You Have to Hide Your Struggles Because Nobody Wants to Hear or Help
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I recently went through a box of my old artwork from high school. My daughters are both artists and they were curious to have a look. So, I opened the cover of the first notebook to reveal a picture of a smiley face shooting himself in the head.
At first glance, it’s kind of funny. I laughed and so did my daughters. But seeing that image also brought me back to those difficult days. Even now, looking at the picture, I thought to myself, “I’m surprised I didn’t get into trouble for drawing that.”
Even now that’s my response. I was worried about getting into trouble. A drawing of a mask of happiness superimposed over suicide and the thought is, “They’re going to punish me.”
I could just imagine what the school counselor would say. “How dare you draw something like this? Don’t you know how serious this is? Some people are dealing with enormous emotional traumas. Do you realize how awful a person you have to be to mock them in this way?”
“I didn’t mean to mock anyone, I just...”
“Don’t be so impertinent. Now get out of my sight.”
I swear to god that’s what he would have said. They were always looking to punish us. The whole United States is a culture of punishment. If you haven’t done anything wrong, they assume you’re just hiding it better and deserve even more abuse.
“We hate the smart ones!”
With my kids, I went through a bunch of my old drawings. There was a study in colors. There were some scratch boards. There were a bunch of strange pictures of frogs. With every single picture, I had a story about how the project had pissed off my art teacher.
Every Friday, the teacher would set up a still life. They’d be boxes or bottles or whatnot. We had the hour to do a sketch. It became boring so I started introducing objects into the still life that weren’t there. Naturally, this infuriated the teacher even though the other students got all excited about my work and used to gather around my station during break time.
We’re all emotionally immature during our high school years. Even so, I thought generating interest in your artwork was sort of the point. My classmates thought it was cool. Everybody loved it but the teacher.
This was a community where the kids drew things like the fish they caught or the deer they shot. I was doing strange, surrealistic images of the tentacles of an octopus grabbing a bottle. I’m sure the teacher had to answer questions about me during the annual art show.
“Yes, he’s in the same class as your son. I don’t know that he’s a bad influence. I can’t explain all the strange images he creates.”
As my daughters looked through the pictures, I realized they didn’t make any sense without the context of what everyone else was doing. My drawings and paintings needed to be seen within the confines of the mundane and banal prison of conservative cruelty and conformity.
It was always conformity.
Conformity, conformity, conformity!
Every single thing I created was an act of defiance. I had to defy them just to survive. Naturally, it never occurred to anyone who surrounded me to help. They considered me a saboteur. They considered me to be an out-of-control menace. They wanted me out of the classroom because they thought I might have a negative effect on their black-and-white perfect little conservative brat. They didn’t want any rainbows in the classroom. How dare I!
Anger does a decent job of covering up frustration. They’d look at my sketches of smiley face stick figures and shake their head in disdain.
“Why do you have to do weird stuff like that? What’s wrong with you?”
Maybe it was because we had three suicides in our school already. We were losing kids left and right. Whenever it happened, all anyone did was tell lies. They’d talk about how dedicated the parents were, even though we knew that wasn’t true. They’d talk about how much the teachers loved the kids, even though we’d seen those kids get bullied every day. For some reason, we were all supposed to be silent and lie and depict a perfect world of vibrant colors in dull, uninteresting, monotone.
You couldn’t tell your problems to anyone. Listening requires work. Lecturing requires no energy at all. So, instead of interpreting anything I drew, or even judging it on its own merits, they defaulted to anger.
“Why do you have to do this? Why do you have to make trouble? Can’t you see how much effort we put into making a perfect world? Why do you have to keep going along and screwing it up?”
“I’m just drawing what I see.”
“That’s just it, you should be drawing what we give you permission to see.”
The sad part is that it works on so many. So many of them put their box of crayons with all the colors away. They put away their construction paper. They put away their paints. Instead, they pick up a pen with black ink and a ledger. They pick up a red pen to tally everything that’s owed to them.
After a while, they see everything in red. They think everyone owes them something.
Some kids stop resisting and join the side of their oppressors. Other kids die. A smaller number still manages to survive.
When I was seventeen I drew a picture of a smiley face blowing its brains out. At age 51, it remains a striking image. It was something I felt reluctant to publish. Would people look at that drawing and think I was making a mockery of suicide? Would they think I was being difficult? Would they think I was being disrespectful?
“That’s a kid who needs to learn something about respect! Doesn’t he know how serious that topic is?”
But that’s not what I see when I look at that drawing. I see an expression of the fact that we all wear a mask and that we’re all hanging on by a thread.
It has been many years since I took a moment to contemplate the relics from my years of uncertainty. Those images are a reflection of the inner-workings of my mind. There was a lot of creativity there. There was a lot of understanding. There was a lot of curiosity. There was humor. There was sadness.
I wouldn’t draw something like that today.
But I did draw it.
I share that picture now as a message for others who might be feeling that way. I hope that they look at that picture and know that I see them. I hope they know I understand them. I hope they feel seen, and they know that I think they’re beautiful.
The happy face is not a mask, it’s the real you. The lie is this horrible world filled with ledgers and red pens that’s fixated on nothing else but punishment.
Remember that.
This world is a lie.
Your colors and your smile are the truth.
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