What the hell am I doing?
When I started writing this blog, about a year ago, I didn’t have clear goals about how I would do this. I thought I wanted to talk about being creative, how that feels for me, and build an email list of an audience to share my work with. Through this process, I’ve often been torn about how much to share, how honest to be. Sometimes, after hitting the share button, I have some dread about my post. Did I over share? Is this all about me? Why do I want to write about me and send it to people? When this shows up in people’s inbox, do they think: “Oh no, here we go again. Whine one one, call the whaaamblance“ Why am I even doing with this blog? I recently listened to a podcast where Rich Roll interviewed Tim Ferris and Ferris talked about the importance of finding a balance between being vulnerable and what he called trauma vomiting -sharing too much. This post took me a while. I felt like I wanted to share and then I felt like, whoa, too much. I don’t know. I have a love hate relationship with this process of sharing. So I’ll leave it up to you.
Goodbye, Sinéad: I never said thank you
In 1989 I was watching the Grammies. I was 16. I have NO IDEA why I was watching the Grammies. The Oscars were something I watched faithfully every year but I don’t have a memory of ever being interested in the Grammies because I was starting to like music that didn’t fit the pop categories. I had recently decided I was done with pop, done with all of that and wanted to find musicians who spoke to me and who didn’t necessarily fit into the mainstream. And yet, for whatever reason, I tuned in that year. I remember nothing about the show except for one performance. Yup. You guessed it. Sinéad.
I vividly remember watching a her walk out in her ripped jeans, black halter top, and shaved head. On the left side of her head was a circular logo. (I wasn’t into hip hop so I didn’t recognize that it was the public enemy logo.) This person was not the usual pop fare for the evening. The song was called Mandinka. Her voice was strong, but she seemed a little awkward and out of place in this environment. She did a sort of sideways shuffle dance during the parts without vocals. No backing band. Sort of like watching someone do karaoke. But about a minute into the song something changed. The tempo picked up and she started to sing “I don’t know no shame, I feel no pain, I can’t…see the flame”. And she held the note on flame with this expression of intensity and maybe rage? And it was here I almost fell out of my seat. I mean, I really, really remember sitting bolt upright and feeling chills. This could be revisionist history, but this performance was different and I felt it. This person, this music, this emotion was cutting through things to something essential: truth. This was someone singing directly to me and it was unlike anything I had seen or heard. I bought the tape within the week. The entire album was and still is a home run.
By the way, why was she wearing the logo of Public Enemy on her head? She was protesting because although a new rap category had been added to the Grammies (really? Not until 1989?!) the powers at be decided to give the hip hop awards out separately and not televise that portion of the evening, because you know, let’s not advertise this scary medium that white people might freak out over. Many hip hop artists boycotted the Grammies and this was her showing solidarity. This was just the first of her protest moves, and eventually all of this protest would catch up to her -unlike all the male protest singers out there that got famous for it.
So, I wore that tape out and when I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got came out, I bought it immediately. That was in the spring of 1990. I was a Junior in High school now. By the end of the summer, before my Senior year, I started to have debilitating headaches. Laughing hurt and I started taking Tylenol. I thought the headaches were just bad luck. Eventually they got much worse and I was taking way more than the recommended max dosage of Tylenol 3. (Do they still make Tylenol 3? Why 3? 3 times as strong? 3 just sounds tougher than 2?)
I saw a neurologist who said something was off but I had to wait for over a month before seeing the neurosurgeon. He seemed bored. Not worried. This seemed like a good sign. I found out that I had Arnold Chiari Syndrome, a congenital condition in which my cerebellum was herniating out the base of my skull. I had to have brain surgery, where an inch and a half portion of my skull would be removed and a shunt would be left in to release fluid into my spinal column. What felt even worse than having someone remove part of my skull, was that I had to sit around and waitfor someone to remove part of my skull and insert a shunt.
