Fear of Being Seen

When I was very young, I tied the idea of being a role model to femininity and to parenthood. I've never been the ideal feminine nor have I ever wanted to be. I don't hate femininity–I just wanted to be the most genuine version of myself, the one that existed somewhere in a rainbow of genders, the one that didn't feel that I was cosplaying gender to feel accepted. But in a culture of machismo, extremist performances of gender are created, and the parts that are not feminine enough become the loudest to people who only experience or accept the extremist performances. Among the not enough was the understanding that I never wanted to have children because the idea of having another human growing inside of my body is a bit like body horror to me. And thus, this developed into the belief that becoming a role model was terrifying and something I simply couldn't be.

I felt the first pangs of my fear hit me super hard when a couple of artist friends expressed that they saw me as a role model. The role, in that moment, was chosen for me, and no amount of suggestions that I was kind of an idiot and it was sooo much better if we all saw each other as equals convinced them. Somehow, this coupled with my perfectionism (more on that some other time) snowballed into art block. Years after this conversation, I was still unable to draw. I would doodle here and there, but was mostly unable to keep it up. Weeks would go by between drawings, sometimes months.

On a hot summer day, weighted down by the guilt that I shouldn't buy any more books because I have enough of them that I haven't read, I pick up a book from the back of a store in Massachusetts: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. The mere fact this was art social media's favorite book made it feel like a grifty self help book for a really long time. But once I started reading it, I was sent back in time and place to Art Theory (art philosophy, not design theory), one of my favorite college classes ever. It reminded me what the role of the artist is: to exist as a human, wrong or right as we may be. Sharing our work creates new reads, new versions of that work. No one experiences art the same way just as no one experiences us the same way; we are mirrors of society. By nature, our role does not put us on a pedestal, it puts us on the pillory.

We aren't creating to produce or sell material products. The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. A longing to transcend. What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond our understanding. Art is our portal to the unseen world.
Without the spiritual component, the artist works with a crucial disadvantage.[...] (Rick Rubin, The Creative Act)

I can't recall exactly where I first heard this, but this whole thing brought to mind that, "The process will always be yours, but the final work is the audience's." This finally helped me face my fear of being seen. At the beginning of the year I had set out looking for discipline, but the problem had been too much discipline, too much desire for order and control of my work. I wanted my work to be ultra-polished, that it speak the right words and give the right answers to my audience, that it be so polished that it couldn't possibly be ignorant because someone out there was seeing me as a role model. I realize now that that is not something I have much say in because, damn, that's a grandiose task for one person who just makes drawings, isn't it?

I believe than when my friends told me I was their role model, that they weren't seeing me, exactly; I believe they were looking at my artwork, at me, and saw qualities that they already have and admire: drive, creativity, talent, passion, love for their work – whatever it is they saw, it was theirs, not mine to begin with, and it was there for them to accept it and appreciate themselves once they felt ready to face that truth. I'm grateful I was able to be a mirror for them and I hope, that in the future, I will be able to react in a less fearful and defensive way when I'm put on the pillory.