Seeking self-expression

Sometimes I look at the items in my house and I see a scattered graveyard of hobbies of years past. I have books on drawing, a guitar and piano I’ve barely touched in a year, microphone equipment from the time I swore I was going to become a voice actor, music books from 6 years of voice lessons, 6-7 tarot decks, a whole box of scrapbooking supplies I have yet to unpack despite moving close to a year ago. I’m starting to dive into herbalism, and while I’m excited about it, something in me wonders if I’m going to wake up three years from now and wonder why I have so many tincture bottles and jars filled with dried herbs.

It frustrates me that I do this. Sometimes I wonder if I just don’t have the ability to commit to anything. If the only thing I can seriously commit to is something that gives me a steady paycheck, and even that only because my fear of not being able to pay the bills forces my brain to stop wandering and get something done.

But when I look back, each hobby I picked up served some sort of purpose. In fact, most of them have to do with different types of expression. Given my history of suppressing different parts of myself, it’s actually quite beautiful to see that the parts of me that weren’t able to directly express themselves found little outlets via my artistic curiosity. Another way to look at my inability to commit to something is that as I allowed hidden parts of myself to express themselves more openly, the need to express myself through certain hobbies fell away.

That’s not really what we’re taught, though. We’re taught that resilient and ambitious people follow through on what they start. That there needs to be a payoff if we invest in something. Ideally, the things we invest in eventually make us money. When I was taking Dra. Rocío Rosales Meza’s Divine Alignment course, she talked about how the colonial capitalistic patriarchy demands that everything be linear, that it be logical, and that we extract everything we can.

As I write that last part in particular, I think about artists who started their craft from a place of curiosity and passion, but eventually burned out because they had to extract from their creativity so hard in order to make a living. I’ve watched many writers put out 6-12 books a year because that’s what they’ve been told is required to make a living writing. If you’re going to do that, you either need to make it extremely formulaic (same story, new characters and situation), you need a team of people ghostwriting for you, or you need AI to most of the heavy lifting. While there is nothing wrong with any of these, it becomes much more about keeping a business afloat than about expressing yourself artistically. And then, of course, many of these writers and the writers trying to keep up with them burn out hard and stop writing altogether.

The messages I absorbed growing up would say, “Well, that’s just the way the world works,” or “If someone wants to live on their passion, they don’t deserve to make a lot of money.” Passion feels like a selfish thing, something that most people trying to make a living don’t get, and therefore you have to pay the consequences if you’re going to choose to live that way.

We devalue art and authentic expression so badly in capitalistic society. Some might say it’s because art and expression are so widely available for free. To me, though, it’s because of what art and expression do: they help us to dig through the protective and conditioned layers to find our true selves. And once we do that, we aren’t as bought in to the linear, the logical, the materialistic, the extractive, and the controlling. We don’t give it up completely because of the world we live in. But we’re much more likely to move slowly and thoughtfully, to listen deeply to ourselves and others, to want to preserve something because it’s beautiful rather than tear it apart for our own gain. That state of being doesn’t jive so well colonial capitalistic patriarchy.

Something inside me intuitively knew that was where I wanted to be, even when I didn’t believe it was a possibility. So it searched. And it experimented with the forms of expression that it saw in the world, looking for a good fit. Even as I tried on and dropped hobbies, I took bits and pieces with me as I evolved how I express myself in the world. I think that’s an important piece to remember—even “failed” experiments have a purpose. Sometimes we have to go through that experiment to learn something we didn’t know about ourselves so we can get to an experiment that fits better.

The path to greater openness and self expression is often littered with twists and turns that make absolutely no sense until you look back on them.

From that perspective, I’m grateful for all the things around my house I tried and failed to see through. Because they’re reminders that even when I was caught up in making decisions that were purely logical and made grandiose promises of security, there was something inside me seeking to uncover something more honest. And if that ends up being the only purpose they ever serve for me again, it was worth it.