EDGE OF TEARS // A Manifesto For Resistance
There is a state of being I refer to as “edge of tears”. The name is not cryptic. If you have experienced this state, you know which state I mean. If you haven’t experienced living day after day on the “edge of tears”—that’s maybe really wonderful for you, or not, I have no idea.
EDGE OF TEARS: (an imprecise definition for a soul crushingly expedient culture)
The edge. The verge. Every moment is a balancing act performed on quick sand. You aren’t about to fall, you are falling. While falling you are aware you may “fall” again at any moment. You don’t land. That would be comforting (a result). Fragile while also breaking, but not coming apart. Not crying, but consistently about to cry. But actually when you think about it you are crying. Just not with your eyes. Through your skin. Your spine. Your lungs. Your neck. Your arm hair and toes are crying, silently, without moisture. Your ligaments, muscles, bones, that brain fog making language haaaaarrrrrddddd toooo finnnnnnd--your whole body is crying except your eyes. The action underneath all your other actions is weeping. Weeping without weeping is the baseline; with things like email, getting in debt, and showering jangling around on top. This is not an acute episode, edge of tears becomes a chronic state. The edge is always there, it’s just a matter of how close you are to it. A slight wind, a bike lock being finicky, the internet, a voice that is too loud at a party—a party at all—any mention of current events, past events, the economy, social media, a book you should read, the word should, the environment, the mass shootings, the vigils, the oceans, the oxygen, the celebrations, the task of breathing, of waking, of sleeping, of eating, of going, of reminding yourself to keep going, of caring, of trying to care, of caring so much it’s painful, of pain, the task of telling the truth, of hiding the truth, the work of feeling, the terror of not feeling--every day, on the edge. You are weeping all the time, everywhere. Except your eyes. Which is why people keep coming up to speak to you in such a normal fashion—they can’t see you’re weeping. They can’t see the tears coming out of every part of you. Because they aren’t coming out of you. The edge of tears is not tears.*
*If you feel inclined to diagnose the edge of tears as GENERAL ANXIETY DISORDER, CLINICAL DEPRESSIVE DISORDER, SEASONAL—WHAT THE FUCK ITS SUMMER NOW I GUESS—DISORDER, GRIEF, PATHOLOGICAL GRIEF, FATIGUE, BURN OUT, WHINY ASS ARTIST WUSSY DISORDER, PRE-MENSTRUAL LADY DISORDER, IMPOVERISHED UNDER EMPLOYED PERSON WHO READS PHILOSOPHY DISORDER, or WOMAN THING–please feel free to do so now.
“Hey, how are you?”
“Edge of tears.”**
**(Which is to say, no, you don’t need to phone a help line about me despite how comforting death seems right now, but I also maybe don’t have the energy to explain my actual state. And yes, it is equally exhausting if you feel the person asking CARES or DOESN’T CARE. It’s actually easier if you feel they don’t care, you can just say, “Ah ya, things are good, busy, ya know,” and then get the fuck out of dodge).
“Ah... Edge of tears. Gotcha.” (the dream response they give knowingly)
“How long you been there?”
“Long time”
(general nodding and stuff)
“Well, you’re either on the edge, off the edge, or you are the edge”
“…..true say.”
(no more speaking)
HOW DID YOU GET ON THE EDGE?
If the following thing is true of you, you may be susceptible to finding yourself on the edge of tears:
YOU HAVE A PULSE
I don’t mean just physically. I mean spiritually, emotionally, sexually, aesthetically, ethically. The pulse of your spirit. The pulse of your emotions. The pulse of your sex. The pulse of your creativity. The pulse of your justice.
These are your life lines. This matrix is you. These are the pulses that connect you to the universe and create meaning in your life. They are also the pulses that aspects of/forces in our modern world will attempt to bleed you dry of. It’s bad out there, you know that, (because you have a pulse(s). Pulses that every day parts of humanity drain. You know what I mean: greed, abusive power, injustice, destruction, ignorance, hate, violence, laziness, mediocrity, superficiality, neglect, denial, consumerism, all the ‘isms’, all the fucking horrific atrocities, and the regular everyday bullshit human beings and societies consistently enact. It drains you. You may be hemorrhaging this very moment. The edge of tears is the full body weep of your pulses streaming out of you.
