Stick Figure Sisyphus

I Am Weak But I Am Stronger Than I've Been

Stick figure Sisyphus / Behind massage parlor window glass

How long will this pain in my chest last? / How long will it last?

---

I’ve never seen my therapist take notes in our sessions before. He’s a deeply attentive man, a thoughtful listener and always capable of pulling the threads of our conversations into a picture that is the current stream of my life. Yesterday, he took a note while I was going on and on about something—running in circles, changing my mind about something while speaking on it then changing it back again–the usual. I didn’t notice him taking the note but he mentioned it as we were closing out the session, after we’d worked through some tough stuff, and called out some hard truths. “I took a note that I wanted to come back to: You’ve done a really great job of noticing your patterns and calling them out. You should be proud of that.”

My patterns!!!! Oh, my patterns, they are many and I think about them all the time unless they are scary, in which case I do not think about them at all. For better or for worse, humans are a patterned species. We thrive best when there are repetitive rhythms that we can attune our lives to. Work, scheduled meals, TV at night, sunrise, sunset, masturbate before bed, shower in the morning, let the stars define me, cry on the train, run when it rains. Our learned instincts carve themselves into our muscles over so much time and become the habit of our lives. I am a tapestry of all the things I have learned, internalized and beholden myself to and at my best they make me a kind, loving, thoughtful person, and at my worst they make me a difficult, frustrating creature who struggles to communicate even my most basic feelings.

The summer before my senior year of high school I was 16 and wildly depressed. Spending almost the whole season swaddled in the carpeted halls of my childhood home, I somehow managed to catch a very rare and debilitating disease. I noticed one morning in early August that the food I ate tasted strange—not bad, just…off. By midday I could not taste using half of my tongue, the left corner of my mouth was drooping like candle wax and I struggled to close my left eye in sync with the right. 

I’ve always watched the things that happen to me with an idle, removed curiosity, almost scientific like ah, let’s just see what happens. Little creature in a petri dish. Of course, I was mostly just paralyzed by myriad fears such as: what if I die? What if my mom finds my dead body? What if I die and I’m only 16? What if I’m a dead 16 year old who never kissed a boy? What if my body is a vengeful thing revolting against me for its mistreatment? What if divine punishment has come to swallow me? Any of the above could have been true and still I would have, and did, let the concerning thing encroach upon me. By the time my mom got home from work, my knees were swollen and so sharply aching that I couldn’t bear to stand for more than a few seconds; the entire left side of my face was yearning to slide right off my head. Of course, my mom was full to the brim with concern and asked why I hadn’t called her at work and I didn’t know how to tell her—that, right there. Your concern. I don’t want to spark it and I do not feel worthy of it.

It was Lyme disease. I hadn’t been truly outside in weeks so how had I gotten it? Mystery for the ages. But we caught it soon enough to treat me so it would not become chronically debilitating, though it took quite a while to regain control over the left half of my face. I’d been perfectly fine to let this thing move through my blood and do whatever it liked with my body but the moment I realized I might have to start my senior year with half of my face slack and paralyzed, I was on my knees pleading with some distant god to restore me. My prayers were granted, I moved on and forgot about that god almost instantly.

I’ve built up a lot of deeply negative habits in my lifetime and very few positive ones (this underestimation of my good qualities is also, you guessed it, a negative pattern.) The psychology of it is slightly beyond me and not necessarily something I’m interested in. But the nature of patterns and how they make a person is often the subject of my writing, or at least its own character working from the shadows. 

I’m interested in the origin of things. My therapist quietly hates it, the way I want to trace everything back to its roots and name moments as the spark that made me Like This. It’s not a terrible impulse but it does often distract from the work that has to be done in the present to undo bad habits and build up good ones. The catharsis of discovering something’s origin point is undeniable but it does not always offer a path forward. Not to mention my history of depression which has invariably fucked my sense of memory and the linearity of my existence. It’s very difficult for me to place the things I’ve experienced in context so chasing origins is often going to be more fruitless than euphoric.

