Over the past few months I have learned that although many people claim to love art, love reading and love listening to music, it is actually rare to find someone who actually understands it or the artist, writer or musician and their creative processes.
Often an artist, writer, musician is misinterpreted or misunderstood by their observers, readers, listeners – even by people who work alongside them as part of their creative team, but are not in themselves creative.
What am I on about and what is the purpose of this post?
I have learned that I have many readers who like my work and some are disturbed by it, the ones who are disturbed by my work are people who are actually in my life and who have misinterpreted my poems and writings or with those who are not in my life, they do not see the hidden meanings behind things I have written or have completely got the wrong end of the stick about what I am saying in my work!
For example, earlier on in the year in a post where I was expressing how someone keeps attacking me and how I feel about their efforts to do so and how I desire for them to mend their ways and see another way in doing things and thinking about things, I get a message from someone telling me that they believe my poem was vitriolic and how it appears to me that I can’t possibly be capable of love or any gentle thought and that they pity me as a person.
It was not written to me by the person in question at all, but a stranger.
I have written a poem called “so long jerk” and this got a big reaction behind the scenes, so many people emailing me about how they felt that the poem was aimed at them, but it wasn’t – some even felt it was a direct attack on my most recent ex of whom I still live with, but again, it wasn’t, they came in defence of him. Rightfully so, but it wasn’t about him or them.
It was about a woman of whom seems to think I am competition to her in a social circle and how I appear to want to affect her career – I do not want to affect her career in fact I would like to guide her because she is shooting herself in her own foot with pissing off the wrong people that could help her further her career!
The poem was me coming to a conclusion that this person doesn’t want my help and for some reason or another hates my guts and therefore I was saying goodbye to them as I had had enough of her drama.
Because she wasn’t very nice to me for months, I decided that I wouldn’t be nice about her either – it was something I wanted to get off my chest and my blog needed a post at the time too, so why not?
Another misconception with my poetry is that a lot of people believe my poems are current thoughts and feelings, whereas often they were written in the past and were prescheduled sometimes months in advance.
Ironically on some occasions poems appear to be almost prophetic, because sometimes a post will be scheduled on a day when something occurred in my life and once or twice, people believed I sat online and did a fast and furious write up of my emotions in a vicious poem, whereas hilariously, it was just a coincidence!
It’s funny how things work out!
One of my last poems which seemed dubious about me committing suicide soon, was actually written 2 months before the post came out and a friend was so concerned she contacted me, demanding that I go stay with her for a few days to cheer myself up and snap out of it sort of thing.
Lovely of her, but she needn’t worry.
This is where I will get to the crux of the matter right now; as an artist, writer, painter, we store up our feelings and sometimes we can use those feelings at a later date in our work, to produce work related to those feelings. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the creator’s current mind-set at all, sometimes it is, but it is seldom always true.
Those in the acting career, I believe will understand this more than any other creative! They can cry on command, the best ones that is – they store up their thoughts and feelings and use them when they need to express them for their own art form.
It’s more difficult that you think, storing those kinds of emotions up in you like that and you really have to be made of some strong stuff to write or express these kinds of things when you need to – why do you think that suicide and addiction is so prevalent within the arts?
How else do you think that us creatives can form such a connection with you in our works?
The thing to understand is this… those thoughts and feelings aren’t fake, even if they are not really based on fact at the time they are a facsimile of something they’ve experienced in the past, but not always the exact same thing or scenario.
For me, a lot of my poetry is actually based on truth in my life somewhere, but it is also an ironic or tongues in cheek take of it, sometimes an exaggeration of my emotions as I am a self-confessed drama queen – but ultimately although those feelings are real, I can produce work that is also fiction based on those same sort of emotional memories.
I think this is why I can write violent scenes and horror so well, because my life has been pretty messed up in the past and quite a lot of what I have experienced, would churn even Stephen King’s stomach with how real it all is. In fact, quite often people have accused me of lying about my past, because of how horrific so many things were in it and how much of it has happened to me.
Well I don’t care if they believe if it’s true or not, it just is and it’s exhausting trying to prove otherwise, particularly to strangers who don’t really care you see – they just want to blurb their emotions at you because they think they’re do-gooders trying to oust an attention seeker, whereas they’ve had such sheltered lives they can’t even begin to grasp the concept that even 5% of my life has happened to anyone, let alone the whole caboodle!
I’ve probably shared around 10% of the nasty stuff in my life on here and even to my closest most trusted companions, because I know that people can’t be pushed to seeing the whole picture too much – it scares them to think that there are so many people in the world who are capable of the things that they did to me – that obviously I have to think about my listeners and readers mental health and just not share too much.