Take your pulse(s). Which are strong? Which are faint? Can you find them? Hear them? Feel them? Do you need help finding them?
If I am very gentle—may I place my ear against your body to listen? Or if I am very fired up, can I bash their rhythms out on a collection of broken pianos? Maybe your pulses are racing—like a terrified deer lost in a suburban sub-division crashing through wooden fences until falling into an empty swimming pool—your pulses only stopped by your own bones shattering. If I am very calm—may I grab your flailing limbs and hold you against yourself? If I am very steady, may I place the whole weight of my body on you as anchor? Or perhaps you feel crushed already. If this is the case, may I rig a hammock among the canopy in the trees and rope-pulley you up to sway until your pulse returns?
How can we strengthen our pulse(s) in a mass consumerist culture that continually attacks, abuses, degrades, and seeks to erase them?
The dominant culture of modernity is Capitalism. What began as an economic system has become a culture. Modern Capitalism is a violent system and thus mass culture is a violent culture. No one is untouched by this system, thus no one is untouched by this violence. We all participate in this violence by the fact that modern economies are intertwined, a product and tool of colonialism and neo-liberalism. “Business as usual” relies on dehumanizing models of expansionist growth so the ‘haves’ can have what they have, while the ‘have-nots’ are kept in new packaged forms of economic slavery. This knowledge is enough to flat-line one’s ethical pulse of justice in a few excruciating moments. The sense of confusion, rage, heartbreak, disappointment, betrayal, and disgust felt by those seeing the system for what it is, is enough to make some want to be dead. Others enter a pretty thick state of denial/disassociation, which is a common reaction the psyche implements in response to trauma and pain when that pain threatens to fracture the Self. So if you care about justice your options are: excruciating pain or perma-denial with weird nagging pains. That’s just really how it is. You know that. You have a pulse. Maybe you try to do good in the world because you feel so fucked up about this.
On the edge of tears trying to do good*** in the world feels as rejuvenating as the idea of being buried alive. Which is already a bit like what being in modern society feels like.
***Besides, what the fuck is good? What is bad? On a good day it’s hard to know what these words mean to you. On the edge of tears the question has you paralyzed in the middle of the tasks you felt ok about completing today such as: sitting on a chair, biting your cuticles, throwing out the socks with holes, and hiding (in general).
On the edge of tears you feel that every movement against this dehumanizing system, every progressive attempt, every hope for change ends with a gun in the face. A shooter in a queer club/women’s centre/school/daycare. More police brutality. More dead marginalized youth. More missing, murdered, and raped women. More murderers and rapists not punished. More corporate power, more privatization, more refugees denied, more ignorance, more bullies winning, and if you’re an artist, more safe art you find horribly mediocre being “branded” and championed as art. (Which will cut you in a way you did not expect and no one warned you about as you watch your aesthetic blood pool and swell beneath your feet).
If you express this baseline feeling of despair, which is what the terrain looks like from the edge, people (likely behind the fog of denial) might say:
“Sounds like you’re in a bad place right now”
To which you might say,
“Yeah, we all are. Because what’s bad in the world is pretty fuckin bad.”
I DON’T SEEM TO BE ABLE TO KEEP GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS OF MY LIFE—AM I BROKEN?
No, it’s actually good you can’t keep going. It's also ok to "go through the motions" if that's all you can bear for now. You feel very tired. It's ok to sleep for as long as needed. Sleep might feel impossible, in which case it’s ok to lie on any surface that seems amenable and ‘rest’. It’s ok to do nothing. If you are a workaholic (which is what trying to hack it in this world often necessitates) this may induce waves of panic and terror. Believe me when I say I know what those feel like. As a workaholic, free time is one of the more stressful things in my life. It’s ok to “accomplish” nothing today. If you need to trick yourself into thinking “nothing” is your biggest accomplishment yet, do so. You have done really, really well accomplishing the fuck out of that “nothing”. After all, rest is not nothing. Being still is not nothing. They just aren’t things our culture values or rewards. You probably need to keep making money on the edge of tears, because I don't know anyone who saves up extra cash in order to fund their descents into hopelessness. Try to go gently through your work, ask for help, and resist taking anything else on. It may takes weeks or months for your body to adjust to the edge of tears. If you are like me, learning patience makes you want to throw up and punch your hand through a brick wall. Which is probably why you keep having to learn patience while your goddamn hand heals because why the fuck would you punch it through a brick wall?
