So this character in the book I wrote (you can find it here) kind of really encapsulates the whole chaotic art academia aesthetic thing and so I think I shall talk about her.
Her name is Maya Hayden and she's probably agender but doesn't know it yet, and definitely has ADHD (but I didn't know it when I wrote her) and she's an artist and studying to be an architect and in the world where the book is set she has fire powers that are meant to help save the world as a fire aide, but at heart she doesn't really want to do that, you know? Save the world. She's a painter and her painting are visceral, straight from what she's feeling, like the one of the swan dancing in an oil spill in flames that she made after going with the aides to deal with an oil spill in a river but also after seeing Nick's performance of the Swan Lake ballet. How the art was her eye of the hurricane, how she hunted through garbage in dangerously smog-filled post-apocalyptic streets to make art out of.
And most people who've read the book, When the Touch-Me-Nots Open, from the time I first wrote it back in 2022 to now, relate to Nick, her co-protagonist and eventual love interest (the one exception being @wispedvellichor shout out to you relating to Maya first). But I think of all the characters in the book, I really poured myself into Maya, I gave her the mental health struggles, the depressive episode I was in while I was writing the book (you're welcome Maya), I gave her my urgent need to love and at the same time the guilt that comes with not being able to be there for the people you love.
Almost at the end of the book, even after she's made peace with most of it, she's just training to keep her powers in check rather than actively being an aide, she still doesn't believe she's an artist, yknow?
There's a scene called Open Your Eyes and Nick and her are in Florence, Italy, and she talks about how seeing all those great works of art in the museums and in the city itself, how it should inspire her but it doesn't, it just makes her doubt herself more. And she's questioning what art even is, how as a kid she used to make pretty pictures and people would call it art and now people only see the avant-garde as art, or no matter what it is someone will think your work is art and someone will be equally certain it isn't. She says, I think "People like pretty things, Nick. Pretty things aren't art." But also she finds her art grotesque and painful and still doesn't consider it art.
And I don't know, thinking about my own art and writing and sharing it, as well as my very chaotic one year at art school before I dropped out due to my illness--I'm reminded of her. And how maybe when I was writing her, I knew what I was doing, but now I don't.
