The Grayness of Healing

The thing about getting better is that no one tells you how "gray" it is. 

No one tells you how the space where chaos used to be is the healthy emptiness where peace resides. No one tells you that you can fill it with the things you really want in life instead of "more of the same" because "more of the same" is all you ever knew. No one really teaches you how to stop running from it. We see this glamorized in movies. We see it in the stories of heroes and underdogs... But no one... No one tells you what to do with that when it's your turn. 

We think that getting better, overcoming your demons, solving your problems... Is like this big, colorful experience. Like a huge glamorous epiphany. But it's not... Not at first. At least it has not been for me. It's a series of little rebellions. A million deaths of choices and habits that will continue unraveling you in ways that you didn't know you needed but also that deep down you understand are necessary... And yet you don't know what to DO when it starts happening.

It is gray. It is colorless. It is empty. Especially when you have created an identity that was built through being bullied, through hearing things no child should ever hear, through immense loss, through parentification, through mental and emotional instability, through self sabotage, through self loathing, through hiding, through self doubt.... Because all of those situations and coping mechanisms combined helped you patch yourself together enough to get to the next day... In some cases.... Just to the next hour. You learned how to survive. The idea of having to look at yourself in broken parts and decide that all of them are still worth something, especially when the world around you is so confusing, is very scary.... because it forces us to be accountable and it forces us to think, "What if I'm actually not the failure I think I am? What if the way I feel about myself isn't actually true? What if I lived outside of that perception?" It's those "what ifs" that hold a potential that feels unfathomable because we don't know.... 

I heard a question a few days ago that flipped me upside down: "Who are you when you are not broken?" 

I was painting in my studio. I'm preparing for a show at Smithville. I've also been really busy with physical therapy for my leg... Again. My head was stuck on a loop: "You let yourself become the last priority on your list and now your knee is even WORSE. Good fucking job. You really did it this time." 

Over, and over, and over. And then the video I was listening to in the background cut through: "Who are you when you aren't broken?"

Which led me to my own question: Who am I when self sabotage isn't the way I make decisions? 

And then another one: Why do I get better and then absolutely set it all on fire again? I keep kicking my own sandcastle just so I can cry again. For what? 

I sat with that for 3 days. Every time I went to my task list for each day and felt the urge to put stuff off, I asked myself again, "Who am I when I am not broken? Who am I when I don't keep self sabotaging?" 

I still don't have an answer. I probably never will. But what I did realize is that the grayness of healing, the space where something used to be that is now empty, the really dull "well is this all it is now?" when you aren't angry, sad, lashing out, catastrophizing, when the chaos is gone... is really what was messing me up. Because peace is stillness and stillness is here to serve you in a way you have never thought was possible. 

It wasn't the feeling of brokenness. Inherently, I know I am flawed, but I am whole at the same time. Inherently, I know I have value even if I don't always see it. Inherently... I know my life has meaning and purpose even when it feels like it's all too absurd and stupid to understand.

No, it was the big, gray, emptiness staring back at me asking me in no subtle way, "What do you want?"

And the irony, in my case, is that I make a living making something from nothing. Painting stories on white panels. Making drawings on empty paper. Filling the grayness, the emptiness, with color and motion. I am an artist in every sense of the word and have felt that from the moment I could sense the "rightness" and "wrongness" of things when you try them out and they either feel like home or feel like suffocation. 

But when I looked at the canvas of my own life... When I started wiping away the dust it collected from sitting in dark corners and getting stuffed dark rooms... When I started priming it to paint my picture... 

I stabbed it instead. 

Every single time. Because I was so used to the chaos of shuffling it around and tearing it down and throwing it away and picking it back up and doing it endlessly... That I could not understand the stillness of sitting down to be with it. To have a conversation. To go on an adventure that can only gain color once you pick up the brushes and decide that the grayness is safe. That you can still be you within it. That you don't need chaos to tell you who to be... That you can decide that for yourself. 

No one ever taught me what to do when that hits you. 

No one ever taught me how to stop running. Maybe that is also the point... The idea that no one *can* teach this to you. You have to see it yourself to know what that feels like. You have to be in it to know how it envelops you.

To be honest I don't even know why I have written all of this. I just feel compelled to.... I guess because I want people to know that the grayness is actually normal. I finally understand some part of this. It is your opportunity to paint your own life. And you don't have to start from scratch.....

You've been collecting supplies all along the way. 💜

"The Rage of Lifetimes"

Graphite on Vellum

Available... Email me through my website: www.taniapomalesart.com