Goblins

My father once said to me “you’re introverted” followed by “not that there’s anything wrong with that.” I remember smiling to myself, since he seemed to imply the opposite of what he meant. It reminded me of that Seinfeld episode, when Jerry exclaims that he’s definitely not gay— “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

In my father’s eyes, I am extremely introverted, at least I think he sees me as such. My dad is the opposite. He loves to be with people and to chit chat and to talk away. From his stories, he spent his twenties never once alone, even somehow when traveling by himself in foreign countries. He told me that when he came to America, he only had a little bit of money; no friends, no job, and no place to stay. His first day here, he walked into a bar and spent all of the little money he had on beer. By the end of the night he had several offers from strangers to stay on their couches or air mattresses while he searched for more permanent lodging. 

He is Irish, and has an Irish affability. He is a practitioner of conversation, on top of having a natural ability to read people. He would tell you his origin story with much more gusto and embellishment. I certainly have never gone a single night of my life without knowing where I am to sleep.

If it sounds like I idolize his disposition and ability, it is perhaps because I do, or I was made to. He certainly counts it among his strengths. It was only recently when I became older, having not lived with him for some time, that I realized that he did not have much capacity for introspection. Not in terms of realizing when he had done wrong or needed to apologize, but that he never seemed to think about his feelings or how they arose. He seemed to lack a sense of interiority; he certainly has one, as we all do, but all his feelings and emotions seemed to flow straight from their source to his reality. Whatever he felt simply was: there was little observation, I think, of his own thoughts or feelings or their origins. He was like an oarsman in a boat, simply skipping above the surface of himself, knowing that he was on a body of water and certainly feeling its current, but never peering into it. 

When I realized this about my father it was like I had discovered a great truth about the world. It was a pair of lenses through which I now observed my childhood. It made me think of the time he had pointed out to me that I was an introvert (not that there was anything wrong with that) many years earlier. It was clear even at the time that he thought being introverted was not exactly a weakness, which could be improved upon, but an unlucky truth, like being unattractive or short. There was nothing to be done and I had to (and he had to) simply accept it.

My father was not baseless in his impression. Before college, I never went out to parties, I enjoyed being at home to read books or comics, and I generally kept to myself. I was very content. This would change with time. Like many nerdy girls, I became much more social in college. I found that social ability could be improved upon with practice. I learned to make friends with strangers; perhaps I was my father’s daughter. In fact, once I knew how lovely it is to feel at the center of things, how nice to have people wanting to be your friend, to be popular in small circles, to belong and to feel belonging, it made being alone or excluded much more difficult. 

But this was not a problem when I was in high school; I was alone and almost didn’t seem to realize it. In the way that my father was not aware of his interior, I was fully enveloped by it. I remember coming home on Fridays and being excited at the prospect of being able to lie on my bed and be with myself and my thoughts and my worlds. I would add myself to the stories that I read, I would be the hero, or the genius, or the author. I would think about the cities that lived precariously in a drop of water sliding down a leaf. I lived inside of myself.

Instead of these imagined worlds adding to the enjoyment of my life, the real world only served to add enjoyment to my interior. I would take details from my life, the boys I had crushes on, or the girls I wanted to impress, and transform them into characters, and that became the way that I knew them. I was like a goblin, grabbing trinkets from my life and retreating with them in hand to decorate the cave of my mind. In this same space I would flip through memories and change them, I would explore my feelings and wonder about why I had them, if other people had them.

This was rest for me, and it was fun and fulfilling and, at the time, I didn’t know I was missing anything. Alone in my bedroom, I happily swam in the pool of my thoughts and visions, books and stories, while I am sure my father paced outside and lamented that I was missing the point of Fridays and weekends. 

So I was introverted, and I still am, but I think what really defined me, and still does, is not my introversion but my interiority. I don’t think introversion and interiority are the same, or even dependent on each other. But my father did not make a distinction between the two, at least in me. Or he thought the two were intrinsically, and perhaps unfortunately, linked; I spent so much time reading and watching and imagining because I was introverted.

I think this is why, all those years ago, he lamented not the fact that I spent time on my own, but that I was not spending it with others. He did not realize that I did not feel alone nor, I think, would he have understood why not. He thought I was just doing a good job shouldering it; that my worlds, of which he knew very little, were my coping mechanism.

I do not get as much fulfillment from retreats to my interior world as I used to. Still, I slip into that space often. I feel like it is the place where my creativity and emotional reality mix together, feed into one another. It is from here that I attempt, with varying levels of success, to be an artist, to pull a cup from my mind’s pool for the world to drink.

I have only recently, and with great hesitation, begun to think of myself as an artist. It has been a struggle to use the word, even just to myself, even just in my mind. I have never suggested the idea out loud. 

I have a reverence for artists. I guess the whole world does. They seem to have a finger on an elusive divine pulse. I am jealous of this. When reading a poem, as Billy Collins said, I wish I could erase the name of the author and write mine instead. If only I could shape ideas like that. If only I had insights about the world, or about myself and could make them as beautiful or as interesting. Then I could be a “real” artist; I am afraid of being someone who is only artistically inclined. 

Maybe this is partly why I do not get as much fulfillment as I used to from trips to my interior. I’ve started to interrogate my inner self for deeper meaning and for art, to arrive at some grand conclusions about life from my tiny experiences. I feel like everything I do is contrived or boring and I’m jealous of the authentic.

Sometimes it seems that artists are possessed. They are compelled to get the ideas out of their head, to drain the interior out of their ears and mouths for the world to see. (Michael Angelo starving himself to buy more paint, etc,.) 

I must admit I do not have this compulsion. I do not feel that I must write. Maybe I am just lazier, or not as ambitious. Maybe I am not an artist and can not become one. Then why do I try? I worry I write because I am a poser who seeks praise, not an artist, and however difficult it is to define who an artist is, a poser is surely the opposite.

Do I want to be an artist or do I want others to think of me as an artist? 

My father is not an artist. He would take offense to this, as he considers himself creative. But while he can come up with ideas (one of his most famous: Gorilla themed birthday party, where everyone dressed up as a Gorilla, a party for me, a girl) I do not know if this makes him artistic. Many of his ideas are about products, something that can be given or sold, and almost never about feelings or questions. They are concrete and static, not explorative. Artists always seem to be exploring an idea or question or feeling, rather than just having one. 

Artists also have skills and techniques or the ability to craft. If my father does have an artistic ability, it would be writing, which makes sense, given his conversational aptitude. He writes lovely poems for my mother on Christmas. They are funny, and they rhyme; he once wrote a poem from the point of view of an alien observing her from afar. Conversation itself can be seen as an art. Maybe he is an artist? Am I selling him short to increase my own price? Make superior my own interiority over his ignorance of it? Get back at him for calling me introverted when he didn’t understand–I am interior, I am artistic? (Maybe I am still a bit miffed about it). I certainly don’t have the right to label anyone as an artist or not. I barely have the guts to consider myself as one.

But to be an artist, I do have to create. I am hoping this is that beginning.