I avidly wrote poetry and kept a sketchbook for approximately one year before I came to terms with the fact that I sucked at both. I was ok with not being particularly talented in either area, since I recognized that writing and drawing helped to alleviate some of the pent up depression and anger I felt at the time. Times like these, I wish they still worked for me.
I recall one theme of characters I would draw - angel fairies and black shadow people. The angel fairies represented peace, grace, goodness, love, caring. Reflective of my feelings then, they were often trapped, lost, or compromised. The black shadow people when drawn in groups of 4 or more would represent the nameless and lost of society. If only one or two were drawn in a piece, they tended to represent forces of evil.
In one piece, I drew pathways to Salvation. A Thorned Heart with raybeams rested at the center top of the page far from everyone at the bottom. A spiral staircase leading about halfway to the heart grew from the bottom left of the page. To the right of the page, at the same approximate height as the top of the staircase were a grouping of clouds. A pathway up a hill led to a cliff that dropped off into fire on the bottom right of the page. A group of nameless, lost black shadow people stood in the middle at the bottom trying to understand where they were and where they needed to go.
Some got lost on the staircase of Good Deeds - climbing, growing, but always falling off the top step to land where they'd begun. Some looked to and relied on the black shadow people reaching down at them from the "Now too holy to REALLY get our hands dirty but can't keep going up ourselves" clouds, never realizing that they didn't have their eyes on the right prize. They wanted to appear as holy and elevated as the cloud people and couldn't seem to understand the cloud people weren't really any closer than they were to salvation. A good number of the group delighted in the Mountain of Weakness - a seemingly beautiful, wonderful, light adventure ...that dropped them off a cliff into fiery nothing.
Angel fairies attempted to direct the shadow people away from these paths.
A few even sacrificed themselves to the flames to save a person or two.
In this illustration, I think I've become the character I like least. I'm a Cloud Person. The Good Deeds climbers at least have the satisfaction of trying, of being humble, of experiencing an illusion of progress. The Mountain people are just lost. They deserve love and pity as most of them simply don't know any better, don't know that they're supposed to be looking up.
Then there are the Cloud People - the fucking ridiculous bastards.
See, the Cloud People started out alright. Many spent their fair share in the fire. They climbed the Mountain, fell, and were rescued enough to start looking for other paths. They did the Good Deeds thing for a while, but eventually realized they were powerless in their Salvation. They fell a few times, but perservered. Then, they recognized all they really needed to do was look upwards and wait. They realized they needed to have the faith that they were going to reach the Thorned Heart without any obvious way to get there. Eventually, angel fairies (grace) descended upon them and they were being carried to the Heart. Something about seeing the Good Deeds people still going at it and seeing the Mountain people perpetually falling, they stopped receiving the gift of grace. Although grace would never drop them, they had the power to stop receiving it. They stopped ascending.
They got stuck in limbo. They realized how much further up they still needed to go and got scared. They wanted to help everyone else look up to see Truth. But they developed pride. They were enlightened, seemingly successful having tapped into the right path. They were brought too far to choose to fall again, yet they could no longer relate to any other shadow people without looking down on them. Looking down at others, they couldn't look Up anymore.
I'm looking down at others - those who are trying to figure it out, those who are lost, and those in flame. I'm looking over at the Good Deeds people who are really trying. I'm watching people pass me on their way Up.
I'm not looking Up, but I refuse to go back.
I don't know how to fly from here.
I'm afraid of falling, since this cloud hangs above fire. If I fall, I might hit someone being carried to a better state of existence and bring them down as well. If I fall, I risk crushing more than just me. If I fall back to the middle, I'm stuck knowing I can't climb back up via Good Deeds and that the Mountain of Weakness will never really make me happy.
In a lot of ways, this sucks a bajillion times more than being completely clueless. I now know that my biggest obstacle is me. I keep getting in my own fucking way. This is depressing.
Help me fly. Please.
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