Did My Sucky Childhood Make Me A Better Artist?

On the gifts of hard childhoods, Georgia O'Keefe, River Phoenix, dry sponges and real technologies.

Howdy, Kumquats.

I had to sit down and sort out my feelings today, so many are coming up.

Let’s start at the top.

I’m having feelings about feelings.

I have always been very sensitive. I also have several planets in water signs in my zodiac chart. So, my soul’s blueprint for this life makes emotional sensitivity dominant in my personality, for this Trixie lifetime. I’m not sure if that made me choose to be an artist, or if I had no choice at all because of that, or both.

After college I held the belief that only the really damaged souls could become great artists.

I believed you had to suffer for your art. Kind of nihilistic, I know, but hear me out.

I just didn’t think you would have enough gas in the tank to push that hard uphill if, let’s say, you had a comfy upbringing and really supportive parents. LOL. I just felt like you needed something to rebel against. The easy life just wasn’t what I saw in the pattern of other artist’s lives that I admired.

Happy Scorpio Season! From my living room to yours! LOL

In a way, I felt the beauty of life could only be brought to full brilliance if you had first hand experience of the grotesque, the horrible, and the truly ugly sides of humanity. Back then, I wasn’t even sure my childhood was “bad enough” to “make me really good” at being an artist. But I felt the edges of what I now understand in spiritual terms as duality and the power that contrast provides for transformation.

The hard stuff gives you something to push against.

And we all need something to push against, but we don’t have to be a dick about it either. We can be a spring board for each other instead.

Of course I wanted the comfy-lovey stuff, and in a way expected that because of TV, but my childhood was hard. Divorce, remarriages, violence, drugs, alcohol, moving a lot, more siblings at multiple stops along the way. My parents were working class and struggled for most of my life, though they both stabilized a bit after I grew up and left the house, but the chapters I had with them….were tough.

I was the oldest of my siblings and of the grandkids on both sides of the family. So, you just get to see more when you go first.

As I matured, people like Paul McCartney showed me that you don’t have to have to have a fucked up childhood to be great. You don’t have to be a damaged John Lennon to be a Paul. But would Paul have LEARNED how to be a true artist without John? Doubtful. John brought the artist edge to the whole Beatles thing. He brought the hunger, the skepticism, the pathos and a lot of the poetry. They wrote songs “eyeball-to-eyeball,” as Paul himself explains their creative process in the early days. Each one pulling and pushing the best out of themselves and each other, in a friendly competition of sorts.

That’s why partnership is so important.

Someone has to be the cup so someone else can be the flow, and you can reverse it too. It’s a flexible yin-yang, receiving-giving. It’s not fixed. This is a muscle we can develop in ourselves. I have been forced to work on it actively since my divorce, when I felt like I had my right arm chopped off. I was so paralyzed!

I had to re-learn how to be an artist on my own.

Anyway. How I started having all these feelings started like this:

Yesterday, I was at my part time job, working at the silk screen shop and my boss put on a podcast for silk screen businesses. It was about how to ethically use AI in the graphic design and print industries, and what these people had started using it for. I immediately felt my chest tightening around my heart and my heart pick up speed. I noticed I was having a physical reaction to what they were talking about. I just noticed it and tried to open my heart to what they were saying anyway.

But the rest of the day I was grumpy AF.

I was actually annoyed I let my peace be disturbed at all! I had been doing so good holding on it— through the whole election, through the pity parties my Democratic friends were having all week long—through the lame attendance at my birthday party— I didn’t let it rain on my birthday AT ALL. But for some reason, the AI discussion just sent me over the edge a little bit.

The main guest on the podcast was a graphic designer woman who talked about things like—

• the importance of disclosing which parts the design had been “touched” by AI to clients.

• how it’s not much different than an artist using a search engine or going onto Pinterest or a book even and gathering reference images and compositing them.

• how AI is helpful with inventory and robots count better than us anyway.

• how designers can save days of work by getting AI to create multiple mock-ups for clients or cleaning up their pencil marks so they don’t have to erase and re-draw things.

The whole thing just didn’t sit right and I didn’t even have words for it. I was just angry and cranky the rest of the day.

I tried to shake it off.

