Art | Friendship | Self

It’s Okay To Be Undecided

Embracing uncertainty through creative expression

This afternoon I’m sitting at the dining room table instead of at my desk. There’s a tin piggy bank in the shape of a telephone booth, a stack of tarot cards, and a pink crystal candlestick holder. I am neither happy nor sad. I have four cats. I’m thinking about what it means to be a good writer and editor. Today, I draw no conclusions.

Writing without one seems blasphemous; I know you have an appetite for answers. They soothe us. They help us cope. I’ve looked for them too, in my sleep, in a degree, in therapy, in said tarot cards, in dry brushing, in various Christian sects, in shopping. I picture the last decade of my life and ambivalence floats above it all, like a cloud.

To his credit, my therapist figured this out long before I could. Or at least he pulled at the thread.

“You’re ambivalent about your friendship.”

Ambivalent?

Shocking. When and where did I find the room to be undecided?

At the time, I was obsessed with packing my schedule and my mind. Every thought was for the sake of a grade. With what energy I had left, you could find me racing towards financial stability far, far away from my family’s bankruptcy. I was tired but it had meaning. Every piece of me rested on a pedestal of passion, extremes, goals, evaluated as better, worse, or not my problem. I tried to keep the pieces from falling.

Acknowledging the ambivalence I felt about Fanny was the sun rising. Expected but glorious. For a long time, I believed that I deserved, at minimum, contentment for being a good person. Fanny got caught up in that and I wanted to be free from her, free from my life, free from being someone who has decided. Now, I could be honest.

And so I did. I left. But I eventually went back to the therapist, thinking there was something else to work on. I completed a few more sessions.

On one occasion, after I broke down crying he observed, “Wow. Sorry, I forgot how emotionally moving our sessions can be.” Was he bracing for impact at my waves? Trying to deflect countertransference? Startled at the ethnic vibes of my puffy, narrowed eyes?

Art is the only valid place for people like us to exist.

I forget the rest of the sessions, they were whatever. I wandered out of the last one and kept walking. As I kept walking, I found myself relaxing. Oh, those moments were beautiful! I could appreciate time without a goal or evaluation. I want to live there forever. I love it here.

You have to do it for yourself. Looking for validation will kill your voice.

This is a warning. Most people do not want you to be happy; they want something from you to make them happy. Art is the only place I don’t have to give people what they want but no one else has to either. We can be together and celebrate just that, being together.

So, I write this having found a home and still no conclusions. Art is my home and it’s never threatened by my ambivalence. Is art, the conclusion? Can something so malleable be a declarative statement? No, it’s life. It contains all of me, contradictory parts — perhaps that’s what makes it a place of ‘we’. I’m welcomed in full and so are others. It can be smol or as big as a sculpture. I can dive into a pool and call it art. I am art. I am ambivalent. I am declarative. I am a juxtaposition of unnamed things.

Hey, It’s Jeeeeeeee! Your favorite writer, illustrator, Editor-In-Progress of Le Fool, bonus mom, person-thing-artifact of the ’90s, oh-it’s-2021-wait-what? I believe in art — it’s my home — and I hope you’re okay with being undecided. I’d love to contain that in a hug. Yes, I’m a hugger.

Question: Is the birdie in the illustration right side up or upside down? Lmk below.