Because the truth is, most don’t believe me anyhow.
I mean, how could they? I practically live in a horror wonderland as far as they are concerned, why should they believe this sort of thing goes on to the scale it has?
I chill people to the bones with short poems, let alone my life story for goodness sake!
How can anyone stomach the concept a child was born as a business agreement, told constantly she was an unwanted problem throughout her whole life by her mother, who was convinced she was the devil’s whore – and then was raped by a relative; their mother was too tired to care.
Their mother was in a biker gang with lots of fights going on around her; then she found God and used God as an excuse to punish the child, then she taught the child witchcraft, beat ten bells out of her when the child practised it for herself because now her mother is a J-witness, then isolates the child from the world.
Mother has Munchausen, neglects the child’s health whilst making up others to the doctors, the child nearly dies due to medical neglect; social services kind of knew all this stuff but couldn’t help the child.
The child became anorexic, had a nervous breakdown aged 12, was a day patient in an asylum for a year, was raped again shortly after and survived being cut to pieces by a possessive bully who had a crush on her.
Nearly died again, ran away, bought back, ran away again nearly got sold into sexual slavery and escaped that but my cousin didn’t.
Mum got into a weird cult, child runs away again but is now a woman she runs away to a man who kept her for fourteen months and domestically abused her so badly she miscarried a baby at five and a half months and wasn’t allowed access to hospital or aftercare and had to deal with it alone in the bathroom, he dumps her, so she goes back to her mum!
Her mum abuses her worse, isolates her worse, she runs away again and finds herself in a cult, narrowly escapes that, gets stalked by an enemy cult for the rest of her life, goes back to her mum who ramps up the isolation and control and violence and then she runs away again;
Finds a nice guy and has a baby falls into extreme poverty, food banks and nearly dies of pneumonia on four occasions and then writes poetry and blog posts about her life and wonders how the fuck she lived through all that, and still, it’s only 10% of what she’s willing to reveal to all of you and weekly she gets at least one email from someone who feels the need to tell her, they don’t believe any of it!
I’m past caring if you do or not.
But now maybe you can understand the mind of a creative? Maybe now you can understand that there is something deep in us you can’t possibly understand, but it must be real for us to be able to invoke emotions in you in our work.
Nobody really shares more than 10% about themselves anyway, so you wouldn’t know what they’ve suffered.
So yes, I do feel the things I write – I do write based on experiences – but there is fiction there too in my poems.
In fact, in the past, some people felt that some of my poems were based on me wanting to murder people – but actually, those were poems based on vampires and demons from my stories – not my thoughts and feelings at all.
I appreciate that it is hard to tell – but you must realise I work on the side of the macabre before I ever worked on the light side of fantasy and humour.
Fantasy and humour and abstract forms are new to me, horror is not. I have been writing horror and dark things and things of the macabre since I was ten years old – I specialise in darkness.
I specialise in raw humanity and inhumanity because it’s what I’ve personally experienced.
When I put my life experiences into my horror, I write better than the other genres, because I am writing from experience – “write what you know” I’ve known violence, psychopaths, isolation, fear, hunger, neglect, pain, abuse, revenge, vengeance, it’s easy to write those things coming from that.
But it’s hard to heal from it when I make it my career, which is why around 2013 I decided to go into fantasy and perhaps children’s stories.
Except that I struggle making life so flowery and end up putting things in my stories which are not age appropriate or could be mistaken for dark humour.
So, yes – I, like most creatives, are often misinterpreted, misunderstood, underappreciated and disbelieved.
As laughable as it may seem, recently I have been struggling to write poetry, purely based on the fact that I am rediscovering happiness and love again – I have been writing my thoughts and feelings about it, but it is so far apart from what I am known for – I fear once again, being accused of being a fake or being schizophrenic, because of how sweet and lovely my thoughts are and then I have a bad day with bipolar and then suddenly, psychopath! You get what I mean?
There is a bundle of poems unpublished on my cloud and in my handwritten notebooks that won’t ever see this blog, because it is too light – my readers won’t be used to it!
But there is one thing I want my readers to get used to and that is this… more abstract short stories and poetry, which is something I want to do more of.
Poetry with cryptic messages and meanings; I enjoy those!
I’ve had a passion for things like Alice in Wonderland and the nonsense verses and Irish limericks since I was tiny, before I could even read – but I was never confident in showing people my ideas which were inspired by them.
However, I have got to a stage in my life where I no longer care.
Thanks for reading!
tardycreative.com 