A false epiphany, or did that giant blockage finally release itself? I feel like I’ve just shook hands with a monstrous demon, who now in the light of day, looks more like a sweet celestial creature, who greets me on my road to self acceptance. Maybe it’s ok to be a little crazy, to have desires that don’t fit, and a mind that searches for the deviance in your eyes – I’m not a pathology that needs addressing.

I can be a bit obsessive, it’s how I make my art. Immersion, and dogged obsession. My obsession also quite prominently manifests itself in my reading and re-reading of Lolita. Sporadically caressed between my hands, its words rest and deliquesce before my eyes, it resides there on the bedside table like a security blanket, always close. I study it with a ‘healthy’ obsession of someone who wishes to glean secrets from within it. Its pantone insides resonate. Something about the dynamic, the love between the two and her rosebud of childishness, it soothes my beating heart.  Today I devoured its pages, hungry for something; a stillness to rest my racing pulse, an acceptance of my loving mistakes, an encyclopaedia for my pain. I don’t quite know what it finally was that clicked in place, like a once misaligned cog, but something spoke to me, and finally made me feel quiet inside. For I have another obsession in life, that sometimes escalates out of control, until all I can think about is that noun of which I try so hard to forget. And right now it’s about at its peak. And so with these overlapping obsessions, possessions of the soul I start to see through the mist, the dots connect and form islands on the horizon of my mind, and perhaps I am liberated, for a moment. Because now I understand and accept a part of myself of which I had bolted down the door. Now I admit it. I take full responsibility for my desire, and know what it is I need and want. To be the girlchild of my imagination, to be encased in a safety net of a faux-paternal embrace, a recognition that my development is not stilted, and that I can explore it however I see fit. Through art, through sex, through writing, or discussion. That its presence is not an indicator of my ‘unhealthy, broken mind’, or that I need fixing. For I am not broken. I might see a correlation between a childhood whose spell was burst a little too early, the emotional turbulence of a disparate family, or of attachments that were forced and broken, but it doesn’t make me ‘unwell’ for wanting to explore it, for feeling it’s familiar sting and dancing with it. I’m going to continue to live in my elected pre-adolescence, my childlike curiosity, with my sweet and sticky sex that hunts you down and covers you in its inoculant magic, because this childlike obsession that permeates my being, is me.

 

Image credit: Between her legs, 2014, Prefix-poly. (collage)