How Making Gentle Art is Maddening Me

Painting has given me more than I could have ever imagined.

A home within myself, an added career path, and an embodied sense of enchantment and presence.

It feels utterly miraculous, and in the same breath, I feel a ruthless, madness awakening within my being. Like the voice of a wild creature commanding me with requests in every waking moment.

When I read the Artist Way last year, this passage by Julia Cameron stayed with me:

“An artist must have downtime, time to do nothing. Defending our right to such time takes courage, conviction, and resiliency. Such time, space, and quiet will strike our family and friends as a withdrawal from them. It is. For an artist, withdrawal is necessary. Without it, the artist in us feels vexed, angry, out of sorts. If such deprivation continues, our artist becomes sullen, depressed, hostile. We eventually become like cornered animals, snarling at our family and friends to leave us alone and stop making unreasonable demands.”

I really, truly understand this now.

Somehow, I feel like I’ve become both a butterfly and a raw, beastly nerve.

At my easel, I fly with my paints. My soul bursts in excitement to create, and everything gentle and emotional pours out from my hand onto paper. Yet every moment after, I have noticed an uncompromising internal force command my attention.

Slowly, I’ve felt my energy deplete if I socialize to the degree I used to. I need an extraordinary amount of alone time to feel like myself again, it feels overstimulating to plan into the future, and lean into an abundance of human connection. The hardest change I’ve witnessed is seeing myself become quickly rageful, dysregulated, and depressed if I do not protect these high desires and needs, at all costs.

I now suspect that I avoided returning to art most of my life, because the demand to protect my peace to this degree would seem like pure selfishness. It feels lethal to my being to solely prioritize my needs, yet, all my work in therapy has also taught me that a highly co-dependent person would see it that way (lol).

I’ve decided it is now my responsibility to trust that this “beastly rage” is trying to communicate something loving. That this is exactly where nature wants me to be, and that my commitments and communities would adjust to that. It would save me so much energy to stop resisting the changes of my desires, and to simply respond to them. It would be freeing to trust that life isn’t about managing who I am, but about allowing all shades of myself to emerge and shape my growing evolution.

And art, although beautiful and generous, has shown me that it has the power to awaken our wildness, to an unfurling and unrecognizable magnitude.

Now I want to say to all artists, entrepreneurs, & creators that have felt this way- damn, you are so, so brave. This path I’m walking down really is miraculous and maddening. To hear myself this clearly is a privilege, and yet to be this surrendered to the unfamiliarity of who I am becoming has felt like the bravest thing I’ve been asked to do.

I’m trying to be more honest in the sharing of this journey.
So until next time…

Much love and rage,

Melinda

More of Melinda’s writings: Soft and Messy Living