But in my writing, I’ve found that there’s so much room for exploring. The starting point for a lot of the stories I write is most often: character x is experiencing y problem. From there, I have to unfurl why the character is experiencing this problem, why it matters to them (i.e. what place does this story have in their history) and how they are going to handle it. I’ll usually develop a character’s patterns around this focal problem in order to tell the most truthful and interesting story I can. For example, I wrote this short story a while back about a woman who is haunted by her past of shoplifting. The central problem is that she wanted some stuff that was locked up in the CVS and couldn’t find anyone to help her and was in fact scared to ask for help. I reveal that she used to steal because she was ashamed not just of being poor but also asking for help, which unfolds rather obviously in the present. The shame reaction is central to the patterns she follows. Rather than seeking help, she is prone to panic, submit her body to unnecessary stress and end up emptier than she was before, which is exactly what happens.

Because I’ve been so held down by my own patterns, I write lots of characters who are also stuck in their little loops. It resonates. And it’s a great short story format, a little snapshot of a facet of humanness that can be sort of horrifying. I like my novel writing best because I find there’s more room to expand upon the ultimate lack of longevity that negative patterns offer. Being unwilling to change is gross and boring and not at all the spice of life. In my novels, I try to offer the characters a path forward or space to change. Sometimes it does look a little Sisyphean. No one has ever said that change isn’t a boulder. But, well, you gotta do it anyway. Pull on your best boulder-pushing trousers and get that baby rolling.

In fiction, I get to choose if it works or not. Sometimes the problem is too big and the character gets nowhere and the patterns win. That’s a reality that is possible. Sometimes there is triumph and a pattern is broken and a future of better possibilities looms on the horizon. Sometimes, not that much changes. There are many worlds in every decision and as writers, we get to decide which world is the best story. It’s a cool job. In my own life, I can only choose if I want to put in the work or not–there is only one possible ending and it’s the one I get and I won’t know it until I see it. A very scary prospect. And yet we face the inevitability of our patterns every day and most days we make the choice to stay the course. Not always a bad decision, but certainly not an exciting one.

A couple weeks ago, I was riding in the car with my mom and I was talking about how I’d gone out dancing with some friends and my joints were in so much pain from the pretty minimal exertion. I laughed it off and said something like, “My knees always hurt, just walking makes me so tired sometimes. I feel like a twenty seven year old elderly man. Haha! Haha!” And my mom wondered aloud if it had something to do with getting Lyme when I was 16 and insisted that the amount of pain I experience is not normal for my age. The idea filled me with fear. It’s a real possibility—even when the initial effects of the disease are chased out of the body, Lyme can hang around inactive in the blood for really as long as it wants to. I slipped hard into the terror that it filled me with—I’m terrified of chronic pain; I’m terrified of my body becoming an unsafe place for me to live; Unoriginally, I’m terrified of death; And at the core, I’m terrified that the pain is my fault, some sort of divine punishment for my avoidance. All the same fears I held when I was 16.

Whether or not the decade-past effects of Lyme are what I’m experiencing now isn’t really the point. It’s forcing me to face that I haven’t been to a doctor in ages because I still struggle to care about myself. It’s forcing me to face that I still ignore a lot of pain in my body in order to make my reality more bearable. It’s forcing me to realize that I am not a character in a story, but a real person living my real life and the decisions I make affect me and the people who love me.

So, I’m trying to break a pattern again, like I always will be. I’m showing myself some tough love and forcing myself to schedule a doctor’s appointment because I am a twenty-seven year old adult man who is still afraid of phone calls and that does not grant me the excuse to go on not caring for my body which will house me for the rest of my living life.

I am still haunted by patterns that I cannot see the origins of. Sometimes I find them in my writing, but mostly I just end up being shown all the ways I’ve been sitting at the bottom of the hill pretending the boulder isn’t there at all, out of sight, driving me out of my mind. Like forming patterns, breaking them requires some muscle too. I am looking the boulder in its eyeless face today and I’m gonna push it up the hill even with the prospect of it bowling me over time and time again. I look like stick figure Sisyphus right now but I’m making what I believe the kids call ‘gains.’ I’m putting in the work. I’m making the feeble and necessary attempts to shape my own life. I am weak but I am stronger than I’ve been.

jw

---

And when I turn back around / Will you drain me back out / Will you let me believe that I broke through?

