My late husband gave me the superhero name, Wonder Why Woman but why I always have to make something out of everything was not a wonder I had until a few days ago.
I was sitting in my living room on my comfy couch, going through fragments of writing to complete the rough draft of my memoir by my birthday — the end of this month. A goal I made for myself for my milestone birthday.
In between pages and chapters I wander around on the internet. That night I saw a post that had an AI prompt I thought would be fun to play with. It only had what I told it — my own stories, my own words — and it came back with a sentence that literally was at my front door my whole life but I just didn’t see it because I was inside the house!
The passage was: You make things because making is how you metabolize.
I’ve never put the word metabolize and art in the same sentence, and so it reframed it in a way that I understood it differently, because I know how the body metabolizes food. I mean, we kind of all know that, don’t we?
It took me down a metaphor rabbit hole. If we put something toxic inside our bodies, our inner environment, we physically get sick. So, to me, it would stand to reason that if someone is in an actual environment where being seen is dangerous, then they have to be able to metabolize being seen. Don’t we all?
I have been asked many times, why do you make what you make? What inspires you? In so many different interactions, the question always circles back to this. I don’t feel like I have ever had a really good answer other than I am compelled. I will actually physically feel an ache if I don’t create.
Why? Welp, that obvious answer at my front door, because this is how I metabolize my life and my experiences. Good or bad.
You eat and the whole digestive system goes to work to make sure all the good and not so good get to where they need to go to keep your body going. I make things for the same reason. I go through a process of thinking about it, but it’s very intuitive. I don’t try to force it or even ask for it. It’s just a natural experience. Natural, like digestion.
It’s just so strange to me to think about when I finish a piece, I really don’t think about it again. Nobody lingers in the bathroom thinking about what just happened in there either. You flush and move on. But that’s because the part I needed is already in me. Your body takes what it needs from what you feed it, and the nutrients are what keep you going.
Making things as a metabolic function? What a concept. But I feel like I know it to be true because of what I went through years ago when the mechanism (me) got junked up because she hadn’t been making things.
I had to go through this whole big work betrayal which meant I would hardly pick up a paintbrush, even in my own private life, for almost five years. I was so wounded from this experience that I just kind of lost focus and stopped painting. It was awful to feel pain because I wasn’t painting and also feel pain when I would.
After seeing me in this state of distress and unable to resolve it on my own, Patrick, a trained photographer, came into the laundry room and set a photo down on the washer. It was an antique Ford from our most recent road trip out west, taken in WaKeeney, Kansas.
“Bet you can’t paint that.”
And that was all he had to say because he knew the best way to get me to do something was to say I couldn’t. So I said, “Yes I can,” the whole time wondering if I could.
I had never painted a car. That work experience had told me I wasn’t any good, and for a time I believed it. So when I finished, and it turned out good, I was just as surprised as he was. I remember saying to myself out loud, I am a good painter!
Because he loved seeing his small photographs on big canvases he gave me more things to paint of his. It was such an Andy Warhol move of him to use me like that. But it got me back on metabolic track.
Making things is how I process life experiences. It isn’t how everyone does it though. There are plenty of other ways. For example, I have a good friend who processes hard things by being in community. She literally needs to be around a bunch of people and ask questions. For her this is the solution to metabolizing her life and experiences, good or bad.
I feel like the next time someone asks me what inspired me to create what I made, I can answer confidently: Making is how I metabolize — my life, my experiences, even a conversation. And here I am doing it right now.
All this time I thought I had a past life as a record keeper for all the archiving I have done for years. My memoir is proof of it, photos, paintings, words and moving images stacked in pages, hard drives and painted surfaces. Numerous side quests and trips and thoughts of I will make something from this. When in fact the making was the reason, not the product.
Although the one below turned out pretty well. :)
I wonder, how do you metabolize your life? In what ways do you find yourself?
