Artist

I see now in artists something not visible to me before.

I see a turning inward, away from what others think or expect. A lack of concern about misunderstanding or judgement. To be an artist, to have personal integrity in the face of artistic commercialization, means listening only to self. Finding what is illuminated by one's singular experience of "reality," and offering that as art. The power of inner place is to create something, as well as how that something is viewed and experienced by the creator.

Those who collaborate somehow meet in this place (e.g. musicians, composers, actors, directors, playwrights, fashion designers etc.). 

One cannot argue with someone's experience. It has its own reality and logic. It is a magical offering of self. It becomes a child with its own life. To create Lestat is to be with him, and find out who he is and what he does. A relationship is born and fostered. The child has a life of its own.

I see now that to be an artist is to live and be fed from a very powerful place. A room of one's own. My time writing after Bill went to sleep, when all was quiet, no interruptions. A container and openness (no fear) in which the characters, places and words can bubble up from the creative force, which is God.

Writers aren't people exactly. 

...They're a whole lot of people 

trying so hard to be one person. 

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

For the first time in my life, I have let go of the child's consuming terror of always being alone, and have abandoned a life spent mimicking others so as to try to be "a part of."

I am a superb mimic, a cartoon of myself. It is an illusion that I will ever share my life with others. I can visit theirs, but I don't get to stay. And they never visit mine. I am still baffled by this. I now think this is one of the main symptoms of my high-functioning autism. Perhaps, as I have wondered, this is something I chose so I would not have a life like others. All of consciousness is my life. I haven't met anyone who can meet me here, or even visit. Perhaps I will, once I claim it wholeheartedly as my universe. This is my work, emotional and artistic. 

It has taken embracing being alone to have a chance to move on, to do anything at all.

I did the work, arrived at this place, where I embrace being alone. Where I can undo a life of emptiness, struggle and waiting. Always waiting for my life to begin.

My life felt broken. It was so broken I had to have a universal strategy for fixing it, and a way not to wander off and forget about this. I was unwilling to do anything else until I solved this horrible feeling of being broken and lost. 

My grand strategy: hold onto the endless FEAR, to remember my strategy. Hold onto the sustaining HOPE, to remember my overriding goal (the obsession that I would prevail and join with others). And never move on, never give up the WAIT to see what I could make of these two powerful forces. I gave up most to try to save the essential. In a way, I bargained my universe for a patch of land... which turned out to be nothing but illusion.

Now I see that all this strategy has left me with is waiting, obsession and fear. A lot of fear.

How liberating to let that all go! And not just in my mind, but with my heart and whole being, my soul. The mind follows. The dog wags the tail. I notice right away when the fear rises up, promising insight. I reject it immediately as delusion.




I embrace being alone. There is only one. I am not lonely, for I have the ultimate companion in my heart, and of which i am made: God, my beloved.

There is no one I would rather be with each moment than God. All else is just a flickering sparkle reflecting the tiniest bit of God's light. To reach for these is an illusion. I cannot grasp or join with an illusion. I can dance with it. But to watch myself dance would be to see myself dancing alone.