ART/LIFE
I didn’t necessarily know what I was doing when I became an artist, but I do remember saying to my ex-boyfriend that my deepest fear was living a normal life.
(I was probably 19 or 20 when I said this and maybe a bit dramatic, but I find it honest all these years later.)
The artist’s life is a contract with mystery. I didn’t know that when I decided to move to new york city and become a recording artist, but I did know that what I was doing wasn’t considered normal.
This choice wasn’t a big deal to me then. I just knew that everything would work out and I had the utmost confidence in myself and by ability to “make it” that I never questioned my “normalcy” rejection.
I went all in.
Then there were points over my past near-decade in NYC where I’ve gotten scared. I started wrestling with concepts of normalcy in my own mind. Maybe it is worth something. All of a sudden those people from high school on Facebook who were buying houses 15 minutes from their mom’s house and having their second kid looked like geniuses who had their lives figured out, and I felt behind. “Normalcy” became a way I started to torture myself. Questioning crept in more each year. Luckily, so did my spiritual resolve. My relationship with myself deepened. I started digging for the treasure of my own decisiveness deeper inside of myself. I followed the path that kept revealing itself one brick at a time, and dealing with my doubt with more and more self-compassion.
And now I’m free.
Just kidding. I’m still working. I will probably be working on my relationship to normalcy for a long time.
But I’ve come far through crying and singing and dancing myself out of the bonds of normalcy buried deep in my socialized self, so that I can truly offer what my Soul calls for.
…which takes time.
…which takes patience.
And it isn’t easy.
I conclude now that in reality, normalcy is elastic.
We are all better of challenging our minds to encompass ever-expanding ideas of what is “normal” in life.
We are better of identifying our own invisible standards and questioning where they come from.
We are better of as who we are truly meant to be.