EVERYTHING HURTS WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY I CAN’T FEEL ANYTHING—NOW WHAT?
The first experience of comfort we learn is physical contact. In most cases, baby is born and placed immediately on mother’s chest. Heartbeat to heartbeat, the chemical bonding process of imprinting happening between the two. Body to body. Skin to skin. Imprinting, imprinting, imprinting--both brains and bodies firing and acquiring massive amounts of information from one another. Whoever’s arms that little body goes to, that physical, instinctual, chemical experience of comfort, safety, and security is being coded into the psyche.
As adults it is sometimes hard to know where to put oneself in time and space for comfort. Being held by another adult sometimes doesn’t cut it. Depends which pulse we’re losing. I think there’s an aspect of scale, geography, and proportion that comes into question. As a little kid being held meant having my total body held by these beings much bigger than me. I got picked up off the ground, up, up, up away from that pain, danger, or fear—up to safety, comfort, and a chance to re-balance myself. Held in those big arms, against that other heartbeat, I got to be somewhere else with a different perspective, supported by someone else during the tumult. Eventually I got placed back down soothed, bolstered--back in the ring. I’m lucky, I have loving parents. A lot of people learn early on that there are no safe arms coming to scoop them up.
It’s crucial for children to learn how to comfort themselves as a necessary part of the journey to becoming independent. That’s easier when a kid has had the benefit of loving security behind them during that process. However, I’m wondering a lot lately about how we, as a society, model comfort to each other as adults when our very culture demeans vulnerability and struggle as an embarrassing weakness or deficiency, often conflating any experience of pain/challenge with mental illness (as opposed to a response to mass culture’s dehumanizing effects).
WAYS CAPITALISM TEACHES COMFORT TO US:
buy more shit
eat more shit
lose more weight
get less hair/get more hair
bleach it/tan it/dye it/remove it/surgery it/enlarge it/enhance it/get a new “it”
you’ll be happier here/there/with this/that/them
fuck it/fuck 17 “its”
but also monogamy means you will never be alone
have a wedding/have 17 weddings
have an affair/have 17 affairs
have a baby/have 17 babies
drink it/snort it/inject it/roll it/smoke it/shoot it up your hole(s)
advertise it to your friends/document it/proliferate it/put it online
There is minimal comfort here. If any. This is poison. Your body and spirit know that now, and your body and spirit react violently when they can no longer withstand this violence. Sometimes your resistance is energetic; a seismic ferocity that propels you deeper into your creativity, your fight for justice, your loving, and your sex. Like a non-stop montage of your pulses DOING THEIR THANG AND PUSHING YOU CLOSER AND CLOSER TO THE MYSTERIES OF BEING ALIVE AND IN TUNE WITH THE CHAOS OF THE UNIVERSE, AND YOU ARE LIKE “FUCK THE SYSTEM” AND THE UNIVERSE IS LIKE, “YES BABY, YOU GOT THIS AND WE GOT YOU”.
Held by the universe. Tiny you. Vast energy. Comfort in the dance. Comfort in the danger. You are ON THE EDGE BECAUSE YOU ARE THE EDGE. You know what I mean. Because you have a pulse. And you know what I mean because you know how to spot someone in this zone. Her pulses are strong; a pack of wild horses running, while she leaps from horseback to horseback, riding them all. In this zone our hearts lead us. Our work gets richer, our bodies vibrate, our spirits grow, even when we feel insane inside it—it’s a nourishing madness, a feedback loop of balanced output with energizing return. We are, as they say, “on fire”.
Of course being on the edge of tears is nothing like this. Just hearing about this "on fire" state is painful on the edge because it’s hard to believe such meetings between daring and skill, courage and abandon, and action and intention could ever happen. Or ever happen again. You are not “on fire” on the edge. You feel more like a pile of charred ash that can’t even seem to blow away in the wind.
