Caution: Content May Include Pubic Hair

Photo by art_es_anna.

As I write this blog, and supportive friends return to read and comment on the contents created herein, I realize that the personal-ness of the content, may be TMI (too much information), for most of them.  I understand the reason that writers use pen names...more so when the main topics of said writer are pubic hair and husband bashing.  Writing is really personal, and it can't be good or very interesting if it isn't.  A quote from Kafka I read recently states "Writing means revealing oneself to excess".  I think even if I weren't telling people what style of pubic-coiffing I was sporting at the moment, the excessive revealing would still be true.  Even say, if I were writing about being worried about writing about pubic hair.

Great art, painting or writing, is created without fear or judgement.  The judgement that matters most is the judgement brought to the work by the artists themselves.  If a writer or painter were to put pen to paper, brush to canvas, and think at each idea or stroke "What if this isn't good enough?" or "What if people don't like it?" the flow of creative juices would be stoppered up, and the artist would fail to create anything spontaneous or meaningful. Once the creator begins to pre-edit his own content, originality and and creativity are stifled.  I am finding it harder not to pre-edit my personal girly-girl experiences, worried that I will begin to enjoy prolonged stares at the local coffee shop. If you know what my pubes look like, will you still respect me?

Great artists do not give a flying flat what other people think of what they create.  This takes an admirable amount of pilotes (balls), effusive self-esteem and leaden oblivious-ness, not present in the average human.  Most of these people I feel are also socially inept and disliked.  Part of humanity is caring about what other people think; about you personally or about the effect your actions might have upon the lives of others.  I am a big fat wuss.  My self esteem has been externally motivated for the majority of my life.  If you tell me you love it, then it is good...I'm not sure what I think about it, unless I know what you think first.  Pathetic really.  The worst of it however is how it hovers over the things I try and create.  Even when I go shopping, before I buy something, I look at it through someone else's eyes first, guessing if they will like it. 

The first few blogs were written in complete anonymity...I didn't really expect they would be read, and so I just wrote stuff.  Now, I know some people are reading it, not very many, but some, and I have begun to filter and edit. The same thing happened with my painting.  The first few times I messed with it, I had no expectations...I just did it, tried it, and waited to see what happened.  Somewhere I learned to have expectations...I could create some interesting things, and so everything from that moment on needed to be just as or more interesting as the thing before.  If I didn't think it was, I feared I'd lost whatever ability I had had, and began to doubt my ability to create anything good ever again.  When I began golfing a few years back, I was pretty terrible.  I recall during one especially high scoring effort telling a friend, "Man, if I had any expectations at all, I would be really pissed right now!"

I think it is too late for a pen-name.  I confused an editor recently by trying to change the author credit to a pen name before she printed it.  I told her I thought a pen name would be prudent, given that the article was about blow-jobs.  I finally just told her to use my name.  There is a lot of learning and skin thickening that must go on as you begin to write.  At first I thought I could write without concern for what other people thought, but I'm not so sure anymore.  I have an understanding of the concept of writing and creating without fear, but enacting it is a work in progress.   

Theoretically, if I pretend nobody will read what I write or ever see anything I paint, I won't care what it looks or sounds like.  If I stop caring who reads about my waxing habits, I should be set free. As a precaution, I think that I will start putting warning labels on my blogs.  If a blog is about pubic hair, and you would rather not read about pubic hair, you will be warned to move along.  Some of you will be personally instructed to never, ever, read the pubic hair blogs, and for the sake of our coffee shop encounters, please respect my request!