On trusting your certainty

Your art doesn't have to be the best in order to make it :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED november 6th 2022

The things God, our most inner self calls us to do is our certainty.

I love the line in the artist way that goes,

“Our truest dream for ourselves is always God’s will for us.”

God’s will always feels right or aligned.

What we must remember is this: right is different than good or bad. Right is not absent of good or bad. Right is what brings peace through the things you can’t stand not doing, you know? I love the word aligned. The word aligned hasn’t even been ruined for me. One of my favourite things about being autistic is that I seem to feel my alignment and my misalignment very intensely. This means, I listen to my greatest dreams a lot, following God’s will is actually how I naturally live my life because when I do not follow God’s will, I typically get very sick.

I have spent the past 2 weeks writing a poetry book.

But a Book is only the Heart’s Portrait - every Page a Pulse. - Emily Dickinson

Time for yourself? For what?

Hailee as Emily:

I cannot make art if I cannot hear God. I cannot hear God if I cannot hear myself. This is why I am a hermit person. I like to read, and go on silent walks and meditate and take two baths a day.

I just did this with a huge project, so you would think that I would not have forgotten so quickly that art tells you who it is, you don’t tell art who it is.

At first when I made myself available for you make me cry like a sunset, I told myself I would collect (and write when need be), about 150 poems. Then, the art was like no, that’s way too many. We want to be a collection of 54 poems. So here they are - I have collected and written 40 so far.

1 to 13… which one seems like it’s for you?

14 to 37. Poetry doesn’t require you to be healed to write, like essays do. Poetry gets to be how you feel, not how you felt.

I wanted to share drawers with you - one of my favorites. What will the last 10 be called? Stay tuned.

This book is about heartbreak and failed love. I love sunsets so much and they make me cry because they are so beautiful but also because we lose them each time and we can never have the same sunset twice - sort of like love.

I have spent the past few months grieving that my life doesn’t look like I wanted it to look and really acknowledging the losses, and at times, the immense trauma I have been through in the past 10 years of relationship. How I have loved the wrong people for me because I was attracted to people who mimicked what I knew - lack of empathy, disconnection, no trauma resolution. I have sat long and pondered about what my adulthood and early relationships would have been like if I had gotten to age eighteen feeling safe and protected in the world. I wonder, with no real way of knowing, how much different my choices would have been if so. I let myself feel, and I hold myself through it, how much I long for that reality that never was, or will never come. I wonder what it would have been like to be able to choose partners out of desire, taking my careful time to select, instead of picking people to share life with out of survival dependency, missing neuroception and urgency.

In a lot of ways, my dysfunctional childhood haunted me through the choices I made in love. Childhood was over and I had survived developmental trauma, but at soon as I turned eighteen for example, I was in the most abusive relationship I had ever seen or been in myself. I made better choices as I learnt and moved along, but sometimes I’d end up again with the same patterns, in different faces and homes and bodies and genders when I thought I had escaped them. I have a poem called Mad Man that goes like this:

To be in love with a mad man

You must have been raised by one

Dripping in chamomile tea

With promises of a restful night of sleep

Lending you t shirts

That smell like laundry cleaned away sins

Making you chicken that taste so good

You forgot you were starving

You must have been picked up from school

And kissed on the cheeks

By a mad man

To be in love with one now.

I love this poem as it encapsulates faulty neuroception.

I want your weird stuff in my house and I want my weird stuff in yours.

I don’t write poetry as seriously as I write non fiction and what I love about poetry is that it doesn’t require the same a personal essay requires - being healed. I’m not sure people realize how much work goes into writing personal essays if you don’t write them. Poetry can be what we feel, not what we felt. And that is a special treat for a memoir writer.

I feel like in general we as people make art more complicated than it needs to be and I think the ultimate teacher of art is always going to be Julia Cameron. In her book the right to write, she says, “Vulnerability in writing is the enemy of grandiosity.”

Julia Cameron is like write your morning pages, see what you have to complain about and then let room for God to tell you what to make today. Let art tell you what it is, ‘cause it will, just be available to listen for its shape and form. It doesn’t have to be the best. That’s what I wish we all as artists would be okay with - it doesn’t have to be the best. It just needs to be made.

TWEET by @glamdemon2004 “The best books are just some insane girl thinking about stuff”, November 2nd, 2021

I can make something that is more or less my beating heart out of my chest, available to be touched, outside of my body, and someone will still only give it 4 stars on amazon. So at this point I cannot make my art because I want people to recognize it for what it is, I need to make my art because I recognize what it is.

If we are making our art for approval or for others to like us or to be famous or to feed our ego, we are missing the point. Art is about saving our lives. Art is about being ourselves and processing and digesting our experiences. If making art is in your biggest dreams, then it is God’s will for you. Trust your certainty.

THINGS I LOVED THIS WEEK:

  • The last market of the season was wonderful. Here’s me sitting on a sidewalk with some of my goods.

  • I have been asked on different occasions what my favourite memoirs are. Here are top three memoirs: Everything I know about love by Dolly Alderton // There I am by Ruthie Lindsey // We have always been here by Samra Habib

  • Carving pumpkins was hella fun. It reminded me that I hadn’t carved a pumpkin since Caleb asked me when the last time I carved a pumpkin was, which was 4 years ago. And when Caleb asked me, it had been a good 15, so I would say I am improving in the FUN department. Here are the pumpkins.

Speaking of weird art in your home. The candles are by supernova mystic - my friend Hillary’s shop. And the 2023 moon calendar is from Chelsea Granger - really recommend her oracle deck DIRT GEMS.

Mentioned Caleb scene drawn out:

Gorgeous comic drawing by my book illustrator Lisa Seilkopf.

  • It has been said by Lisa below to have you live a thousand lives:

  • What I watched lately: The wonderful mrs. maisel. It took me a few episodes to get into it, and now it is one of my favourite shows of literally all time. Also I watched Maggie on Hulu and the ending, as a psychic, SENT ME! WE HAVE FREE WILL! HOW WILD! YES!

  • I have been listening to a lot of Dermot Kennedy. My top songs are an evening I will not forget, boston, moments passed and of course outnumbered. OH I HAVE MORE: Without fear, the killer was a coward.

  • A crafty gift idea: for Christmas, I am making my friends a pristine vibe potion made of dried herbs for health and decorating a mason jar. I love to make crafts and send it via Canada Post to my friends!

Emily Aube