And I feel that I grew a lot in 2012 as a result of my involvement with The Artist's Way. It has given me a way out of a life that is too quiet, colorless, and mundane for my taste. So I suppose my New Year's resolution is to "do something colorful and fabulous every day", something that engages with the senses.
It seems also that this is going to be the year of self-esteem. The first thing I have done, after three years of blogging, is turn on the "moderate all comments" function. That means no comment will show up here without my seeing it first.
Please note: This is not meant to discourage commenters. I am eager to have more readers and more commenters! I will accept most comments with a few exceptions. I will not tolerate "lectures" that are meant to "shame" me out of one my funks, which I can get into frequently. Helpful suggestions are welcome, as is advice about vocal issues. And I will not tolerate cruelty. I have begun screening comments because about a year ago I posted some sound clips here, hoping for some honest constructive criticism, by which I mean this sort of thing, from voice teachers, coaches, or experienced singers (who would all know what "flaws" might be the result of the recording process), but what happened instead was I was ripped to shreds (not just told my singing was horrible, but that I probably didn't practice enough!!) by someone with less experience that I had. As you can see from the referenced blog post, someone I respect very much said that this person meant to do damage (he had read her comments before I deleted them), which I guess is rather sad. I would have long let this go (I have sent the clips to other people and gotten the sort of combination of compliments and constructive criticism I had been looking for) except that this woman keeps posting comments here, not nasty ones, but she continues to behave like a bratty child trying to get my attention. I would not even give her the time of day by writing about this, but I want to alert most potential commenters to the fact that they are welcome and that their comments will be read, answered, and appreciated!
Second, something very strange happened yesterday, which has led me to want to devote a blog post to the topic of a ghost from the past. The strange thing also involved an assault on my self-esteem, which I put a stop to.
Someone I had known in childhood and adolescence, a heterosexual male who had always been a friend, but never anything else (the feeling was mutual), "friended" me on Facebook yesterday. A lot of what our past friendship had been about was his attraction to a friend - no, a "frenemy" - of mine, a girl named Beth (not her real name) who was a stuckup princess with a heart of ice. I need to make it quite clear that despite being attracted to women, I was never attracted to Beth, only envious of her. More about Beth in a minute, but first I want to mention that after this man friended me, we exchanged several emails most of which were about his continued obsession with Beth, whom he had found on Facebook. I realized after a few exchanges that this man's only interest in renewing a friendship with me was to talk about Beth, so I "unfriended" him and told him frankly that I didn't want to continue this type of interaction, that I might not have had much self-esteem as a teenager, but I did now, and that as a woman who liked to think she was attractive and interesting in her own right, being used as a shrink to hear about a 40-year-old obsession with another woman was extremely insulting. I got a brief email back from him saying that he was sorry, so now I can close that door again, thankfully.
I want to take time to mention Beth, though, because probably she was one of the three biggest influences on the "self" that I created over all these decades (the others were my SO, as she was when I met her, and the Mentor). What they all had in common was that life, for them, was primarily an aesthetic experience. And they were all snobs about aesthetics. Beth actually came from "old money" but until I was much older I had no idea her family was rich, or I wasn't sure. She had very expensive dolls and "party dresses" but often she would show up for class (we both went to an exclusive prep school - my father was a professor and when he was alive there was money for that) without some item that everyone had been told to bring (like a notebook), saying that her mother couldn't afford to buy it. Later I realized that the family had plenty of money, her mother was just scatterbrained and disorganized. What I envied about Beth (aside from the fact that she was ectomorphically svelte, had long hair like a storybook princess, and moved gracefully) was that she seemed to care only about things that were beautiful, never about anything that was practical, and that this was encouraged by her mother. She studied ballet, and she drew, but she did poorly in school and her mother seemed not to care. She was well versed in the nuances all things fashion and decorating, and seemed to think her purpose in life was to be decorative. Whether there was a connection between this and her family's money I don't know. Not necessarily. I knew other rich girls at the school, and many of them were neither pretty, stylishly dressed, nor charming.
I don't know whether or not Beth liked me. We spent a lot of time together and had many things in common (an interest in the arts, a love of cats, a total ignorance of sports and popular culture), but being around Beth made me feel fat and coarse, not unlike how Pip felt around Estella in Great Expectations, only sans the romantic attraction. I suppose Beth was sort of a cross between Estella, raised to break men's hearts, and Gigi raised to be a courtesan, well versed in all things fashion, decorating, and fine dining.
The friendship with Beth continued until I was about 18 or 19, then I made a conscious decision to drop her. She got married (she never went to college) and I took up with my SO, a butch woman who treated me like a princess.
But I always knew it was because of Beth that I loved all things Victorian: she personified the entire Dickensian landscape, being both a princess and a waif. And it is because of Beth that I will always choose what is beautiful over what is practical. And it is probably because of Beth that for good or ill, I have always been totally indifferent to what I did for a living.
My SO had many of the same qualities. She was always poor, but she loved beauty. She would eat canned soup and buy an expensive item of clothing at a thrift shop. Or something pretty for the house.
And of course then there was the Mentor, with his orange walls and open vials of patchouli, unmade beds with brightly colored sheets, vintage china in a kitchen where the dishes hadn't been washed for a week.
Well, there you have it. This post is a strange one to begin a new year with, but maybe not.
There is a lot of "Beth" in the life I've learned to live from The Artist's Way.
P.S. I snuck a look at Beth's Facebook photo and she certainly is no longer pretty. Here's my latest self-portrait. Eat your heart out.
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