Because later that evening, I had a fance birthday dinner with a friend (I’m still celebrating turning 50 all month!!) who told me that she watched her co-worker use Chat GPT to soften up the tone of a text message to a friend she was having difficulty communicating with. Which…that’s fine…but can’t we all just learn better social skills on our own? Isn’t the ability to gracefully express yourself the minimum requirement for having and keeping good relationships? Is there any learning when someone just does it for you?

I just don’t know, ya’ll. I’m not into it.

The conversation started to show me a pattern of AI “erasing all the lines” for us. I started to feel like everything soon will be as airbrushed as a drag queen’s publicity photo. AI will be erasing all the evidence of the process— the twists and turns of the journey, and the evidence of the forces that were required to bring the thing that stands before us into the real world. Aren’t all of the kinks and knots the beautiful part of a big old tree? The effects of harsh weather or fire or human interference are so cool to see. Aren’t the gnarliest trees the most beautiful ones too?

I mean…have you ever seen portraits of Georgia O’Keefe?

Not to mention her ART! Georgia is another great Scorpio woman whose birthday is this Friday, November 15. The photo above was shot by her first and only husband, the photographer, Alfred Stieglitz.

Look at Georgia O’Keefe below, at home in her 80s. Why would we erase all the lines out of people?

Georgia is quoted as saying…

Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.

It’s not that I’m a techno-phobe.. I love technology, I use it to bring this to you. But technology is like tequila— there are limits and they sneak up on you. Easy to go too far and then it’s just way too late.

The past few years I have been untangling myself from all of it and feel more myself than ever.

I have sworn off social media (FB, IG, X) and also quit dating apps after 2020, deciding I’d rather meet someone the old fashioned way— by spilling a drink on them at a bar, having an undeniable psychic connection or being introduced by friends. And I quit Amazon in 2018, after resenting the self-checkout that replaced the cashiers I enjoyed talking to and the way they dumbed down everything that cool about Whole Foods. The final nail in the Amazon coffin came when I found out how employees in the shipping warehouses are treated at Christmas. Now, I have to get up and go outside and have real world experiences because I don’t use Amazon at all. For anything. And it’s great. I have many adventures.

I am still on Youtube and Substack, but aside from that, the more I pull out of these systems, the more of my instincts return. The more I fall in love all over again with things I love. The more time I have to do things I love. And the better I feel.

These apps and gadgets are also addictive, which we don’t really understand until you try to leave them. Getting your paralyzed synapses back in working order takes time.

I don’t listen to the news anymore because I value my peace and it’s all being spoken from normies who limit themselves to living inside of a world view that I just don’t have anymore. It was too confining for me.

The world is not falling apart.

My world looks like it’s coming together. It’s not always pretty or how I planned it, but it is getting at least 1% better every day— and sometimes it’s 110% better. So, I’m going to stay in that world, thank you very much.

I’m sure you’re tired of hearing (or reading) me say this— we have been lied to about everything. I’m not saying it to be pessimistic.

I’m actually a romantic optimist.

I also happen to know the price of true freedom.

I am here to rattle your cage—and show you that the door is open.

You don’t have to stay in the box that the over-culture designed for us.

Every day I see the fabric of the dumb ass reality that the controllers wove around us, start to unravel. They want us dumb, numb, scared and dependent. They have poisoned our water, food, air, land and cut us off from fire. They control all of our memories by virtue of storing our photos and music. They keep us triggered and traumatized, fighting their wars and doing their dirty work. We lost our ACTUAL psychic tap root to Gaia and to God / One / All / Source / Universe— when we all used to have that connection.

I’ve been getting mine back online and now I protect it with my life. Having to endure as much poverty as I have has partly been a choice— but a life or death one. Not that I don’t love making money, because I do. It’s just now the stakes are higher, it has to be in alignment. Now I feel my heart and body collapsing when I enter back into the system in a way that’s out of balance—I want to die. And that feeling makes me turn to other addictive things and thus the vicious cycle rolls ever on.

Unless you jump the fuck off the wheel.

I remember the lost lonely times when I used my imagination to map out how I’d kill myself instead of using it to make ridiculous funny-sexy things for the world. What a loss it would have been if I had been successful in killing myself. I think I add a lot of color to this place. It was a hard lesson, but now I REALLY know the price of living the programmed lies. I chose (and continue to choose) to love myself instead. I choose to protect my health, peace, and sanity. Many times that has meant just being poor as fuck cause I don’t fit in anywhere and am far too smart for dumb jobs. So be it. I won’t be poor forever.

