So I’ve been thinking… Typically when I say this, BC says “Uh oh,” but lately it hasn’t been followed by “…this isn’t working for me.” BC and I have been having really good talks lately, and I’ve initiated a new way of considering the challenges in our relationship.
There are two areas in constant need of discussion; expectations and desires. Typically when either of the two is under siege, my frustration leads me to want to just throw in the towel and move on, to find it elsewhere. Well, this hasn’t really worked, creating a mutual distrust and tension that we dance around until the next crisis. Our challenge is what to do about those failed expectations and frustrated desires–how to manage them so that resentment doesn’t build up.
One area of frustration is related to how much time I’ve put into helping D. I spend the bulk of my time with him, even if it’s just him being around watching me while I work in my studio, but with no intellectual dialogue, no dialogue at all really, just proximity, so when I’m with BC or my other friends, I want stimulation, I want to talk about things, I want to learn, I want to see… Beth called me on improperly assigning responsibility to others, so I need to be more in control of my intellectual growth. I’ve told D. that I need Wednesdays-Fridays to myself, my own creative time, and then to BC that I may need to spend less time with him to be around artists and writers or to watch the films that he considers unwatchable or to engage myself with culture that he might find frightening and certainly unentertaining. Essentially I’m saying that I need things that I’ve typically relied on the relationship to provide, so while it’s new to me, I’d like to try it.
Dealing with the built-up resentment is harder, but I’m not caving in to the old me, not assigning blame, but bringing things up as issues that both of us could address–“What do you think?” “What can we do?” “How do you feel?” I know it sounds like common sense to a lot of you, but it takes a long time to unlearn bad communication.
Turning 40 and coming to terms with failed expectations on a grander scale only complicates matters, and I’m trying to maintain a distance between the two sets of expectations. My life might be half over. Really. Already my body is showing signs of stress, my gray hairs multiplying exponentially–maybe I won’t marry Bob Hoskins after all and my movie will be tossed in the trash along with the rest of my art when I die. Maybe I’m insignificant. I don’t know if artists have a different relation to life in general, but this artist feels compelled to communicate something of my experience that is going to last, that’s going to show a future generation what I saw, and how I saw it. Maybe it’s why people have kids, or build libraries, to feel some comfort from knowing that something of them is continuing. If mediocrity and anonymity are my future, then how do I want to be in the present? Thus far there’s been the promise of something happening, whatever that is, it’s just something that’s out there, that I’m striving for and never quite reaching. Every achievement brings on more desire, but never contentment. If this is all there is, then I should experience the most that’s possible with it, right?
Questions, questions, questions… and is the answer really 42?