= Loneliness in (my) Childhood =
A rant, of sorts, but also a connector to a subject I’m looking to develop further.
Being an only child and having my parents getting a divorce when I was four years old sure had a tough impact on the child I once was, the teenager of yesterday, and the adult of today. The lacking of a father figure to accompany me throughout my physical and intellectual development forced me to grow up too fast, or at least feel like I had, comparing to the other children in school.
My mom was crying at home, my dad was doing god knows what, my grandparents angry with the whole situation and using me as a mean to hurt my father, but to no avail, since the man simply did not care.
I was jealous, most of all. Selfish, yes, but to hear other kids talking about how happy they were for having their daddies keeping their promises of picking them up early for ice cream deeply triggered me, honestly; why couldn’t my own daddy keep his promises? Something as simple as a “forever”, as he had so often told me, “I’ll be here for you, forever.”
Maybe I clung to that fraudulent “forever” a bit too much. Maybe I believed in it so much it became everything I lived for. Why did I need anything or anyone else, if daddy promised me “forever”?
I suppose that was my first mistake.
I secluded myself in this environment of hope and fantasy, created by the mind of a lonely child, who simply hoped too much, who believed WAY too much. I drew, I played by myself, but most of all, I drew and drew and drew. I loved drawing because the paper was a promise I had the power to make happen. A way to increase my trust; if I could make promises happen, so could my daddy. Each stroke of my pencil upon the virgin, paper sheet, was the opportunity, the chance to bring my utopian forever a little bit closer.
It wasn’t a perfect world, but it would keep me safe until my hero, my father, came to pick me up and fulfill his part of the promise. Or so I thought
And then I simply began to realize that daddy would never keep his promise.
I felt dumb. Stupid. A complete, utter, fool. I actually rejected the idea that my father even existed anymore. But who was I, after all this time believing, if I no longer had that hope or that goal of “forever”? What was made of me, putting aside everything I made of myself?
A lost child, entering her tumultuous teenage years, with no certainty of the past and no sense of the future.
As confused as I was, drawing would often help me to calm down my tears. Sometimes to redraw my world, not the way I saw it but the way I wanted it to be, all bright, hopeful, and full of colors; other times, to simply make me realize how things actually were. Dark. Scary. Hurtful.
God, I hated my father. I had this unconscious belief, deep within me, that if that man were to die suddenly, I wouldn’t shed a tear.
And that hurt. Bitch, that hurt. A whole fucking lot.
So my dad had abandoned me. So my dad didn’t care.
Twelve-year-old me decided that she wouldn’t care either. She would find her own father figure along the way, or she would carry on living without one.
Who the fuck needed a nymphomaniac drunk excuse of a father anyway.
Lots of mistakes came attached to that mindset, including the rising need to find some sort of shelter and support online. I met a man, so much older than me. The outcome of that meeting is mine alone, but it became one of my greatest regrets.
I remember I drew a lot during that time. I had grown more conscious of the concept of aesthetic and anatomy, and all that stuff, but I realized the feeling I had was exactly the same as when I was a child. The colors spoke to me, I believed - they would see through my feelings and guide me to the color that would represent them best.
It’s been sixteen years since the divorce, and looking back now, I can say that I was, in fact, a lonely child.
Not by choice, though not because it was imposed on me. It was simply the way my life happened, the path I took guided by nothing but my gut.
One thing I noticed, however, is that I never stopped drawing.
= So the point of all this drama, you wonder? Guess what, sunshine ☀ =
I’ll make my polyptych based on the drawings of young children and the interpretation of their current state of mind and heart.
When children draw, they have the purest of intentions, of simply portraying an object, a person, the way they see them. The way they feel them. Depending on the color of their pencil, the order of their strokes, the position of their drawing upon the sheet of paper, there are several secrets we can unravel and thus understand the child in question so much better.
This is also a way to connect my theme, “loneliness” to art, and myself.
= ON A VERY IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE =
This is a very intimate and delicate matter to me. Yes, I’m over the divorce, I’m over the hate, I’m over the pain, but no, it’s not easy for me to discuss it. It is still a scar and it’s never fun to poke it. It’s very important to me to explore this matter, but it has been taking me quite a while to deal with it precisely because of the delicacy of this subject.
Thank you very much, bye.
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