Subject Matter

"I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best."
-Frida Kahlo

I saw this quote on the walls of the Frida exhibit at the AGO.  I went there last week with my ex girlfriend.  It's doubly weird to call her my ex.  Out of 21 years of knowing each other there have been less than as many days where I would have been able to say that we were an item.  And for however many days I would feel that she was mine, she would likely divide by as many days in her figure.  I imagine - as I have to imagine - that she would not argue - at least out of sympathy - that there was at least one day that she felt as she was mine.   So you see, this paragraph, as with many of my paragraphs, was a waste.

I don't have a life, I just have the ability to describe one.  I waste so many words, countless letters, on a fiction that only I believe.  21 years out of perhaps only 21 hours, I have a knack for transforming the mundane into the epic. With a fearful heart, I imagine many life witnesses at my graveside whispering to each other about my life story "it wasn't quite so."  Fiction, says they who know me best.  Fact, says those who simply love my stories.

I've been trying to put my finger on why it is I have felt like I'm in a metaphorical bubble.  The short answer is, because I'm in one.  So I can and have put volumes of words about how I feel, to the people for whom I have felt them, describing most often the life that I don't have with them.  What sorrow, my pen has lived more than my fingers, and my fingers moreso than my body, and so on. 

My life to date has been carried out in a handful of days, so many other days have just been dots in between.  Dots I pencil in to make it seem as though I've made a line, as though I'm on a course somewhere.  But where?  Where will I go?  Where did I really come from?  I keep asking myself these meaningless questions because I am obsessed with myself. Yes, obsessed.  Any moment that I haven't spent thinking about certain someones, I have spent worrying about myself, forgetting all the while that living helpfully is vastly different than living selflessly.  Living without self; neither for self, about self, towards self, or with self in mind.  There are true rewards in selflessness I am yet to reap. 

Basically, I realize tonight that I've spent the large part of the last decade trying to capture facts out of a fiction, when in fact what I should be doing is making a fiction out of the facts.  I deal in the world of complexity, and while it is still my job to show you that things aren't as they seem, it is no longer my job to suggest that I am more than you give me credit for.  I am not.  I am as you would have me be.  But that is just my self, not my whole world, and there is more to my world than my self.

To start, I need new subject matter.  I don't just need new subject matter to write about - in other words to possess as my own - I need new subject matter.  There needs to be more in all of this than me.  There needs to be more in each day's experience than what it means for me.  I live to read words that describe the world as it is, rather than the world as certain people see it. Today, and moving forward, I want to be more in touch with the world outside my bubble.  And it starts by describing less of what I want - for that is just a projection of the self - and more of what is out there.  It's time to find out all the things I haven't yet learned and see what those things teach about life.  And then, as a novelist I will synthesize those lessons into something general that we all can share in.