I was still trying to pull double workouts on the swim team and it was getting harder and harder. That didn’t last long and eventually I stopped swimming altogether. I distinctly remember one early morning after a swim workout, before school started, before my surgery. The coach would play the radio on the speakers, probably 101.3 KGOT, (Anchorage’s local pop station at the time -I had come to hate it) and so whatever was on the charts would be playing. The workout was over, I was exhausted, my head was killing me, and I remember climbing out of the pool and just lying on my back for a minute to get it together. Nothing Compares 2 U, which had been on heavy rotation on the charts, came on. By now everyone was kind of tired of that song, but I remember hearing it and just being overcome with emotion. I know it’s a song about love and heartbreak and breakups, but I think what was really going through my head was connection and again, like watching the Grammies, I felt like Sinead was singing directly to me.
Good art, really good art, puts you in the room with the artist. You are there in each others presence and you feel as if the artist is speaking directly to you. That’s how I will always feel about Sinead O’Connor. Every couple years I would google here, watch interviews. She was always seeking. She became an ordained priest. She released more albums. She became a Muslim. Or as she put it, she had always been one, and finally figured it out. Her interviews were always interesting. She always seemed a little nervous, a little wigged out about being in the lights. Even THAT feeling I connected with and again I felt like she was speaking to me. It’s like she was saying, isn’t this so uncomfortable for us, this experience of putting ourselves out there? Here’s the thing: we don’t make good art without consuming good art. Creativity begets creativity, and people like Sinéad O’Connor helped me hone my skills as a visual artist because she allowed me to feel through her.
When I think of that time, I think of the fear, the despair and general confusion that became a heavy cloud of my senior year in high school. I also think of my friendships and those who really came through for me. I was lucky to have great friends, am still friends with them to this day, and I am so grateful for them and everything they did. I remember recovering in the hospital and what felt like the entire swim team showed up to watch the Simpsons in my hospital room. That was amazing. The nurses must have loved that. My English teacher Ms Shaddy brought me homemade cookies. My art teacher Ms Lamb, whose art teaching footsteps I would eventually follow in, stopped by to chat. My friend Jen showed up and literally passed out when I showed her the staples in the back of my neck. The nurses spent some time helping her get back to normal. Sorry, Jen. My family friend Lynn Birdsall brought me cactuses every day, each one getting bigger and bigger and after twelve days the biggest one was enormous. My good buddies Josh and Jeff talked to me on the phone daily or visited. There was a girl who sat behind me in Algebra class who I didn’t know all that well, but joked around with during class. She just showed up with flowers one day. Many others visited and sent cards. I felt seen and known. It was amazing. And of course my parents were amazing. This was pre internet and when I was diagnosed we went to the library to read medical journals. I know now, as a parent, that they were also quietly losing their shit, but they didn’t show it. They were my anchors and continue to be.
Despite all that support, despite all that love and attention I also felt completely and utterly alone. I was staring my mortality in the face. I never told anyone that though, which in retrospect doesn’t make any sense and wasn’t helpful. I think it’s easy to look back and say, what was the big deal? The doctor was telling me he’d done dozens of craniotomies before and there was little chance of anything going wrong. The fact of the matter is I was scared out of my mind. It still scares me to go back to that younger self. Throughout all of that, Sinéad O’Connor’s music was on constant repeat.
This is from my high school yearbook. It was taken days before surgery. I think the look on my face says it all. Deer in headlights at that point. BTW my friend Kari wrote that “Mr. Terrific” in my yearbook. She wrote it on every picture of me in the yearbook! And she visited me in the hospital. Also I still miss that t-shirt and plaid.
I missed three months of school post brain surgery. It was pretty miserable. I tried to get into watching soap operas and that was a fail. I watched some VHS tapes but too much tv gave me a headache, as did reading and drawing. So it was sort of 3 months of wishing I could do something but doing nothing. The remainder of my senior year, and I guess you could say a year or two after that, was about making sense of that experience. Music and my sketchbook was a big part of that. Art and creativity is what helped me truly process.
