I have been learning about Face Reading in Chinese Medicine. Forehead wrinkles show difficult experiences during one’s twenties. Wrinkles that go all the way across the forehead indicate important lessons learned. Those that don’t go all the way across hint the owner of the forehead has more to learn about the patterns that create the wrinkle inducing situations.
This fact inspired contemplation about the lessons I learned in my twenties.
It was the late 80s, and I lived alone in a fantastic three-room rent control apartment across from a project in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I worked at MIT for the business school’s magazine. My office was within walking distance from my place, so I happily managed without a car.
The largest room was set up as a studio; I studied painting at the Museum School across the river in Boston. I was lucky to score the apartment; I am always lucky with such things, and my worries were not big. I had a good job, no car payment, and cheap rent. I was concerned about things like translating my dreams into paintings, collecting rusty mufflers to use in still-life drawings, and being an artist with every cell of my being. I remember sneering at a classmate leaving the Museum School to attend chiropractic school. (I understand the near-poetic ridiculousness of every word of this.)
I had friends who went to Berklee College of Music, and one of them gave me a quartz crystal on a piece of rawhide he found in the subway. Neither of us knew anything about crystals and he decided it was cursed. I chose to think it was magic and put it around my neck, vowing to leave it there until the painting I was wrestling with was complete. I just KNEW the crystal would be the key to finishing it.
So, I painted. And painted. I had to go to the office but turned down invitations to do things afterward and came home to paint. I read about ideas, religion, and philosophy to inform my work and journaled about dreams and ways to express them on canvas. I listened to music and painted. Sometimes, after class, school friends and I would have a beer. We talked about painting.
The canvas wasn’t singing to me. I wasn’t sure what I wanted, but I knew it wasn’t happening. I was used to things suddenly falling into place. Days, maybe weeks, went by. I was obsessed. I should have started something new, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was a slave to the canvas hanging from a big nail on an otherwise bare wall. It taunted me. It haunted me.
One sunny afternoon, something snapped as I stood staring at the stubborn beast, paintbrush in hand. I grabbed a hammer and threw myself to the ground in a dramatic twenty-something fit so I could smash the crystal without taking it off. I snatched the stretched canvas off the wall and ran down three flights of stairs and out the door. I marched to the Mass Ave bridge carrying the canvas like a one-winged bird. I reached the halfway point and flung the painting into the Charles River. “Who’s in charge now?!” I screamed.
I was free. Suddenly, it felt like performance art. Maybe the real art was throwing the painting into the river. I knew people were looking at me, but you could get lost in the city. Anonymity soothed my long walk back along the bridge.
I swear, even then, I imagined telling this story someday when I was OLD. Thirty-five years later, here I am. I never dreamed I would be an acupuncturist tucked away in Sandwich, Illinois. I did think I would laugh. And I am.
I quit painting just like that. It was weird how I defined myself wholeheartedly and passionately as a painter, something I didn’t feel in my soul. I went through such contortions to be who I thought I should be instead of simply who I was.
Ultimately, all that reading and thinking gave me a rich foundation that has served me well. I wish, though, that I would have encouraged my young self to do what I loved and explore thoroughly before crawling into the straightjacket created by a label.
What do you love? What brings you joy? Those are the questions we might lovingly ask ourselves.