Work isn’t going so well.
I don’t generally gripe about it here, and don’t plan to do so now (you can relax.) But I will say that due to the high probability of COVID/Delta contamination, and the lack of adequate protections, I am voluntarily quarantining from friends and family. We text, talk, hang out in the backyard as air quality permits, but nothing measures up to the kind of social supports I usually have.
Things are stressful now, and I’ve started strategizing ways to help relieve the pressure. As I’m lying here in bed, contemplating how deeply my world is rocking on its foundation without my typical go-tos, I can’t help but remember Neil Gaiman’s famous speech about making good art. And… huh.
The connection between social pain and art is something I stumbled on a few years ago.
As someone on the autism spectrum, I experience something I like to call social pain. It means I’m awkward as hell as I wind my way through this life, banging into things in the dark and wondering why it hurts, as Lois McMaster Bujold wrote so eloquently.
One day, back in 2013, I was at a park near my then-home and staring out at the sewage processing facility across the way. The park is gorgeous, but it stinks. You can’t see much detail in the sewage facility, but you can sure hear and smell it. There I was, trying to cope with the cold shoulder yet again, ruing the incomplete and haphazard kind of communication I’ve lived with my whole life. It feels like a broken bone set badly and healed crooked, aching and grating against other bones in exactly the wrong way.
“What is the use of social pain?” I asked myself. “Why do I feel this way over and over again? What is its purpose?”
Then it came to me. Art. The purpose of pain is to make art.
Writing, crafting and artistry is what I live for. If I were neurotypical and were able to live life in the usual fashion, it wouldn’t matter nearly as much. Wendy Pini, one of my heroes when I was an adolescent, was in physical agony during the years when she was doing her best work. I’ve decided to take this as inspiration, because I will never not be in pain.
So… why not make art with it? Why not?
After all, the sewage facility and the park have a lot in common. One is shit, and the other grows from it. They are two halves of the same whole — you cannot have one without the other.
That’s where I’m at right now in my thinking, and it’s good. I honor this pain, because flowers are going to grow from it. I’m in. Let’s make good art.
