This last year has been a thing of nightmares, and perhaps it is too soon to write about, but that's something my anxious, and decidedly former, self would worry about. I don't worry about that now, I am alive and I am feeling. And with feeling comes words, at least for me, my feelings have to go somewhere, otherwise, we bottle them up and become mean; we grow resentful and we make things worse. And that was me, all of last year. I think emotions should be treated like energy in the scientific sense, in the kinetic sense. I was never terribly interested in physics when I was forced to sit in a lab and write equations that always felt foreign to me, and even if I did take a liking to my teachers I always felt I was jumping through hoops, something I have never cared enough about to try with any real vigour.
Despite my apathy towards science, I did take a liking to one of the key principles of the energy topic: 'energy cannot be destroyed or created’. I wrote that down (or something to that effect, GCSEs are over and I can't really remember) in my physics book, and I think something lit up in my mind- the amateur psychologist in me loved it. As an idea, as a way to live, as a way to view myself: that I will never truly disappear from myself (one of my biggest fears), that I will never truly be someone new (sometimes my strongest desire), that I can merely transfer old habits into new habits, old friends switch out for new ones, old tools exchange themselves to fit the seasons. As summer turns to winter we retire the lace, the linens, the silks in lush summer colours, and swap them out for boots and thick winter coats and knits, as the cavemen once halted their travels as the weather grew colder, preparing their overhangs and smoking their horsemeat. It's in our DNA, our very nature, to never destroy or create- only to transfer. This is why I fundamentally cannot understand when people claim not to be creatives, and I say this with no accusatory intent, but with a curiosity of this species of human, with a confusion and confoundedness I can't quite word, but alas, will try to.
If humans cannot dissolve energy, nor can we will any more into existence, where do the emotions, the experiences, and the energy expended on these things go, if not transferred into art? Where else can one unburden themselves of the things they’ve moved past and the weight they inevitably hold?
Now, I understand there are a host of unhealthy ways people 'transfer energy': they turn to unsavoury habits, or, on the other side of things, they run into the arms of people with unsavoury habits, in search of this energetic transfer. For argument's sake, let’s assume we are well-adjusted, healthy individuals who have gently wiped away the tears from the faces of their inner children, who have nursed their wounds, and generally understood their compulsions. How does one become this individual without an inclination toward art? Surely the absolution of one unhealthy compulsion requires, by the principle of physics, another outlet?
Or perhaps that's just me. Perhaps I live my life too rigidly by what I believe to be the rules of the universe. Perhaps I am anxiously awaiting a time when I fall out of line and forget to write that week of my life, that offbeat word you said, that phrase I couldn't bear to forget, and then that would be it. I would be destined for something I probably can't fathom in my current state: I would be something else entirely. No fabric of my being could exist in the way it does now without the urge to write, to create, to feel earnestly fulfilled and realised through making these micro-decisions, word choices, and ruminations of my own point of view- minor, but massive to me. I am a self-proclaimed ‘narcissist’ (though I am of the most boring and benign of the sort, and with too much awareness of it, and
it's actually just a joke I have with myself). I am self-obsessed, I must be understood- if by nobody else, by myself, and surely that is why I am inclined towards art, and I believe we all should be that way.
As someone who has called herself a feminist for longer than I can remember, it’s hard for me not to relate my experiences to issues of gender, if only in an intellectual sense. More often than not, women fall under the patriarchy's cruel and cold fist and live and die believing they should be smaller and quieter and dumber. This presents a host of issues: low self-esteem, normalisation of mistreatment from men, lack of ambition, mental health struggles: essentially a block in the energetic transaction of earnest and authentic self-expression. As women, we are taught that our 'energy' deserves nowhere else to go, and if we create a destination for it, (be it through art, family, or a passionate and vivacious career) we are told we are unsupported in our endeavours in doing so, that nobody cares and nobody will, and so we might as well go on with our lives forgetting about it altogether.
When we try taking another route- lashing out, breaking down, tearing into the cracks of our sanity until we've created a chasm large enough for us and all our loved ones to live inside, miserable and bitter- we are teased, accused of being witches, sent to a shrink. Or, more recently, we are romanticised for it and our grief is wielded against us. It is hailed beautiful, mysterious, desirable. Thus, women live under the thumb of men, as little vessels of pain and regret and anger. We resent each other: we resent those of us who overcame these struggles for being ahead and those of us who didn’t for being the same; we become the vehicles of our own oppressors. The same applies for all marginalised groups under a capitalist society: we live, we create (or rather, transfer), we are shot down, and we live a little darker this time. And so the cycle continues. The rules of capitalism go: 'no currency shall be created or destroyed, merely transferred' and the game has to be won.
This may seem esoteric and convoluted, perhaps even far-fetched, but all of this is to say: I urge you to create with what you have. I urge you to consider, at least, this lifestyle of energetic transaction, and to allow yourself to participate in it. I am not telling you to let go of your troubles, your unresolved 'energy', but I am telling you to account for it; to figure out where it came from and where it needs to go, and how it has impacted your life until now: darting about (a writer's depiction of what energy does in its free time), screaming at you, begging for you to look back at it, and send it with peace to its next destination.
There is undoubtedly something special about the soul of someone with no dead weight hanging around their neck, living free of the shackles of the past- or if they must hold onto it, they live with the knowledge of what that weight is: they know how to make it lighter, how to grapple with it.
Personally, I cannot imagine a single version of the world I could possibly move through without writing how I feel, transferring my energy onto the page, and finding a way to feel lighter and more alive. I think it keeps me awake, keeps me curious as to what's to come and what I will make of it. Even this is my own transferral of energy.
thank you for reading xoxo
PS: It is not lost on me that much of my language in this piece is that of capitalism (‘transfer’, ‘transaction’ etc..), it is an irony I cannot avoid, so I thought I’d just be self aware about it. What I will say, though, is that it is valid to learn the ways of the oppressing force, if only as a form of self defence. I want to use the knives in my back to carve a masterpiece, and the weight on my shoulders to keep me grounded.