I've Started Painting Again

I’ve started painting again.

The last couple of months have left me longing for creativity. A craving to mix colours. A craving to blur harsh lines with my fingertips. A craving to make lines and paint over them hours later. A craving to enjoy the temporal process of how an image changes over hours, days, or weeks. The fascinating reality of transporting something from my imagination onto a canvas through shadows, highlights, shades, and pigments.

Painting is a kind of meditation for me. It always has been. As a woman living with ADD, painting distracts my hands just enough to allow my mind to wander. As a student, I’d use painting to disconnect from myself and disable the rigidity of my brain. This allows my intuition to take over. For me, painting feels like internal waves crashing against a rocky shoreline; emotions and memories emerge and wash away. Thoughts, hopes, and dreams sweep in and bleed out. This steady stream is both a challenging and cathartic experience; challenging because it stirs up my hidden vulnerabilities and simultaneously cathartic as this energy releases into the paint and onto the canvas.

For this painting, I’ve been listening to a steady loop of Taylor Swift’s “Cornelia Street” live in Paris version. This song has brought me to tears several times over the last few days. I can’t determine whether it’s the beauty of the lyrics or the emotions evident within Swift's voice. Regardless, this song has taken me on a spiritual journey as I imagine my own experience in the West Village, simultaneously falling in love with my boyfriend during a summer spent in New York City. One line in particular: “And baby, I’m so terrified of if you ever walk away,” she sings. This line beautifully captures feeling of opening up to someone—the painful vulnerability—that new love requires from both parties. This not-so-secret secret. This rush of love and fear simultaneously swirling around the head and the heart. We invite this person deep into our hearts, cutting a new place for them knowing all too well that this could result in immense pain should one of us walk away. And yet, we continue to invite our lover deeper and deeper into our bodies and souls, walking the fine line between love and heartbreak.

That’s the crux of falling in love, isn’t it? This idea that falling in love requires us walk the fine line between intense pleasure and pain. On one side lies the promise of happiness and on the other side lies the potential for earthquaking heart break. Perhaps that is the best part of it. The risk is well worth the reward. The potential for pleasure far outweighs the potential for pain.

And just like that, you’re in love.

I’ve often wondered why I didn’t ‘like’ Taylor’s music prior to 2020’s Folklore. “She’s so annoying,” one friend would say. I’d nod my head in agreement. But I don’t think I ever found her annoying. In fact, her music became a guilty pleasure that I’d listen to alone, fearful that I would be dubbed a Swift fan.

Ironic, isn’t it? I loved her and the stories hidden within her lyrics and yet, I hated that I loved her.

As it turns out, this was not a question that only I asked. Throughout Swifts career, the media continued to criticise her with headlines that read: Dear Taylor Swift, you are not a victim, so stop acting like one,” and “Taylor Swift: Why is it so difficult to support her.” Indeed, this was not a Swift issue, but rather an issue about women being within the public sphere.

As Swift’s downfall and subsequent revival demonstrates, the public sphere casts its misogynistic gaze upon women to deprecate and degrade their successes, achievements, and characters. Women within the public gaze are awarded a different kind of narrative. Men can be ultra-successful. Men’s bodies can be big or small. In either case, men exist in society unscathed because they exist within a realm that has been fashioned by and for men. On the other hand, women are told that they will never be good enough to fit within this space. As a result, capitalist society sells women products promised to fix the very insecurities created by this misogynistic (and toxic) environment. After a lifetime of living in a society that teaches women that they do not fit within this space, women seek just about any opportunity to obtain a seat at the table. But this is the irony of our society: Women do not fit within society because society makes it impossible to it so.

As the old saying goes—you can’t fit a square peg into a round hole.

So, what’s the solution? …If only it were that simple.