I’M TOO TIRED TO RESIST THE HORRIFYING THINGS IN THIS WORLD— I NO LONGER SEEM TO CARE ABOUT MY PROGRESSIVE POLITICS, ART, OR GOODNESS IN GENERAL—HAVE I JOINED THE MASSES OF WALKING DEAD PEOPLE?
No, you haven’t. Because the edge of tears is not a failure on your part. Despite how much it feels like all you’re doing is failing. Let’s open up the idea of resistance. The edge of tears is in fact a form of resistance. It may not feel that way. It hardly feels like anything except a poorly mixed cocktail of exhaustion, dull pain, doubt, uncertainty, futility, and emptiness. But if we think of your state of immobility as a refusal by your body and spirit to engage in a performance of “ok-ness” or constant output—(which is a Capitalist notion of value through constant production) then the edge of tears becomes a very active state of seeming paralysis.
Our bodies, our spirits, our Selves, will send messages until we respond (or until we die—which is the ultimate message). Sometimes these messages are signalling the approach of the edge. We’re getting closer to it, which usually means we go into high gear trying to avoid it. So the messages escalate. Sometimes an idea or image pops into your head, you can’t shake a feeling about something, you’re having epic dreams, you’re beginning to notice synchronicity everywhere, you’re getting weird aches, pains, insomnia, nothing seems to be ‘going your way’, or if you’re me, the tendon in your ankle refuses to heal because even though you said you were going to “rest” you kept running 10K on the treadmill despite the tweaky feeling in your foot. You’re going to keep re-injuring it for the next 12 weeks until one day you can’t get out of bed. Not because you’re ankle hurts, but because you keep yourself busy busy busy with art and progressive politics and trying to do good because these things mean something to you and you do them so as not to feel like this. Because you have been on the edge before and you know it feels like---no no no no no no no no no no no no---
Stop.
You cannot escape this, not this time. Edge of tears. This is where you are. Be here now.
You must be here now.
Can you see yourself here? Will you allow yourself to be here?
What do you see?
Will you allow others to see you here? What do they see?
It is so hard to be here. Panic. Stop. Panic. Stop. Where am I? Nowhere. Here. Stop. Panic. My pulse. My heart. My body. My feeling. Where is it? It’s gone. Where is it? It’s racing. Where is it? It’s nothing. Where is it? Going to explode. Where is it? Dead. Where is it? Where is it? I’m going, I’m going, I’m going, I’m gone.
“What’s the matter?”
….
“What’s the matter?”
….
Where am I?
....
LOST ON THE EDGE—GHOST BODY
Often what is most terrifying about the edge of tears is the general lack of feeling that takes over. Physical and emotional. Nothing feels real because nothing feels. Emotional pulse is gone. You are a ghost haunting your body, haunting your life. A ghost people can see—but can they see that you are a ghost? Or are they all ghost bodies too? What is alive? Where is life? Does anyone have a pulse somewhere you can touch?
For a world so full of people, for cities so crammed and crushed, sweaty and messy, how can it be so hard to find each other? Reach each other?
Where is touch? Where is meaningful touch? Who will touch us?
SERIOUSLY. WHO WILL ACTUALLY TOUCH US?
You know what I mean by this question because you have a pulse. Or you remember having one and are looking for it again.
When a woman I love deeply lost a woman she loved deeply, she needed constant touch to remind herself she was real. The contact on her skin allowed her to know her body was alive, could feel things, and was not a ghost body. These were not just embraces. I hugged her plenty, but I also systematically rubbed her body down, pressed my forearms onto hers, my palms into her back, clutched her legs; made contact with wherever she felt she was dematerializing.
As a woman, growing up in a female body within hyper-militarized Patriarchy and rape culture, I’VE HAD MY SHARE OF UNWANTED TOUCH, SEXIST TOUCH, CONDESCENDING TOUCH, HOLLOW AND MEDIOCRE TOUCH, DISEMBODIED TOUCH, and EMPTY AND DEPRESSING TOUCH. We can check all those options off—those warehouses are FULL and I know where to find them.
