I had my blog and I always wrote and drew. I never made an intentional effort to make use of them as vices. I was stupid in that I dreadfully underestimated the effects of creative channeling. I soon found it in everything - acting, writing, painting, drawing, singing, making videos, playing games with kids, listening to music etc. When I did the things that I had always done but while viewing them as vices or escapes, they became that. 

The noise never truly subsides but I don't view that as a negative anymore. When I use creativity as a channel for everything that is going on within my mind, I find that the fruits thereof tend to be so much more amazing. I look at my work with a greater sense of pride because it feels like something that is a physical and tangible part of me. My escape has now not only caused me to be that much happier as a person but it causes me to produce work that is so much more substantial and meaningful. I feel like I've found my purpose - to create... To create that which only emotion can render. 

That's why I feel that when I paint, draw, write, etc. someone should really be writing down the abundance of thoughts that run to escape the confines of my mind. While the vast majority of them are pretty average and run of the mill kind of thoughts... Some tend to be slightly above that line of mediocrity. Some of the things that go on in my head make me laugh, some make me cry - some make me proud and other thoughts are cause for concern. Some thoughts make me think more others make me want to close my eyes and never think ever again. Some thoughts are holy and inspired while others come from a depth of hell that I didn't even know I was in. The spectrum varies from one end to the other and back again... Nothing is normal but yet everything that I think is understandably a typically "Jillian-thought". My mind surprises and shocks me, bores me and occasionally brings me to my knees at the verge of life and death. 

As scary as it tends to be, I wouldn't trade my mind for anyone else's. I wouldn't want anyone else's peace of mind - I'm madly in love with the chaos that resides within me and the ability for creativity that it affords me. I've embraced the abnormality and insanity and I don't expect nor require the acceptance or understanding of anyone else to be able to appreciate who I am. I consider myself to be terribly lucky to be able to think in the way that I do - it enables me to be compassionate, to be obscenely and sincerely generous and to be genuinely empathetic. I am grateful for my mental hardships as well as the moments of clarity that I occasionally experience because both have shaped me... 

Both have made me who I am - blissfully, wonderfully, happily and willingly insane to a point where I have become my own escape.

--J.