During that time of processing, It was the music of Sinead O’Connor that I consistently came back to. There were others of course, U2, Peter Gabriel, The Waterboys, The Pixies, The Stone Roses, Kate Bush, that I listened to. But it was specifically Sinead O’Connor that allowed me to feel through her music in order to heal through that experience. There is a lot of research now that we can’t just think ourselves out of depression, trauma or anxiety. Our body has to move through it, because the body keeps the score. I did a lot of swimming. I also did a lot of listening to Sinead’s honest, vulnerable, and open music which allowed me to heal, allowed me to move forward. Nothing Compares 2 U makes me cry pretty much anytime I listen to it, because it reminds me of that time. And that’s ok, that’s me still processing. I drew a lot and wrote a lot which also helped, and her music was the doorway to the experience of healing.
As I watched multiple YouTube videos leading to this post, and listened to her albums again and again, the whole situation around how she was treated and received in this world causes me nothing but outrage. Countless male rockstars have committed unspeakable acts they never got called out for. And yet, Sinead’s outspoken punk rock voice was consistently shamed, shut down and mocked. The ripping of the pope’s photo, her eventual boycotting of the Grammies (after that first performance) for its racist and materialistic focus all resulted in her ostracism and yet, she was right all along. But the general public vilified her. It’s still not clear how she died, but it is clear that her life was damaged by the world’s reaction to her honesty about how damaged the world is.
Sinead spoke to so many of us who felt like we were the odd one out. The kid in the corner, the bullied, the loser, the weirdo, the traumatized, the freak, the underdog. But she spoke up for us. She used her voice to connect with us and to call out the bullies. She gave us strength. And When I went through that time of uncertainty of brain surgery, she provided a platform for me to feel what I was feeling, to face it. In her own words from her own song I would say to her now: “Thank you for hearing me. …Now I have a strong, strong heart.”
Couldn’t get this spotify playlist to populate as a visual but here is my Sinead playlist: Spotify
Upcoming Events
In June, when I called Patricia Carrega, or Patsy as she likes to be called, we had been playing phone tag for a few days. Patsy owns the Patrica Ladd Caregga Gallery in Sandwich, New Hampshire and she had agreed to give me a show at the end of the summer. We were getting closer to show time and I had to figure out exactly what was going to be in the show.
I first met Patsy almost ten years ago. I did the thing you aren’t supposed to do with galleries. I walked in with a stack of paintings under my arms and no appointment. She was talking with potential buyers and seemed rightfully annoyed that I was standing here with no appointment. “Give me twenty minutes.” She said. She seemed assertive and curt and I guessed in twenty minutes she would send me packing. As I laid out my small watercolors, made during my kids nap time, she seemed surprised. “These are good!” She said. She gave me a show the following summer and then I would bring in work when I had it. I found her to have an amazing eye, she collected artists who covered a wide range of styles and subject matters. If she liked something she would rave, and if she didn’t she would let you know. Over the course of the last ten years, she would sell a painting of mine here and there.
When I got her on the phone this past summer, she was her usual no BS, straight to the chase self. “What’s your address? I have a check to send you. I think I have your old San Francisco Address on file.”
“What sold?” I wanted to know. Earlier in the summer I had dropped off new work, so I was hopeful that was moving. It turns out she was selling my little paintings, which had been kicking around the gallery. Those same little landscape paintings I was making during my kids nap time.
“So your show’s coming up. How do you want to do this?” She asked.
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” I said. “I mean, you’ve got those big water scapes. Do you want more of those?”
“Yeah, well these little ones just sold.” She said. “Why don’t your bring it all in. New and old and a variety of sizes. We could do a collection of work from the last ten years. We can call it a retrospective.”
“A retrospective?” I asked. That sounded grandiose to me. “I’m not dead.”
“I know you’re not dead!” She shouted on the end of the other line. “You don’t have to be dead to have a retrospective! This is a great idea, let’s do this.”
So this past week I drove 20 paintings down to Sandwich. I think people love to complain about their galleries, but I’m grateful for Patsy and her straightforward approach, her generosity and her support. Thanks, Patsy for being one of the good ones! If you happen to be in the Sandwich over the next month, feel free to stop by and check it out.
Thanks for a long openhearted post. Updates next time about the future of my newsletter and some career updates. Catch you on the flip side!