I have also had the pleasure of NUANCED TOUCH, TENDER-ROUGH TOUCH, CAREFUL TOUCH, EMBODIED TOUCH, INTUITIVE TOUCH, RESPONSIVE TOUCH, SEXY AS ALL HELL TOUCH, PLAYFUL TOUCH, STEADY SLOW TOUCH, NURTURING TOUCH, RESTORATIVE TOUCH, ELECTRIC TOUCH, GUIDING TOUCH, COMFORTING TOUCH, HILARIOUS TOUCH, BRAVE TOUCH, and ENVELOPING TOUCH. These touches are rare animals in the jungle of Western culture which is generally body-phobic, body-shaming, and repressed (nothing feeds cultural violence like generations of shame****).
****SHAME—On the edge of tears one’s shame feels like a thick layer of sunscreen covering your whole body. You can’t absorb it, it’s irritating your eyes, and you’re pretty sure everyone can see it. It’s getting on all your clothes and though you’ve been told it will protect you from the evils of the sun, you’re pretty sure it is giving you just as much cancer. Still, you keep reapplying because sunburns ARE awful and you want to look young when you’re old. Sometimes you only put on SPF 15, but lately, you’re slathering up with SPF 50 (SPF=Shames Per Feeling).
When babies are not held, touched, and cuddled in their formative years their brain development is seriously undermined. This can result in behavioural, educational, and physical disabilities that can be devastating and very difficult to address later in the child’s development. From this we know that love, care, and touch are essential to our being and survival. This does not change as we grow into adults, yet we live in a society where at a certain point touch is greatly reduced or stops altogether.
Who touches you? How? When? Where?
AFFECTION
May I put my hands gently on your face just now? Brush your eyelids closed with my thumbs while cradling your cheeks? May I trace the line of your brow? Hold the weight of your skull in my palms? May I bring my own cheek close enough to graze yours?
How do you feel about all this imagined touch?
What assumptions do we make about affection? Sometimes it seems like it can only be sexual or familial. My culture seems to be pretty fucked up about both. A lot of my work in theatre explores the intersections of intimacy, sex, body, power, and fear. What I run into time and time again is that sex may have become less taboo, but intimacy has become more taboo. Intimacy, affection, care, and tenderness have become a language few dare to speak even within the supposedly safe perimeters of their partnerships and families. What does intimacy mean? What does it cost? What message does it send? What does it ‘commit' us to--does it? In a society filled with disembodied touch in a culture of violence, to touch with embodied affection and intention (sexual or not) has become too loaded for most people to attempt.*****
*****Obviously consent is important. We can’t run all over town touching people without their consent regardless of how embodied our touch may be. But I’m not talking about that right now.
I know people on the edge who are there because they experience embodied contact (sexual and not) so rarely, yet hunger for it so much, that their hunger is paired with deep terror that any actual touch may shatter them completely.
MY LONGING HAS DRIVEN ME TO THE EDGE
Lately all the women in my life are expressing how deep their longing is. Some of my male friends express this too—though not as often about sex and feeling, usually more about change for the world (which makes me realize I’d like to broach this topic with more of my male friends). My female friends also long for change in the world—deeply and urgently--in regards to all manners of things. But these longings aren’t different because the state of sex is a reflection of the state of the world. Sex is visceral and political, mysterious and functional, everything and nothing. Wanna know how’s a society is doing? Look at how they fuck.
The scale and scope of experience within sex is vast. Embodied sex—however that manifests for you--can lift you out of the surface layer of your life. Scoop you up. What feels like being out of one’s life is actually the opposite; in embodied sex you are so in your body, in the present moment, in conversation with your partner(s) that you experience transcendence. What is a grounding feels like a lifting. Heartbeat to heartbeat and skin to skin is how sex can rejuvenate, comfort, and enliven us. Sex can get us back in the ring. Embodied sex surges through our bodies connecting us to the cosmos. Spirit in flesh. There is a reason the phrase HOLY FUCK is so satisfying.
I’ve found myself in the same conversation with many different women (single and not, and everywhere on the spectrum of sexuality) about how alien they feel in the world due to how vast, persistent, ravenous, and ‘impossible feeling’ their longing and appetite for connective sex and pleasure is. They feel the pulse of their sex cannot be met—and they have to work every day to fight the messages in this world still calling them monster sluts for having this pulse at all. Too reveal their sex into the world becomes a draining and often disappointing experience because too many times in their lives they have been told their feelings, ideas, emotions, appetites, and desires are “too much”.
