I spent the night with good friends, tending to a fire. Where there were only charred logs, I created flames, dancing vibrantly with procedural animations.
With brushes dipped in the spirit of embers, I painted trails to the sky in natural forms, performances captured.
It felt strangely a lot like tending to a real fire,
like the kind at a house party or something.
Jokes were shared, laughs were had. And we
were all a little warmer for it..
“These parents don’t curate a person directly, they shape the behaviour of a child by approaching and withdrawing, encouraging and degrading. They poison a child with fear, guilt and shame and they confuse the child by presenting a false self in public. From an early age you learn to read them and monitor their emotions and body language and you learn to do your best impression of a object to keep yourself safe. You have to feel everything they refuse to feel or don’t know how to feel, and there’s no way to meet or discover yourself in that place. You come out of it as a walking talking survival response and an echo of the people around you. Your true needs and inclinations are buried very deep and it’s an archaeological mission to find yourself at the end of it. And part of the recovery is to sever the attachment to the definition of yourself as bad or wrong, and the parent as good and true. And it’s painful because there’s so much love and a deep sympathy for these people who were never capable of loving or caring about you”.