Gifts from Demons
I chose this artwork today because something about it feels right, accurate, and comforting to depict the journey I’m going through. There’s darkness, difficult terrain, traps that may trip me up, scattered leaves that speak to past experiences that can’t be recovered, and it feels like it will go on forever. Yet at the same time, there is something cozy about it, enough differentiation in each step along the way to make progress noticeable, and there is the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. However, I expect the light would be a constant guide and companion, rather than a beacon to signify the destination.
During the last 3 weeks I have been unemployed, and having a hard time finding new work. It’ll happen eventually, and I’m working towards it. I bring this up not to garner any pity from anyone, but to express the importance of viewpoints. The last 3 weeks have given me much time to do self reflection, personal projects, journaling, healing, art, and to apply many techniques of self care.
There is a theory in physical fitness that sleep is where the effort of exercise is finally culminated. I’m being overly simplified here, but the concept is that working out doesn’t actually build muscle, endurance, or skill — at least not on its own. Rather it must be paired with proper rest and restoration of the body’s reserves to gain the benefits one seeks. This is the longest I’ve been unemployed (besides when I was a 40–60 hour a week student for my degree) in 11 years. I’ve been grinding and struggling during that entire timeframe. I’ve made great progress on many things, and yet some things still pierce into my life destructively.
Until now.
This rest that I’m finally getting is allowing me to truly make sense of the lessons I’ve learned and allow them to carve the knowledge and experience into my bones instead of remaining on the surface.
As always, I have a reason I bring this up in my art blog instead of just inking pages in my journal. If it was just something I needed to process, I’d keep it to myself. But there’s a lesson to be shared and it has everything to do with art.
Today’s lesson settled deep inside of me in a big way. It’s about facing demons. There’s so much talk out there about facing demons, and there absolutely should be. It’s something we all go through, and we all go through it in different ways. Recently I decided to get as close to literally facing them as I possibly could. I decided to give them a face.
I’m calling it Project Demons — and the project will yield me drawing out every demon I face into an army of sorts. The collection of forces that I combat every day, week, month, and year of my life. I figured if I could put them down onto paper, canvas, or in digital, then I will understand them better. By understanding them, and sending their energy out into the mediums I choose, they will have less power over me. I also expect a follow up project to represent the champions I use to combat the demons. The goal is to identify, personify, and illustrate them all. Make them real and far more tangible than the vague concepts that assault my mind and soul.
Here’s the hierarchy I came up with for the first project. These aren’t the typical types of demons or sins that media portrays, but they are the ones that I specifically do battle with and they are very real to me.
Even reaching this state helped me understand the inner workings of when I face which demon, and how they relate to each other. It makes more sense to me now how their cross functional roles synergize, escalate, or compound and drive me deeper into my darkness.
I made a few hours for myself to conquer Loneliness first. She’s the demon I’m dancing with the most right now and she’s the one I wanted to look at the least. Last year I taught myself to pay specific attention to what I was trying to avoid, or to go after things I was scared about. So naturally at this point, I dove right into Loneliness to understand what was going on there.
I used more bullet points to describe how I felt about her, and what her possible behaviors would be in the illustration. Then I drew stick figures to figure out what I wanted her pose to be. Said stick figures were bad, like really really bad. Old me would have run away from the drawing right then and there. But the figures were bad on purpose. They weren’t supposed to be good. They were just a breadcrumb to lead me to the next level of detail.
I drew her 3 times in the course of about two and a half hours. Each time getting more and more detailed. The 3rd time still isn’t something I would want to show off to anyone, but I felt and still feel amazing about my work.
Bonding with Loneliness as a character, as a piece of art, as a project, and as a painful emotion let me feel so many of the things I had been guarding myself from. Now that I’m done for the night, I don’t feel her presence anymore. She’ll be back guaranteed. But it’s been a good number of years since there wasn’t some version of her haunting the peripheries of my heart and mind.
I have some serious clarity at the moment and it is a quenching thirst I have yearned for.
Reaching back for a moment, I’ve spent these weeks of non-professional work time to focus on work directed towards myself. As part of that I’m specifically, and as literally as possible, facing my demons. As I reached the end of my art session today I had a realization. One of those experiences that turned into an actual mental gain during rest and restoration like I mentioned.
I faced Loneliness today — and in doing so, her negative influence rapidly vanished. I was shocked to find that true. I thought I was just going to give myself some more tools to work through her oppressive and needy-inducing aura. Instead, she gave me something I didn’t expect. A layer of self love that I haven’t realized that I was missing. Why should I feel lonely if I’m fully happy within my own self? Companionship can easily lay on top of a healthy baseline, but that’s very different. Perhaps her presence is just a reminder of what I’m not looking at for myself currently. An indication that I’m trending into the negative.
She’ll be back of course, and this new layer will fade, because that’s how emotions and trauma work. They come in and out of focus constantly. That’s ok, that’s normal. The idea is to go in a direction where the good emotions are more frequently present than absent in the kaleidoscope of the heart.
It was an amazing lesson to learn tonight — and it codified itself into a phrase that has some serious power to it for me:
“Face your demons. For they are the key to everything you desire, and your back has no hands to receive the gifts they bear.”
- Morgan Smith 3/30/2023
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