THREE TRUTHS FROM THE EDGE
I stand in solidarity with all individuals driven to the point of madness by the depth of their desires.
If I could be multiply myself into the lovers for all these women and men who are hungry for connective, spontaneous, embodied, inquisitive, and adventurous sex I would do it in a heartbeat.
I would sex the whole goddamn world if it would bring these burning souls back from the edge.
I USED TO LOVE ART BUT THAT LEADS TO CRUSHING DISAPPOINTMENT – HAVE I GIVEN UP?
No. It might just mean you live in Toronto. Or any large city where the proportion of art-makers to art-lovers is really, really not in your or art’s favour. Caring about making art in such a place is fucking brutal. On the edge of tears, you would rather beat your head against a wall then care about art and creativity. Both are painful, but you’re guessing the wall option ends sooner. There are SO MANY THINGS AGAINST YOU AS AN ARTIST IN A PLACE WHERE THERE IS NOT A LONG STANDING CULTURAL TRADITION OF VALUING THE ARTS AS A VITAL AND NECESSARY PART OF LIFE. Mass culture does not value art. Capitalism values commodities. If your art cannot be easily turned into a commodity—and thus absorbed by capital—it will be very hard for you. Your profession is generally not respected. Much like educators, child care workers, nurses, botanists, activists, and healers, mass culture is at best aware you serve a purpose, but doesn’t know much about it beyond knee-jerk assumptions and has little understanding of how hard it is.
I make theatre so I’m going to briefly cover that for any of you theatre-makers on the edge right now:
The glass ceiling in Canadian theatre making right now is about the height of a crawl space from a 1970’s suburban house in Kitchener, Ontario. You know what I mean because you have a pulse and maybe you were a little person during that time foraging around in semi-finished basements cause that’s where kid’s playrooms were. I refer to the chaotic scramble one’s life becomes as an indie artist as THE HUSTLE TO NOWHERE.
I can write a shit ton more essays on how economics + art + passion + capitalism + access + oppression + cultural history + geography intersect to create this HUSTLE TO NOWHERE –my first play was about this—but let’s talk about an angle we’re usually afraid to say out loud except at 2 am in bars with friends:
There is not enough money for as many artists who want it. There is not enough audience. There is a lot of fear and there is a lot of shitty art too. We don’t all like the art each other makes. We don’t talk about that often. Maybe we’re too afraid that conflict or dissent or challenge within our community will make us appear weak/disorganized to the outside world of “regular folk” who already doubt whether we serve a purpose. But a healthy artistic ecology needs to be in tension with itself. More money would help a lot of things that are broken in my artistic community, but it wouldn’t help all of them. Even if there was “enough” money there is a ton of work being made I don’t think is very good art at all and I wouldn’t fund it--and a bunch of other people wouldn’t fund stuff they thought wasn’t good art either. Which is probably why we use juries, which have a whole other range of pros/cons. It’s complicated folks. What is art, and who decides, and what informs those decisions is a vortex of conversations you can’t engage in on the edge of tears because you can barely leave your apartment let alone have a conversation.
Seeing enough shitty art can take you right to the edge of tears. Mediocre work that lacks rigour, vitality, formal innovation, and danger makes you want to put a hole in your head. Safe art with an easily identifiable moral compass, the illusion of politics through the sanitization of politics, and the “developed until it died” formula has you desperately searching for the defibrillator in the theatre so you can “3-2-1 CLEAR!!” electro-shock yourself alive enough to get out of there. You are afraid to go back. Beneath the rage is heartbreak. Disembodied theatre is like disembodied sex, just bodies kinda mashing together in space. It lacks the very pulse you are hoping it will strengthen in you. Something made you love art enough to become an artist. Witnessing poor work betrays and offends that love. It is that simple. It is that devastating.
