Sometimes The Ichor Bleeds Through The Cracks
Absolutely nothing to do with the post but it’s a nice photo so leave me alone.
How narcissistic of me to equate myself to God.
I read American Gods (Neil Gaiman's novel about a necrophiliac who develops an asphyxiation fetish) a while ago now, probably been 6 months at this point, and it got me thinking a lot about the nature of belief, and what it means to believe and be believed in. The latter statement being more prominent in my mind, especially deep into the waxing hours of sunlight when the melancholy strikes deep and true. What does it mean for someone to believe in you? What does it mean to be beholden to the freely given support of others? What does it mean to lose that belief?
A while ago, my aunt stopped by to visit my dad, a week or so before I moved out of my parent’s house into the apartment I'm living in now. Through coincidence I ran into her, I'm not going to lie I don't always have the energy to deal with my family, and more often than not I'd fly the white flag and listen to music until I convince myself I probably imagined the arrival of visitors and relax into my artificial peace of mind. Nevertheless, maybe because I was moving so soon, maybe because I just had a momentary lapse in my near-constant exhaustion, maybe I just lost really bad in Overwatch (this was before the Hong-Kong thing) and wanted to forget about how badly I did, I don't really remember anymore but point being I left the iron cage of my self imposed sanctuary and joined my family for coffee on a whim. My aunt casually dropped the emotional bomb letting me know she'd read my blog (Oh Shit), throwing me into emotional turmoil (both because she had actively read the drivel that leaks from my diseased brain, and because she'd said it out loud in front of my Dad whom’st I'm staunchly trying to keep this whole endeavor away from). Again, I'm getting sidetracked.
The point here is that she said she liked it. Nothing in the world can feel like equal parts validation and a strong and consistent tasering to your pancreas like a family member liking your creative pursuits. In my experience (granted this is going to be an incredibly sad and skewed view) a family's job is to be consistently demeaning towards your chosen career path so that you use that built up spite to prove them wrong by becoming wildly successful. That's just how families work bitch, prove me wrong, or at least that's how the relationship between me and my Dad has played out over the past two decades. My aunt liking my "work" (it's a fucking blog, calm down) struck me like a hammer to hot iron, it felt like I'd just bent in a way I had never expected to, and the bend hasn't gone away, it's cooled and just become a part of me, the same way all the other weird imperfections of my brain have just become love-able character tropes for me to drive away all my meaningful relationships. Not only was she openly supportive, and beyond supportive she was incredibly candid and objective about her appreciation. She offered me a job traveling down south and giving some talks about writing after my novel is published, for an astronomical amount of money I might add. Astronomical in this sense is any amount of money at all seeing as I expected to get no money from this whole book writing thing in the first place.
Back to the initial topic of this whole thing, American Gods is a fantastic book and everyone should read it. The nature of belief as a sustaining force, as a source of nourishment, is something I'd never actually considered with any sort of critical thoughtfulness until then, and it's something I haven't stopped considering since. After a lot of careful thought, belief isn't a food simply for the Gods, much like American Gods is more than a book about deities, it's a book about people, and how being starved of your spiritual nourishment causes you to go halfsies with your best friend in a massacre of the divine. It's important to be believed in. It's important to feed yourself beyond the physical and allow yourself to feel and grow and live. Just like it's important to hang yourself from a tree because your absentee father faked his death. There are my daddy issues coming out to play again.
My aunt, making a public declaration of support for my creative pursuits, felt like I’d been fed steak after never having eaten a meal. Not to demean my family too much, I do get some support from them, but this felt like something completely different. There was no expectation here, there was no obligation for my aunt to compliment me or commend my writing. There was no need for her to bring it up at all. Yet she made a point of doing so, and it felt distinctly new and different. It was that feeling of validation that I’d been craving my whole life, that someone would look at my work and see potential in it, and be vocal about their support despite not having any real need to do so. Like Mr. Wednesday, I was withering away after a long spell of not being believed in, and it felt like I was alive again after having someone feed that deity-esque ego living prominently in my chest (humble brag).
This is a lot of extra words to go essentially make two FUCKING SIMPLE points. American Gods is a good book, and tell people you like the things they do. Don’t wait for people to ask for your opinion on something, freely give your support independent of their asking for it. Force that positive energy so deep and hard down their throat that they have no choice but to abandon their divine civil war so they can suckle the everflowing teat of positivity you’re supplying them. Suck my positive energy bro, don’t be so weird about it.