---

Inspired! (I cannot seem to find a title for this section that doesn’t piss me off so I’m just gonna keep changing it over and over and over and)

I’m not a huge podcast guy. I know, a bit sacrilegious in this day and age. I find it far too easy to get lost in a pod and realize after twenty minutes that I haven’t been really listening the whole time and generally it’s just not my vibe. However, I’ve been deep into MUNA’s Gayotic podcast—video versions only. MUNA is a queer pop band that have been on the up and up since their killer sophomore record in 2019. On their podcast, they talk about anything and everything. It’s a mess. All the guests are queer. I love the band’s music but I love their creative and personal philosophies even more. It’s deeply refreshing to see a group as big as this (they’ve opened for Taylor Swift, Lorde, Phoebe Bridgers) talking really explicitly and openly about the genocide in Gaza, capitalism, being queer in the public eye, basically all the stuff that most mainstream pop artists will steer away from. Their honesty and commitment to being vocal advocates is genuinely just cool. They’re also very funny. Their honesty is making me more adamant to be honest in my art as well.

I’ve just read Joan Didion for the first time—I know, I know, I was supposed to do that in college, but I’ve never done anything when I’m supposed to. This was a great read, as most everyone knows, but I particularly love Didion’s position as a culture critic without lamenting too hard about the state of culture. I try to stay away from culture criticism because it’s boring and everyone is doing it, but it’s impossible to ignore that you are affected by the state of the world you live in, as a person and an artist. This book is opening up new avenues for me in which to subvert and critique without overtly being like, ‘culture sucks! where’s the culture!’

---

Collaging Round-Up

not going backwards

faceshopping

Some weird work this week. The themes? All over the place. faceshopping started around an Egon Schiele portrait. I remember seeing a Schiele work for the first time in an Art History 101 course in college and thinking oh, yeah, that is how I see myself. Whether it’s a self portrait or a study of another human, he has a way of making the body look so gangly and awkward and scary and still sexy. I kinda just wanted to chop up one of his works and distort the body even further, a sort of expression of body dysmorphia through a more modern lens than Mr. Schiele was working with. It came out very weird, which is cool.

What do you want? Not to water a garden that didn’t want to live. not going backwards isn’t much more than a reminder to myself to not go backwards. To continue growing, caring for myself, not abandoning my sense of self in another person, especially one that does care for their own self. Truthfully? I’m not in love with either of these works. Collaging is fun, it’s healing, that’s why I do it, but I’m also always trying to hone an artistic eye so I have to be critical as well. I didn’t dig too deep for either of these and they just aren’t the most visually appealing to my own artist’s eye. Not mad about it!

And anyway, I’ve been spreading myself a little bit thin putting some stuff together… My dear sister, also an artist, is a recurring vendor at the Brighton Bazaar, a monthly market in my area where local artists can set up a booth and sell their vintage clothing, art, home decor, vinyl, (but mostly it’s vintage clothing) and she has kindly offered to let me peddle some of my own wares at her table! So I’m going businessman mode. I’ve been collecting lots of wildflowers on my walks around the neighborhood, pressing them and framing them. I ordered some sample prints of a few of my favorite collages on nice paper and I’m pretty pleased with them. I feel weird trying to sell my own art, even though artists have been doing it since the invent of capitalism. Part of me still doesn’t feel quite worthy of it. Part of me doesn’t want to feed into consumerism. The largest part of me would like a second income though. So.

If any of it sells at the market (which still feels like an impossibility in my mind) then I’ll take it from there, see if I can set up an online shop or something. I am full of equal parts doubt and hope. Mostly, I’m excited. I like making cool things and I hope some cool people want to give me money for them. Would be neat.