An artistic community is like a family. Your art and you get “born” into it and you don’t necessarily get to choose with who, or you’re a nomadic orphan searching for your family hoping it will feel like that home you long for. Families are weird and complicated. Pain, love, loyalty, trust, joy, and disappointment run in deep tangles in families. You find a way to make it work or you identify that it’s too toxic too bear--in which case I strongly recommend you distance yourself and build a new family somewhere else. In such cases the pain is tremendous. Protect yourself. It’s ok to separate from your art family if they cannot give you what you need. It’s ok to step away from your community if it’s draining your pulse as opposed to strengthening it. You are not a traitor. When your aesthetic pulse is dwindling, you may need a break. Or, you may need a break up.
MAYBE SEEING SHITTY ART WOULDN’T HURT SO MUCH IF I WASN’T SO TIRED FROM TRYING TO MAKE ART I DON’T THINK IS SHITTY
Our society equates “success” with making your living off your chosen profession and steadily attaining greater security and economic returns as your profession grows. The longer you do it the more rewarding and lucrative it becomes. What a hilarious idea. I think it works for unicorns but I could be projecting. A lot of us feel the pressure of this definition of success, especially if you’re an artist. Some feel they can’t own the term 'artist' proudly until they can live off art-making alone despite an overwhelming amount of data which shows how rare and difficult that is to do in this country. The years in which I have relied on my income from government grants and indie gigging are consistently the hardest years for me. I work the most hours while going into the most debt. Those have also been the years that my spirit is most fragile and my relationship to my art has been most volatile (from rapturous to hatefully resentful). By putting the pressure of my survival on my art I subjugated it to the wage labour system; which meant I had to produce and produce and produce it at insane rates in order to live. I enslaved my art to a system that does not value it and then I enslaved myself to producing it. Writing to live made me hate writing. I took something I love and put it and myself into the meat grinder of capital’s bottom line. To love my art well I must care for it. I must protect it from enslavement. To love my art well I must free it from these burdens weighing it down.
I am an artist whether or not I also do other things to make enough money to live. Maybe some people learn that earlier than I did. It is supremely likely you will not be able to live off your art. Everything costs something. Not having other sources of income will cost you something you might not expect.
I WASN’T ON THE EDGE OF TEARS UNTIL I READ THIS REALLY LONG ESSAY – NOW I WANT TO CRAWL INTO A HOLE AND DIE – IS THAT HOW IT ENDS?
Does anything end? Edge of tears is not a state that disappears once you survive it. If you are susceptible to the edge you will cycle back to it eventually. You’re either on the edge, off the edge, or you are the edge. It can last months, years, long, looooooooong time. I am only now catching glimpses of a different proximity to the edge, feeling some feeling return during this recent bout. I knew something was shifting after it seemed like every system in my physical body was having a melt down at the same time and I was sitting in my doctor’s office for the third time in 10 days (thank you OHIP). I’ve had insomnia for the last three months and haven’t been able to remember any dreams. Which is not a good sign for me. Remembering my dreams lets me know that I am in conversation with my psyche. When dreams go, it feels like the communication lines are down and I can’t get messages from headquarters.
I dream of water often. Water fills my waking and sleeping dreams. In times of past turmoil in my life I have always dreamt of huge bodies of water; oceans, tsunamis, and hurricanes. Water, being deep and mysterious, life-giving and mercurial, symbolizes our souls and our emotions. We are the depths. The night before this third doctor’s appointment I dreamt of ice fishing. Finally, a message from HQ. I send this out to all of you on the edge. Pulses in the dark, sounds from afar:
It's dusk. Bundled against the cold you’re walking far out on a frozen lake. In the distance you can see the fishing shack. The ice is thick beneath your feet. Beneath the ice swirls depths of dark water you cannot see. In the water are things you need. You’ve been walking a long, long time and can barely see the shore behind you. The only sounds are yours. When you reach the shack you’re surprised to find it filled with warm light.
It feels safe. Though nothing about it is set up for fishing.
You have no tools here. Just the strength of your body.
You look down and see the ice.
Frozen. Heavy. Hard. Keeping you from the water.
This ice has been here so long.
Frozen. Heavy. Hard.
Yet here’s the hole. You found it.
The edge, the edge, the edge…
and a surge of love
is speaking on the wind,
"crash through, crash through.”