Anytime there’s a top-down power structure that values profits over people or nature, or drains the life force from its employees, or just has not joy— it’s like my soul starts collapsing. I feel myself falling into oblivion like I want to die rather than do this— and it alerts me to the fact that I continue at my own peril. So, I listen. I don’t go down those dumb roads as much anymore.

Resist! Resist! Resist!

You are smart and sensitive. You are passion-incarnate and thrillingly unique!

After all the healing work I did on myself the past 8 years— after the heart break of my divorce and the brutality of losing my career, livelihood and reputation at the hands of woke posers pretending to be artists— I began to see all of it as spiritual food. I stopped feeling like a victim and realized that everything can be transformed— you can turn life’s shit into spiritual gold when you rise above.

Granted, some things take longer to transform than others, and really we are on Mother Earth’s time. She is the decider.

And so…in the mean time…

I hold my beautiful vision in my mind’s eye and in my heart…

I sharpen my tools and repair my nets…

and I make my faith unshakable.

I know that experiences that I don’t want are the very thing that God has given me to push against— to launch off of. It is all a gift. If we can start seeing everything as a very specific gift meant just for us— we begin to get in the flow again.

Magic and synchronicity start to stick again.

The old wounds bloom into beautiful flowers.

Let’s get on with this long lil’ ramble, already!

I guess I just noticed I was starting to have intense feelings around the AI discussion. I don’t have any interest in something else doing MY work for me. I learn in very traditional ways— with my mind, body and hands working together, using repetition and time to reach towards mastery. I enjoy learning new things and getting good at them. It’s very satisfying.

I am putting the human experience at the front of everything I do. I’m going more analog everyday— the best part of my birthday party was when we projected a VHS tape of Casablanca on the wall behind the indoor swing and played Beatles records on the record player. It was so FUN to swing to records and watch a black and a white movie while drinking champagne! (I highly recommend putting a swing in your homes.)

I love to revisit the technology that was perfect the way it is— like records and cassettes and books. Records and books made our artists so much more intimate and accessible somehow.

The church said we needed someone else to take us to God. Which is one reason I always love/d yoga. Yoga teaches you to go inside to find God. God is not outside of you. All of Creation is God. God is the elements and the ether. God is what we are made of and where we go back to. God IS you. You can choose NOT to believe in God. But God is you, so you might as well get to loving all of it. Hopefully you’ve had enough psychedelic experiences to know this too.

It’s a cute game we play to incarnate into a lifetime and have our memories erased in order to experience ourselves stretched to these limits, but we all return home in the end. We are looking at our lives through one mirrored facet of the whole jewel. The jewel that is God.

There is nothing we can’t heal from. There is nothing we can’t do.

It’s not that I’m anti-AI…

It’s just that I’m just a recovering de-programmed human rediscovering my super powers, and I like it.

It’s just way more fun out here in the real world, with all the lines and mistakes and awkward conversations. I’ll make my own messes and mistakes, thank you very much.

I used to paint a heart on the floor every time I spilled paint in my studio.

It’s like that.

I’ll try to wrap up by sharing another odd story that came across my feed the other day. I actually do appreciate the algorithms that populate my YouTube feed— but I’m not asking them to fix shit for me. LOL.

Anyway, as ya’ll know, I have researched the lives of artists my entire adult life, mainly reading / watching biographies. I always look for the patterns in their lives to show me the peaks and valleys— where to go, what to avoid.

So my friendly algorithms sent me a video about the late great Leo actor, River Phoenix. The Tiger Beat cover boy and talented actor got that way after growing up with hippie parents who dragged them around in a van, briefly had a stint in a cult, where River lost his virginity at age 4 during a ritual that no one was spared from— and, as the oldest, became the bread winner for the family by busking on the street playing guitar, singing and tap dancing with his siblings— and then he made it big as a young teenage actor. River died of a drug over dose in front of the Viper Room in LA, where Johnny Depp’s band was playing on stage and his 19 year old brother, Joaquin, was the one to call 911. That was 1993, he was 23 years old.

Tragic to say the least.

What struck me about this little bio on River’s life though was how many times people described him as SENSITIVE. Stating several times that his sensitivity endowed him with these great gifts.

Could that be the single defining characteristic of what makes a true artist— sensitivity?

Maybe even more than his fucked up childhood, maybe it was his ability to feel things deeply and express them that made him so captivating. And just like the beautiful pattern of duality in all of Creation, perhaps both and more are also true. It is possible he was able to develop his sensitivity muscles BECAUSE OF all the shit he went through.

Sensitivity is like water. In the world of astrology and tarot, feelings and emotions are symbolized by the element water. When we de-program and unlearn the toxic ways were brought up in and we return to a wilder part of ourselves—we get this connection back. This is the part of us that gives no fucks because it’s an immortal soul here for the whole ride!

Our soul / inner child loves what it loves because they love it. Period. No questions asked. It is unruly and rebellious and craves both the light and the dark experiences because they ENJOY testing the limits.

Unhitching from normie-muggle society is the only path to being an artist.

This is what the millennials (sorry to my millennial friends, it’s really hard for us Gen-Xers not to see a before and after to when ya’ll commandeered the steering wheel of culture) skipped over when they sanitized us with the thought police and the “safe spaces”and made it appear as if influencers were the new artists. It hasn’t played out well. Our culture is very sick. And many of us feel like we got leap-frogged over entirely and never had our moment in the sun.

I definitely feel that way, but also I’ve always been playing the long game. I never thought my youth was my “one shot” because of the bad ass artist women who left a bread crumb trail that I followed.

It’s not over until I’m dead.

And I’m not dead yet.

Life is an art. And being an artist is not about doing, it’s a way of seeing and being. Everyone is (or can be) an artist about something. The path is bumpy and treacherous, but oh, so worth it because we re-sensitize ourselves to life and to love along the way. We learn to love more deeply, fiercely and passionately.

We learn that shame and fear are fake tools of old systems that don’t exist in a Universe that loves you just the way you are.

A dry sponge is probably the best analogy I can use to describe how I see most people showing up in the world right now. Dry sponges can’t even absorb a single drop of water at first. In actuality, we are sensitive, absorbent sponges that have been so deprived of the water of life, nothing can get through. Our sensitivity becomes twisted as it turns in on itself and we get paranoid and suspicious. We stop going out and look down all the time. We start hating people and grow smaller…

Until we turn into A DRIED UP SPONGE!

That’s no way to live!

Turn the water all the way on on your feelings.

Flood and soak yourself back into plumpness!

Dive back into juicy, drippy, messy LIFE!

Sometimes you might feel like you’re drowning in your feelings, but you’re not. They have to be felt and sorted through, the tears have to be released. Feelings are there to show you something that is amiss. Ignore your feelings at your own peril. They will metastasize as illness, injury and imbalance in your physical body.

Anyway.

Am I a better artist because of my crappy childhood?

ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY.

I’m a better human being because of it too.

Let your sensitivity be a badge of honor.

Surviving hard things is something to be proud of.

We weren’t taught to use our sensitivity muscles. We are taught to deny and suppress our feelings and go along with what everyone else is doing. In reality, we have psychic and intuitive abilities that we are meant to activate. Our nervous system and our bodies are the most beautiful technology! We barely even know how to use them.

And how fast it turns around when we stop polluting our minds with the old system beliefs. We (meaning humanity and nature) are the technologies that endlessly fascinate me. Nature is way more INTERESTING (as Georgia might say) than fake, phony or manipulated facsimiles of the real things. Like an IA cat playing guitar at sunset on a beach…? I love cats and the beach and guitars…so, nice try…but no thanks.

With the years I have left in this lifetime, I would rather spend my days exploring the simpler natural technologies, and that is becoming very clear to me. Europe, Africa, South America—places with older cultures than ours— already learned what America is learning now, as a teenage country we are: when political regimes go off the rails, head to the mountains, make your own food and work on your crafts.

We not only preserve but also create our culture through the arts.

I don’t want to get into any kind of debate about how “I’m just not seeing how great AI is” or how “it’s happening whether I like it not.” I’m aware that it will continue to be part of my life and sure, I might even like some of it. But I’m taking a detour back to the Old Ways, in as many ways as I can.

Demand what is real and true. and beautiful.

Feel for it in your gut.

Feel for it in your heart.

Feel for it in your loins.

Let yourself BE TURNED ON again.

Don’t resist the good stuff.

Make room for it.

And take action in the direction of what excites you.

More soon, Kumquats.

For the Wilder Side

I’ll be sharing a few more tidbits of inspiration and videos shortly. AND I’ll share the only surviving photos from my birthday party! LOL.

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